The Alphabet (1969)

You won't be disappointed!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

If you missed your abc-education from the Sesame Street during your preschool-years no worries. David Lynch will teach you the basics in this less-than-4-minute short film. The frame to the story is an extremely pale, possible sick woman lying in bed right at the beginning and also at the end. We see a strange structure rising including the letters a to z and more and more growing as the alphabet proceeds. After a short cut to a pout with red lipstick we hear all the different ways in which the letter a can be shouted, some sounds downright creepy. Then we see an animated female figure having the letters put, literally put, into her head, which, not long after, explodes from the pressure. The blood is particularly memorable as the rest of the film is almost exclusively inconspicuous shades of gray. Then finally the cut back to Lynch's wife at this point who sings the alphabet song before she faces a similar fate like the previous girl, only she exhales the letters and the other had them inserted.This short-film is indeed very Lynch. If you like his abstract, surreal works, you'll probably have a good time watching, otherwise you'll wonder what in God's name is going on or even be downright appalled. You won't feel nothing though, that much is safe.

The second of David Lynch's films, The Alphabet, is a significant progression from his debut Six Men Getting Sick. Where the latter was a short piece of static animation, The Alphabet incorporates stop-motion and live action alongside the animated sequences. It's a much more interesting film that achieves an undoubted nightmarish mood.Its genesis was a story Lynch's wife Peggy told him. She had witnessed her young niece experience a nightmare. In a little bed in a darkened room her niece recounted the alphabet in her tormented sleep. From this story Lynch devised a short film that approximates the feeling of a nightmare, one specifically where the fear connected with learning is the source of the unease. There is an alphabet song the like of which would be sung in schools, but removed into this context seems very disturbing. This is probably the first example of Lynch taking a seemingly harmless everyday thing and making it sinister with well chosen associative images and sounds. Indeed this is also the first time that the director utilises sound to disquieting effect, something he would become a master of. Here, we have not only the alphabet song sung by Peggy but also distorted baby crying. The latter being a recording he made of his daughter Jennifer that was corrupted because the tape recorder was faulty. But it was a mistake that produced a result the director loved, and it is indeed a disturbing sound that accentuates the mood perfectly. The Alphabet works often on a subconscious level but it does have a central core idea derived from the alphabet dream that is visualised here. A girl with a white face in a bed in a darkened room experiences the terror of the dream and ends up hemorrhaging blood all over her white night gown and bed sheets. It's a disturbing image but it represents a reaction to the forced learning that initiated the dream in the first place.With this film Lynch moved forward in an important way. It's the first time where his dark sensibility was used in a way that approximated the mood of a nightmare.

I'm making my way through all of Lynch's films so I figured I'd start with his early short films and I am very pleased with them. I really liked Six Men Getting Sick and this one was great too. I will be commenting on the rest of them as well. The Alphabet is very ambiguous and let's you come up with your explanation of what's going on and I think that is great. David Lynch is a genius in so many ways. I think it's wonderful seeing where my favorite filmmaker started out and very inspiring. I am still trying to figure how he pulled some of the stuff in this film off and wondering how I could do something like this myself. I will continue to enjoy Lynch and be amazed by his work. I hope you can as well!

This was set off the basic thematic elements of Lynch's oeuvre. Psychosubconscious horror imagery involving blood, sex, and rich textures of malaise. What's different about this is that it actually goes further, into a child's realm of disturbing imagery, which can be even more disturbing because thinking of Lynch dealing with children is kind of appalling--The Straight Story aside.I think it's probably my favorite short of his, though, considering that it so well mixes everything in animation, stop motion, and real motion, and that overall it's quite adept at forcing you to think about all those children's shows that involve alphabet songs and alphabet animations dancing around, and how a lot of that stuff can be very disconcerting and bizarre if really looked at.Furthermore, I believe it's probably one of his best uses of sound. Lynch is a genius at making sound affect imagery beyond levels that most directors use, and while the sound in this short are much more self-conscious and much more apparent than the underlying growling of most of his work, it's a lot more effective.--PolarisDiB