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David Lynch Made the Weirdest (and Perhaps Most Accurate) Running Shoe Ad in History

Watch the late filmmaker's hypnotic evocation of what it's like to hit the wall

David Lynch Made the Weirdest (and Perhaps Most Accurate) Running Shoe Ad in History 1

David Lynch was many things: a singularly talented filmmaker, a painter, a furniture designer, an experimental musician, a spokesperson for transcendental meditation, and even a YouTube meteorologist.

But few considered Lynch, who died on Jan. 15 at age 78, a champion of distance running. (Before his death, Lynch acknowledged that his health had severely deteriorated in recent years due to smoking-induced emphysema.)

Known for his ability to blend the everyday with the uncanny, often to disturbing effect, Lynch carved out a unique place in the world of art and cinema. David Lynch made films that only he could make. And one of his more peculiar cinematic curios has resurfaced this week as fans paid tribute to the master of the strange: a truly Lynchian take on the marathoning experience.

David Lynch Made the Weirdest (and Perhaps Most Accurate) Running Shoe Ad in History 2

the Wall: David Lynchโ€™s Adidas Ad

Lynch is of course best known for his disturbing evocations of what lies behind the closed doors of everyday American life. With films like Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), he operated at the outer edge of mainstream Hollywood, but somehow remained commercially viable without compromising his challenging ideas.

Even Lynch fans are often surprised to learn that the filmmaker made dozens of TV ads over the years. He directed spots for everything from haute couture fashion houses, to car companies, to pasta brands and, perhaps unsurprisingly, cigarette makers. He even did a PSA for the American Cancer Society in 1993 to raise awareness for breast cancer detection, which feels strangely fitting. And, of course, there was 1997’s Clear Blue Easy Pregnancy Test ad;The most uneasy and uncertain 15 seconds in television history.

Just like his films, each of these ads are unmistakably made by David Lynch. They are visually stunning and haunting, eschewing their ostensive goal of selling the viewer a Nissan Micra or a Playstation 2 in order to explore the beautiful and the profane of the human condition.

One of Lynch’s finest short works, a perfect document of both the marathon experience and mid-90s visual aesthetics, will speak to runners. In 1993, Lynch was contracted to direct an ad for Adidas’s push to market its “Tubular Technology,” a wildly over-engineered midsole that included a valve and a handheld pump to fill up air pockets under the runner’s feet. Lynch wisely ignored the distracting specifics of the design, and instead focused on what it’s really like to run those final miles of a marathon, and more broadly, why is it that people run. He called the ad “The Wall“.

The 60-second spot, ostensibly about pushing yourself to your physical limit, is quintessentially Lynchian. The filmmaker often used mundane, everyday American archetypes in order to explore our (often conflicting) animal instincts and perverse tendencies with our orderly, rational society. Running, then, was the perfect tableaux for Lynch to explore our bizarre drive towards physical and psychic self-destruction in order to trigger some sense of spiritual freedom from modernity. In 1993, running was the personal sport and lifestyle activity of a post-religion middle class, seeking salvation through the rigours of extreme exercise. A perfect subject for the filmmaker to mine.

The visuals of “The Wall” are wonderfully datedโ€”blending video footage of the protagonist, a middle aged runner, dressed as if it’s race day, and a digitally animated collage of what appears to be video footage from surgical procedures as well as a shot of a scorpion, the mushroom cloud of an atomic detonation and lightning strikes. The runner sprints down a raised, empty freeway, heading directly for the eponymous concrete wall. There are no other people, no signs of life anywhere, save for a single car speeding in the other direction on the lower freeway platform, as if fleeing where the runner is headed. Has the world ended? And if so, why are the road and surrounding commercial buildings otherwise pristine? Is the runner fleeing some form of danger? Why is he running?

What is certain is that he’s clearly entering a physical and philosophical zone of madness.

The protagonist is also doing something uncanny: running down the middle of the road. This image, of the lone runner sprinting along the yellow center line, is a thing of fantasy. It’s only ever done in dreams and in stock images, but never in real life. It’s an absurd representation of an everyday act, which is a common Lynchian strategy: the scenario is immediately familiar, but something isn’t quite right, leaving the viewer relating to the scene, but unsettled by at the same time. With Lynch, we are always stranded in an uncanny valley.

The camera tracks determinedly along the dusty tarmac, using the same perspective that Lynch would employ a few years later in opening shot of Lost Highway. Just as in the 1997 film, it’s not quite the point of view of the protagonist, but slightly lower. Here, Lynch is playing with one of the fundamental powers of the cinema: our blind trust in the omniscient third-person perspective of the camera. The viewer and the runner are being led somewhere, almost as if by some force, and what lies beyond the wall is unclear. But it’s evident that the runner is on a collision course with the wall, and that he can’t resist his desire to go to what lies beyond it. And as is so often with Lynch’s films, our desire to know “the truth” and discover what lies behind the curtain inevitably leads to both salvation and self-destruction. If we really must know, then we can never get back to that previous sense of safety, and of ignorance.

As the ad progresses, the runner is first pulverized from the impact of hitting the wall, entering a purgatory of suffering and stifling uncertainty. Shadows flicker unnaturally, and the environment seems to shift and breathe, as if alive. Lest we forget that Lynch was one of the originators of body horror with his early short films and then with his first two features Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. Within seconds “The Wall” pivots dramatically into the viscera of the sub-genre. It’s as if the runner has entered both his own physical body, awash in a red sea of oxygen-deprived blood and goopy lactate, and a visual representation of his psyche as he battles the deep desire to abandon his quest and exit this hellscape. He then experiences primordial threats: a scorpion, lightning, and finally the ultimate manifestation of human-made self-destruction: an atomic explosion. The runner must battle his animal instinct to flee. The driving score employs a tight hi-hat rhythm sampled from a seedy 1950s noir film, combined with a sleek, driving synth contorting into a minor key. As the soundtrack propels the runner through this horror, all he needs to do in order to return to a safe place is simply stop. But for some unknown reason, he keeps going, headed directly for the wall.

When the runner finally collides with the wall, he first seems to run through his own mouth, exiting his corporal self. Light floods the screen and the musical score shimmers in a major key triumph. The runner is carried aloft, seemingly running towards the heavens. It’s a moment so absurd it’s clear Lynch intended it to be ridiculous. But rather than offering clarity and a full release, this moment leaves the viewer with a lingering sense of unease, perhaps because of that self-awareness he triggers in this moment.

The marathon, Lynch seems to be telling us, contains building agony to a point of psychic and physical near self-immolation. Then there is a sudden breakthrough โ€” a fleeting moment of ecstacyโ€” followed by a disturbing desire to suffer once again. The ad leaves us with a lingering sense of dread and discomfort with ourselves even though all seems wellโ€”almost too well, as is so often the case at the conclusion of a Lynch film. But as the ad concludes and resonates in the mind, we aren’t compelled to rush out and buy Adidas running shoes, so much as we are left to wonder, ‘why do I do this to myself? And why do I love it?’

And that is the brilliance of David Lynch.

YouTube video

Thanks to the folks over at Citius’ excellent The Lap Count newsletter for reminding us of this gem. If you don’t already, and you love to nerd out on track and field and elite distance running, you should subscribe. We do.

Run in peace, David Lynch. And get over that wall.

1 thought on “David Lynch Made the Weirdest (and Perhaps Most Accurate) Running Shoe Ad in History”

  1. Just ran my fifth marathon last week so I can relate to that Lynch-ian sense of dis-ease, even if I never really did hit the wall. But while the ad is a trip (and a trip back in time), I think the accompanying essay just might have outdone it — really nice piece of writing!

    Reply

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Michael Doyle

Editor-in-Chief

Investigative journalist and editor based in Toronto

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