The Grandmother

 

How David Lynch uses film techniques to portray ordinary life as nightmarish?

The Grandmother is a short film about a boy escaping his abusive father. The film opens with abstract scenery of the boy being born, Lynch uses sounds to show the Fathers behaviour when the boy is born, the fathers violence is shown through animal noises and abusive imagery. His parents bark abuse at him and push his face in urine when he wets the bed. so the boy grows and grandmother from a seed. Lynch creates a surreal unique world using pastel colours to make things look sickly and slightly uncomfortable. Lynch uses animation to simplify reproduction and birth seem simple and mechanic, The animation is mainly black and white with slight bits of red. This creates unearthly, disturbing connotations to the audience. When the boy gets his head pushed into his urine, Lynch uses the red to highlight the abuse, the red also makes the red white, sickly colours stand out more and makes the world appear more sickly and ghastly.

Most of the film has dark lighting and in most of the scene it is hard to see the whole room, this is awkward for the audience to watch as they can't see the whole scene. The dark lighting makes the world seem more nightmarish and disorientating for the audience and accentuates the abuse the boy suffers. The scenes with the grandmother are slightly lighter and have more colour, the grandmother has flowers and is cuddling up with the boy. The flowers show and symbolise happiness for the boy, even though they aren't extremely bright they still make the boy smile.