After the dinner with parents scene the plot of this film slows to basics and really just depicts life with the baby in the little flat. Things that aren't plot points, though, start to dominate. Henry finds a tiny box containing a kind of grub left in his letter box. After storming out one night, Mary returns to have fitful sleeps during which she discharges large spermlike things which Henry hurls against the wall where they break and splatter. When he's left again alone with the baby he has a one nighter with the woman across the hall which ends in both of them sinking into the biggest wet patch in history in Henry's bed. Henry's means of escape from his nightmarish life is done through his imagining a cabaret visible through the fins of the radiator. The star of the show is a kind of Marilyn Monroe with a pair of porridgey growths where her jowls might have been. She grins coquettishly at us as she dances a crabwalk from one side of the stage to the next to Fats Waller's steam organ ragtime. When the zygotic things begin to fall on to the stage she grins again, conspiratorially, before approaching one and crushing it with her heel. The title of the film is illustrated in a dream sequence involving Henry's disembodied head being used for the production of pencil erasers. And that's just a few things in this film that, at eighty-nine minutes, can, depending on your mood, feel like four hours.
As a film constructed from bizarre situations that can go completely unexplained, Eraserhead has garnered a mass of interpretations. The worst of these are literal and have to do with some notion of sin. Others more plainly offer the abstraction of fears faced by new parents. but why the lady in the radiator? Why the constant industrial noise? Why that creepy song about heaven which seems to foreshadow Henry's fate (once you work out what you think that fate is)? David Lynch himself has said that he does have solid ideas about the film's meaning and that every other one he's heard is wrong but that he likes how many of them there are. That's helpful. Me, I don't care if there's a single central plan to it or not. It doesn't strike me as an essay of any kind, nor even consistently any kind of allegory. This has to do with something I think about David Lynch's films and why I like them that is a little at odds with more canonical explanations.
I have a history with this body of work. I'm not uncritical of it and have my favourites and mehs. When Blue Velvet lifted Lynch's profile anyone who saw it seemed to wear its weirdness as a badge and the term Lynchian came to mean anything bizarre and became part of the conversation. But then when the second season of Twin Peaks turned its audience off with its wayward goofiness and loss of its darker edge, Lynch got the backlash. So, even though some very strong entries appeared in the following decade, including some quite straightforward narrative mixed in with the loopiness, people would approach me as the Lynch Fan to tell me that they had fallen asleep at one of the movies or had not chosen it at the video shop. And if this strange mix of snivelling puerility and restrained psychosis weren't enough I would have to live through reasons why Lynch was a charlatan, nowhere close to the clever dick he thought he was. It was that strawman argument that did come close to bothering me as, to counter it I would need to make the kind of argument I hated: they just didn't get it. They were looking for intellectual substance from a film maker who wasn't that interested in it. My conviction about Lynch at his best is that he is not intellectually deep but deeply emotional.
If you go with that you are going to get more out of his films and any like them. Every time Lynch adds a description of a film it's usually pretty plain and it's worth taking him at his word. The reviled INLAND EMPIRE was given "the story of a woman in trouble". That really is what you get. And then, this was much later, Eraserhead was described by Lynch as "a dream of dark and troubling things" it really does fit the film like a glove. You don't even have to plead the case of letting it all flow over you. Eraserhead is a dream of dark and troubling things. Despite some genuinely funny moments, what it does best is make anyone who goes along with it worry. It's a few minutes shy of one and a half hours of stress. Don't like that? Watch something else. But don't go on to me about why Eraserhead is crappy if you know that and it does that. I used to do the same with Wes Anderson whose films I hate for their clanging cuteness. Then again, his whole considerable following in the world likes that very thing which means that I eventually had to shut up about it and let them have their fun.
So after forty-five years, how does it stack up? The quality of its images remains a minor miracle. Lynch and his crew took four years to make it and the depth of the rich monochrome scale, the fetishistic textures and surfaces still impress. This urban scape of steam valves, distant horns and clanging have both a lulling and unsettling effect. This is a world that did not exist before its creator imagined and recorded it. This nameless city is not a recognisable one but its oppressive claustrophobia might remind you of living in any city. And breathing through it, warming it up and holding it together, however much he seems to crumble, is Jack Nance as Henry.
Nance's worried Little Tramp is a marvel of concentrated performance. He has nuance here and there, showing humour or anger now and then, but mostly he gives us a citizen of factoryville that retains a creative imagination as a kind of disused genetic trait. When the Valhalla was in Richmond, a tram ride away, I would see Eraserhead almost every time it came up in the calendar, accompanied or not. The screenings were consistently popular and if I was alone and saw the forties style title roll out against the darkness I would panic a little and wonder why the hell I was doing this to myself again. There are scenes that still get to me and the overall mood of the film is oppressive. But I always made it through and noted that couples exiting while the end credits were playing always seemed to be clutching each other. I also, particularly if I went alone, had the sense that I looked like Henry and everyone around me knew it.
I didn't see it as a new release (too young and in Townsville). I didn't even know of its existence until after I'd seen The Elephant Man (when it was new). One day in 1983 there was a rumour going around the campus at Griffith University that it would be screening at the cinema for free. All true, we piled in and there it was. The first time you see the dinner scene and feel that no sooner than you'd just had a good laugh it was replaced by a nervous one. And then you saw the baby. Richard in the seat beside mine leant over and whispered harshly, "what is that?" Nothing added up in this movie but because it wasn't like any other movie we'd ever seen we just had to sit back and take it that movies made in this place or creative state don't follow the normal rules. Later, at a seminar that Richard was delivering, I drew a cartoon of the baby to give him a laugh but he later confided that the sight of it made him feel sick. As for me, I watched with gaping wonder at a world I'd felt but never seen. It was more like a Kafka story than a movie, more a Throbbing Gristle album than an independent film. It was disgust made beautiful. It was repulsion and attraction all at once which made it purely fascinating. It still is.
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