LYNCH GOES COMICS: THE ANGRIEST DOG IN THE WORLD

David Lynch is one of the most prominent film directors of the second half of the XX century. Even more - he is one of the most influential American artists ever. His style is instantly recognizable and vast majority of his works are deeply incorporated into popular culture. Insert another obvious blah here. Wrapped in Plastic, Henry Spencer's Haircut, Frank Booth swagger, Elephant Man's looks, Bobby Peru's teeth, Mystery Man's presence from Lost Highway, Ear in the Grass, those cockroaches and birds on the lawn and many-many other images crawl into your head and stay there sporadically reminding of themselves and slowly burning in your memory.

His aesthetics, known as Lynchian, blends banal, mundane imagery of everyday life with inherently relentless macabre feel that lies beneath and lurks with subtle but noticeable soughs and rustles. But as film noir - Lynchian is more of a feeling than something that can be measured and studied properly. You just know when it is Lynchian and when it is not.

But there is one fairly obscure and quite peculiar piece of work that can give you an amazing opportunity to understand his way and wah of thought.

With his cult TV series getting a revival this May - there's no better time to revisit one of his most obscure and undeservedly forgotten entries in his body of work.

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The Angriest Dog in the World - is a comic strip about the dog that is very-very angry because the world around is quite obviously unbearable and is completely unmitigated piece of undeniably stinking feces that is surprisingly undeservedly fecund only for one activity - elentless barking at the breaths end. As the opening paragraph says: "The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis." Imagine Don LaFontaine saying that.

The strip was conceived in 1973 when Lynch was in the midst of the shooting of Eraserhead film. Which was, for the lack of a better words, "tumultuous and conspicuously frustrating". As the production of the film was going in a not very smooth direction (let's say it was a bit rocky) - it started to take a significant toll on Lynch himself who seemed to have reached the tipping point in an attempts to keep things from falling apart. He started to slowly but surely snap - bit by bit he succumbed to a slow motion wreck that his life was turning into. Hopefully, around the same time, he discovered the joys of transcendental meditation and started to direct his obtuse frustrations and obvious desperations into a more creative direction. Thus came "The Angriest Dog in the World".

It stayed a little personal venture for quite a long time before it first appeared in press in 1982 in LA Reader. It showed up here and there in various magazines and newspapers (including Dark Horse Comics' Cheval Noir) over the years up until 1992. After that it continued to appear occasionally on Lynch's official website before slowly slipping into complete oblivion. Currently it is merely a footnote in the Lynch's oeuvre but undeservedly so as it is one of his most uncompromising and surprisingly relatable works.

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Technically, "The Angriest Dog in the World" is a constrained comicâ - the one that confines itself in set of particular rules in order to get above the profane routine. The strip itself is very simple. It is starkly black and white and contains four panels plus an introduction. The panels remain the same in every strip (except for one time when half of them burned off for some reason). Panels contain a dog who lays in the backyard, barking relentlessly while random and seemingly disconnected phrases come from the window of the bland suburban house. And then it is dark and the dog is still there, barking on an infinite loop. There is also a factory far away belching the blackest smoke into the sky with no visible effect. (In fact - you can see the seeds of Lynch's later project here - flash series "Dumbland" and you can view his video for Moby's "Shot in the back of the head" as a spiritual companion).

Curiously, but the titular dog is just there. It is merely a piece of background. All the action comes through the window.

While the information given to the reader is scarce and limited - you can actually piece together what is going on. There are no indications who says what but there are some names. The family in the house - Bill, Sylvia, Pete and Billy Jr. are somewhat related to each other, bound together by the confinement of their home. They're often trying to be nice with each other, showing some wit and then slip into arguing, trying to put out their frustrations and let the steam blow off. In other occasions they're intensely trying to muse on meaningful topics resulting only in spiteful ripostes of some sort of enigmatic manner or dumbfolding silence.

The nature of questions and responses tells a lot about the atmosphere in the house. Some members of the family are deeply frustrated with their lives. The others keep the faith and look for answers to some fundamental and ultimately meaningless questions. The most prominent of the latter is call-response "Bill, what is your theory is relativity?" - "Life is shit2". (Nuff said).

The other phrases like "Woe is me", "Let's merge" or "There is a reason usually for everything" or "There are people dying living here" or "Some weeks nothing is funny" read like some sort of zen minimalist concrete poetry albeit somewhat stubborn in concept and mind-numbing by its sheer banality in execution. There is some eternal truth and it is awful. Sometimes you get horrendously clumsy attempts at anecdotes, for example: "Did you know that Pinnocio loved birds?" - "He did?" - "He even had a woodpecker". Aw...whatever. This is corny beyond reason, but you would doubt that it was unintentional. It's a pure flarf.

It shows the contents and the limits of the worldviews of the characters. They are rampantly unable to express their thoughts. Words don't express what they mean. Not even close. And you can feel the distance between what they say and what they possibly mean. None of them wants to be there, they want to do something else somewhere else but they don't know what exactly and how. They're numbed, bound and gagged by the life itself. Filled with utter horror of failing to succeed and finally realize their ambitions. Sounds like something anyone can encounter.

And that is what makes "The Angriest Dog in the World" such a relatable piece. It has nothing really strange or off-putting. It contains merely a snapshots of everyday life taken out of context. Life of people whose guts are torn away with salvo and a gust of wind and filled with minced meat and then turned into a fancy sausage in a lovely bag with funny sticker and a discount for the highest honor of "staying behind for too long". People who had their balls and brains put into a vice and twisted around for a whole fucking week again and again and again.

It doesn't matter what Bill, Sylvia, Pete and Billy Jr. say. It is irrelevant. It's merely a placeholder for something you, the reader, can put there instead. We all have such moments and we all catch such glimpses of other peoples recurring torments. Reader is left with no options but to be put into the role of a stranger who is just passing by and hearing those remnants of a possibly meaningful conversation while thinking about his own things. Otherwise "The Angriest Dog in the World" seems to be a pile of bollocks.

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But there is no reason for trying to interpret this particular work. Finding finite meaning in this strip is utterly futile. It has no point and is proud of it. It drops your defenses and fears and gets into your head and stays there. You build a place for it subconsciously and then something really callous reminds you of it and you start operate within it looking for the answer you already know.

If you find some parts of it confusing or incomprehensible - it is probably your own fault. You're trying too hard. Don't overthink it. Let it flow. You will need to read it again and again until you get it the way you are. That's probably the only way to comprehend "The Angriest Dog in the World".

As David Foster Wallace wrote in his seminal essay on David Lynch: "Is this good art? It's hard to say. It seems - once again - either ingenuous or psychopathic. It sure is different, anyway."

And one more: "Nothing really matters, anyone can see..."