Eraserhead (1977)

directed by David Lynch

USA

88 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It's been probably over ten years since I last watched this and it has been one of those films that exists in my head as a concept more than as an actual memory of having seen it. And, like many if not all films that attain that category, even if I consider them to be personal favorites, I'm always surprised by how good they are once I finally do watch them again.

David Lynch's death is a hard one to deal with. Much has been said lately about his refusal to elaborate upon or explain themes in his films, choosing instead to leave it up to the viewer to interpret them. I think that this is an extremely admirable way of making art, and one that, if the artist is able to be personally content with putting their work out there in its finished form and letting it speak for itself, can be fulfilling for both the artist and the viewer. Art will always exist as much in the mind of the audience as it does in the mind of the artist. An artist might mean something specific by incorporating a specific thing in their work, but that thing will always ultimately be most meaningful to them; what resonates with a single viewer could be wholly different from what the artist intended when they created the work.

It's freeing, as a viewer, to be able to interpret a film without feeling like you're coming to the "wrong" conclusion about it. For that reason, I'm going to talk about what I think of Eraserhead on a personal level.

One of my biggest takeaways from the film is that there's something weirdly American about it. It feels heavily reminiscent of dour Soviet and Eastern European films like Stalker, The Ugly Swans, and 1980's Golem (among many others), but the characters, the way they conduct themselves, the music and the furnishings that they're surrounded with, all speak to a kind of uniquely desperate mid-20th-century American way of life. It's a little anachronistic; I wasn't alive in the late 1970s, but to my understanding people didn't really dress like the Lady in the Radiator or even like Henry's girlfriend Mary unless they were elderly. Henry himself goes around in a suit most of the time and proclaims that he works in a factory. It feels a little bit more like the times Lynch himself might have grown up in rather than the contemporary atmosphere.

A theme that seems to recur throughout the film is the horror of a hole. Things come out of, and happen inside, holes. Our introduction to the place where Henry lives is through an apocalyptic aerial zoom of a house with a large hole in its roof. A non sequitur involving the worm thing Henry finds in his mailbox ends in the worm itself growing a gaping maw that the camera falls into. Henry's brief affair with the woman next door culminates in the two of them sinking slowly into a hole that appears in the center of his bed. And at the very beginning, the film's horror of horrors, the baby itself, is birthed from Henry's open mouth. This is a deeply, deeply unsettling film, more frightening with what it shows you than with what it holds back, but there is still that sense that there are things in the shadows of it, at the bottom of holes, craters, canyons, mouths.

One tempting and even somewhat compelling read of the film is a literalist approach that says the world it depicts is some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything and everyone is strange because they're poisoned and mutated from radioactive fallout or some such. The film itself even gives us a small detail that could seem to point to this interpretation: the framed picture of a mushroom cloud next to Henry's bed. This could be a hint, or it could mean something else, or it could mean nothing at all. Personally, I think it kind of fits in with the American-ness of it all, the casual display of a symbol of incredible destructive power out of pride, maybe, or fascination; hung prominently the way one might mount a small crucifix.

And then there is the baby. I honestly forgot how horrible that thing is. It's one of the rare elements of the film that is acknowledged as being somehow wrong and bizarre within the film itself - "They're not even sure it is a baby" - and characters react to it in a way that seems reasonable given what it is, which can't be said for most other aspects of the film. On some level it does elicit a sympathetic reaction, since it is a helpless, sick creature too weak to do anything but cry and move its head a little, but it's also just so disturbing that it's impossible to really empathize with it. As for its significance to the narrative, to me it felt like after a while the baby was becoming an extension of Henry himself. They do become physically indistinguishable after a point, with Henry losing his own head and having it replaced with the baby's. Henry finally cutting the baby open and stabbing it could be read as a kind of suicide.

There's a scene in the movie Jigoku that I kept thinking about during this. The guilt-ridden protagonist of that film descends through Buddhist hell until he meets his dead girlfriend, who tells him that she's had a baby down there, but she put it on a big leaf and sent it floating away down the river, and he has to rescue it right now, hurry up, he has no choice, he has to save his baby, right now, go! Overwhelmingly, watching that scene, as with watching Eraserhead, I got the feeling that I was watching a nightmare on screen, because nightmares are the only place where I personally have experienced such a sense of deep urgency and obligation coupled with a situation that is so outwardly bizarre and impossible. It feels like a classic nightmare situation to be tasked with doing something that is of life-and-death importance but is also nearly impossible and makes very little sense in the first place, like raising a disgusting cow fetus-baby when no one has ever told you where it actually came from, just that you are somehow the father.

I guess I have to stop this somewhere. This is one of my favorite movies. It's an easy five stars. I could watch this ten more times and come away from it with ten new interpretations, each entirely different from the last. It's a film that really feels perfectly realized, and I think that may owe a lot to Lynch's ability to put art out there without explaining it. I love that a film can just be weird and nightmarish without having to justify itself.