Why Does David Lynch Have This Woman's Underwear In His Mouth?

Last week an old video of director David Lynch putting a woman’s underwear in his mouth surfaced on Twitter. Just shy of two minutes, the video depicts Lynch watching a woman he refers to as “Cinema Lover” allegedly remove her underwear off camera. He puts the panties in his mouth and tries to pronounce someone’s username—WMMVRRVRRMM. He then informs the woman he’ll be keeping the panties and wishes her a safe trip home.

I spent an inordinate amount of my work week attempting to decipher the mystery of this video. Where did it come from? Who is Cinema Lover and why did she agree to this? Who is the mysterious WMMVRRVRRMM and why did their username inspire such a stunt? Was this whole thing part of a longer interview?

The mysteries sent me into a rabbit hole of early internet culture and oddness worthy of a Lynchian protagonist. And much like watching a Lynch film, I was left with more questions than answers at the end of my journey.

This is what I know. David Lynch was an early adopter of the internet and started his own website in the late 1990s. The first appearance of the website on the Internet Archive was in 1998. It ran on Flash and Quicktime and Lynch maintained a forum and chat room where he interacted with fans. He published surrealist videos and other projects there for years. It was here that his popular weather reports were born.The panty eating video was apparently born from one of these interactions with fans.

The video occasionally surfaces online and what’s making the rounds on Twitter right now is not the full thing. The video made rounds in 2009 and again in 2014 after Lynch took the Icebucket Challenge. The full thing is just over 3 minutes and contains a slightly more context.

According to Roland K, a man who runs the David Lynch Archivist site on Facebook, the video was created in 2003. The WMMVRRVRRMM username apparently belongs to artist, cinefile, and David Lynch fan Dominic K. “Just for everyone else to know, people in the community shoved their ideas at David in one of his little chats and out came this,” they said on Twitter. “My username was a fun curiosity to play around with.” 

“Yes, I was a frequent online chatter in David Lynch's group chats, we said lots of silly things to one another a lot over a number of years often about cappuccinos and waitresses, and I tried to help make sure that other people had the time of their lives chatting with him,” Dominic K. said on Twitter.

I reached out to Dominic K. on Twitter for more details and had what I can only describe as an interaction. 

“What could I really say? I wasn't involved in the chat to do this video but I remember the fun,” they said.

I pressed for some basic facts, such as the date. At this point I had not yet discovered the David Lynch Archivist’s Facebook page. “There's nothing much there really. The basic facts if there are any needed were all behind the scenes far away from where I was I suppose.”

Dominic K. then proceeded to pontificate at length about his username. “I can say back then that because of the fact that people wanted to know how to pronounce my username, I put a link up one day to a voice recording of myself saying it and it's amazing to think that he bothered to listen as well,” they said. “Another direction to go might be to assume that David Lynch hadn't heard the sound file of me uttering my username at all but said it right anyway as if there should only be one way for it to really be said.”

“So that username was being used by myself for some time before David Lynch's website, and I like to think that it was inspired a bit by his paintings and perhaps also the idea of the inaudible voice of the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons,” they said. “I had the idea for a story in which there was a creature called the Wmmvrrvrrmm that blew bubbles that were gateways to alternate realities and the name was like a muffled mumble, perhaps as if spoken through a baseball glove.”

And yet more. “Another layer to the inspiration behind the name would be my fascination for how the 1st stage Guild Navigator spoke in David Lynch's Dune, which was a strange distorted muttering that was suddenly translated into English by a computer voice,” they said. “And another layer to it would be the idea of a primordial sound that created the universe or a universe that sounded nothing like Om, but on the other hand it might roughly have been the echo of the big bang. I'm sure there were other ideas coming into this username as well.”

I now knew everything I could ever want to know about the username WMMVRRVRRMM but I knew precious little about Cinema Lover and how the video came to be. I recalled Part 8 of the third season of Twin Peaks, a stunning episode where the atomic bomb (I think) rends a hole in the universe that announces the birth of the evil Bob. 

Unlike Twin Peaks, though, Laura Palmer was nowhere in sight. I was no closer to finding Cinema Lover. I reached out to David Lynch, hoping he could provide just a little more information. An intermediary responded, telling me that Mr. Lynch was very busy and would not be commenting on the goings on in his web forum from almost 20 years ago.

This is where the trail ends. This is what we know. Cinema Lover was a member of davidlynch.com. Lynch said he kept her underwear though we don’t know for a fact that they were really her underwear. She removes them off camera, obviously, but allegedly she does it in front of Lynch, which seems awkward, so it’s possible Lynch was handed a fresh pair of underwear that didn’t really belong to Cinema Lover. She was flying up to San Francisco later that week and was, presumably, a California resident.

Cinema Lover, if you’re reading this, please reach out to matthew.gault@vice.com. I’d love to know how you came to be in David Lynch’s studios, watching as he mouthed an obscure user name with your underwear in your mouth.