Six Men Getting Sick

The expense of making his first short film nearly soured David Lynch on the medium of cinema. It cost a "completely unreasonable" $200 to shoot and develop Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1966), which employed stop motion animation and was inspired by Lynch's desire to see paintings come to life. Lynch had enrolled in Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with the aim of becoming a painter but as his life changed so would his art. Married and the father of a newborn child by age 22, Lynch would use cinema as a way to work through his anxieties about school, marriage, fatherhood, and city life - preoccupations conspicuous as early as Six Men Getting Sick: a one-minute animation of men vomiting that is looped four times and backed by a soundtrack of a wailing siren. (Lynch had come to the inner city from an idyllic childhood in the American heartland as his family followed the various jobs of his father, a research scientist for the US Department of Agriculture.) Lynch's meshing of an almost Victorian anatomical queasiness with a fetish for mechanical inner workings would be a hallmark of his later feature films, most notably Eraserhead (1977) and The Elephant Man (1980). Screened in 1967 as part of a PAFA student competition, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) earned the Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize and set David Lynch on the long, strange trip that would be his life's work. By Richard Harland Smith