One of David Lynch's last films is an absurd and hilarious farewell on Netflix

David Lynch, the director who did as much as anyone to introduce absurdism and surrealism into mainstream North American movies, died on Thursday. He was 78.

Lynch has been delighting and confounding audiences since his first feature, Eraserhead, which he began developing as a film student at the American Film Institute prior to its 1977 release. Subsequent works include The Elephant Man and the original film version of Dune in the early 1980s. Then he scored his major triumph with Blue Velvet in 1986. It was still wildly bizarre but mainstream enough to secure him an Oscar nomination for Best Director. (He had previously been nominated forElephant Man.)

He would follow Blue Velvet with the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, which helped usher in the age of elevated television. Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire would be the end of his theatrically-released feature film career in 2006. But Lynch continued to produce content in a variety of forms.

One of David Lynch's last can't-miss movies is streaming on Netflix

One of his final works – an absurdist short comedy film called What Did Jack Do – is available for screening on Netflix. It may baffle newcomers to Lynch’s oddball take on storytelling and humanity, but long-time fans will fall in love with this iconic filmmaker all over again.

In the course of 17 minutes, we get a parody of old-school noirish detective stories as well as a parody of Lynch himself. The premise? Fairly standard. There has been a murder. A detective has commandeered a dimly lit room in a train station to interrogate his prime suspect. They will engage in a battle of wits.

Wait – I think I’m forgetting something. Oh, that’s right. The suspect is a very well-dressed capuchin monkey. And unlike Marcel from Friends, the heretofore most famous capuchin I know of, this monkey, billed as Jack Cruz, can talk. He speaks in a gruff, halting manner that sounds just a bit like the detective played by Lynch. That’s because Lynch is voicing Jack as well.

Oh, yeah, and toward the end, there’s a rather dramatic musical number, performed by the monkey.

And a chicken who wanders through. The chicken is the love interest.

If this sounds weird, that’s par for the David Lynch course. Visually, What Did Jack Do? hearkens back to Eraserhead, with its intentionally grainy, low-key lighting. Lynch always had the extraordinary cinematic talent to make the innocuous seem disquieting. Lars Von Trier and David Lynch are the only two directors I know of who could film rock and scare the stuffing out of you. You’d be wondering what was hiding behind that rock to the exclusion of all other thoughts.

In Jack, Lynch never goes that far, but he does linger on a cup of coffee (yes, the monkey wants a coffee, and it is served by Lynch’s actual wife, Emily Stofle), and you start to feel uneasy. Visually, Jack is both a parody of early noir and a rather good reinvention of German expressionism from 100 years ago. The detective is all low-key lighting, half his face hidden in shadow. Jack, on the other hand, gets the star treatment, with the lighting, costume, and features designed to make him stand out as a heroic character.

He actually isn’t heroic, and he may well be a murderer, but the director does manage to gin up sympathy for the monkey as he battles with forces beyond his control. That was always one of Lynch's hallmarks -- finding the nobility and dignity in the weird and bizarre. Beyond that bit a pathos, there are deeper meanings you might read into the power struggle and Jack’s back story, but you need not bother if you don’t want to.

Take it as a comedy – one filled with laugh-out-loud nonsense and pearls of wisdom like “They say real love is a banana” – and it is a very amusing way to pass 17 minutes. And perhaps as a way to say good-bye to David Lynch.

Then again, for those not familiar with one of the most unique and fascinating directors of the past fifty years, perhaps it is a good way to say hello.

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