The Grandmother (1970)

(34 minutes, colour, black & white).
Written, Filmed, Directed, Produced and Animated by David Lynch.
Music and music effects by Tractor.
Sound effects by David Lynch, Peggy Lynch (as Margaret Lynch), Robert Chadwick, Alan Splet.

In Lynch's third film, he uses animation as well as live action to bring across the point of the film. In the opening sequence, human's sprout from seeds in the ground. A "deviant" seed is planted by a man and woman, and a little boy, dressed in a suit and tie, grows out of the ground. The boy tries to get sympathy from his parents, but they get down on all fours and bark at him.

The scene opens to the boy sitting in his sparse room. His parents are searching for him outside, but the soon give up and go back inside. The father drinks heavily, while the mother plays with her hair.

The next morning, the boy has wet his bed. His father discovers this, and punishes the boy by rubbing his face in the yellow stain. Later, the mother tries to show the boy affection by kissing him on the cheek. He rejects her and she shakes him violently, then collapses. The boy returns to his room.

In a daze, the boy begins to hear a whistling noise calling to him. He climbs another set of stairs to a room and finds a bag of seeds. One of them is whistling to him. Later, after dumping piles of dirt onto a bed, the boy plants the seed and waters it. Over the course of a few days, an abstractly grotesque stump grows out of the bed and ejaculates out a full grown woman. The woman is the boy's grandmother. He brings her flowers and they both smile.

The boy is punished again for wetting his bed, at the dinner table. He is not allowed to eat or drink. His parents grunt and growl at him. It's hard to determine what they're really saying (they call the boy Mut or Mud).

In another animated sequence, the boy kills his parents after they stop him from seeing his grandmother. The boy weaps, and the grandmother starts singing a wordless melody. They kiss.

In the next scene, the grandmother whistles for the boy in the middle of the night. She's having trouble breathing. The boy gets no help from his parents, who laugh in his face. The boy doesn't know what to do and the grandmother dies.

The final image shows a tree stump growing out of the boy's head while he sleeps.

An interesting point about the characters of the Boy and the Grandmother. Is it just a coincidence that the same type of characters would pop up again twenty years later as Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, Pierre, in TWIN PEAKS?

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