Director/writer/editor: David Lynch
Photography: Herbert Cardwell, Frederick Elmes
Music: David Lynch, Peter Ivers, Fats Waller
Cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates, Laurel Near, Judith Roberts
David Lynch’s first movie, Eraserhead, was a project connected to his time as a student at the American Film Institute and took him something like five years to complete. It came to attention commercially the only way it could have, basically. That is, as a “midnight movie” in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, winning accolades from Stanley Kubrick (who required the cast of The Shining to look at it to get in the mood), John Waters, and, most importantly, Mel Brooks, who gave everything-man David Lynch a shot at directing The Elephant Man. Eraserhead fits the bill for a midnight movie perfectly—it’s weird, never stops being weird, and has no explanations. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a man living in an industrial wasteland out of Pere Ubu album covers and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (although Eraserhead came out two years before Stalker). Come to find out, Henry previously had sexual intercourse with a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and she gave birth to an extremely deformed baby.
Or, as Mary cries out in some distress when her mother confronts Henry about the situation, “Mother, they’re still not sure it is a baby!” In fact, the prop used to memorably represent it (which never gets a name) was reportedly an embalmed cow’s calf carcass, animated by techniques Lynch has still not revealed. Nance later played Pete Martell in Lynch’s Twin Peaks franchise and it’s interesting to see the friendly figure so much younger and alienating. It’s the baby thing that is the star of the show, however, a kind of rorschach special effect for which we develop tender feelings in spite of revulsion. In appearance it reminds me of the rabbit carcass in Repulsion. By the time it is sick and Henry is taking its temperature we simply care for it. It cries a lot like a baby, which is one of the ways it gets under our skin. By way of the narrative, or perhaps the special effects, this terrible thing comes to have all the pathos for us of a human baby or any mammal infant. It is grotesque but somehow cute at the same time, and its health can become even more a cause of concern for us than for anyone in the movie. By this time, the movie is so weird it almost feels like it is consuming us as we watch.
David Lynch’s first movie, Eraserhead, was a project connected to his time as a student at the American Film Institute and took him something like five years to complete. It came to attention commercially the only way it could have, basically. That is, as a “midnight movie” in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, winning accolades from Stanley Kubrick (who required the cast of The Shining to look at it to get in the mood), John Waters, and, most importantly, Mel Brooks, who gave everything-man David Lynch a shot at directing The Elephant Man. Eraserhead fits the bill for a midnight movie perfectly—it’s weird, never stops being weird, and has no explanations. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a man living in an industrial wasteland out of Pere Ubu album covers and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (although Eraserhead came out two years before Stalker). Come to find out, Henry previously had sexual intercourse with a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and she gave birth to an extremely deformed baby.
Or, as Mary cries out in some distress when her mother confronts Henry about the situation, “Mother, they’re still not sure it is a baby!” In fact, the prop used to memorably represent it (which never gets a name) was reportedly an embalmed cow’s calf carcass, animated by techniques Lynch has still not revealed. Nance later played Pete Martell in Lynch’s Twin Peaks franchise and it’s interesting to see the friendly figure so much younger and alienating. It’s the baby thing that is the star of the show, however, a kind of rorschach special effect for which we develop tender feelings in spite of revulsion. In appearance it reminds me of the rabbit carcass in Repulsion. By the time it is sick and Henry is taking its temperature we simply care for it. It cries a lot like a baby, which is one of the ways it gets under our skin. By way of the narrative, or perhaps the special effects, this terrible thing comes to have all the pathos for us of a human baby or any mammal infant. It is grotesque but somehow cute at the same time, and its health can become even more a cause of concern for us than for anyone in the movie. By this time, the movie is so weird it almost feels like it is consuming us as we watch.
There are many reasons to not like Eraserhead—it is determinedly weird, it is very slow, lots of it makes no sense—but I found all these objections overwhelmed by the experience of seeing it the first time. It was a midnight showing late in 1978 on a frigidly cold night in November. The ads and the word of mouth had an aura, even an urgency, I had not seen since Mean Streets made a stealth assault on the market a few years earlier. Eraserhead is actually surprisingly funny in many places, with a dark, deadpan manner. It is also deliberately gross, with worm/sperm things all over the place, including on stage in a music and dance performance where they are squelched disgustingly underfoot. I walked out of the theater at 2 a.m. in the morning not knowing what hit me.
In a way, Eraserhead is everything we love and loathe and fear from David Lynch movies. I never got back to it again for many years because it was followed by many shiny objects that are even better, such as The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet. What we see of the world of Eraserhead is bad enough and industrial enough to qualify the picture as dystopic. There’s no explanation for the baby but industrial pollution is one of the strongest suggestions, along with aliens from outer space considerations, here to mop up perhaps after we have botched the job of stewarding the planet.
Eraserhead moves slow but it cracks jokes. It has a meditative stillness at its center that is like sleep paralysis, the moments before we lose consciousness. It often feels like dreaming, although it is also embedded with explicitly dream sequences. One of them offers up a sort of explanation for the title that goes beyond Nance’s grown-out crewcut hairdo, which looks like an eraser at the end of a standard yellow pencil. Does it even matter? No, not really. Who cares what the title does or does not mean?
Lynch works the shock value of the baby well. Part of the magic is his sound design, which hits like heavy industrial noise that has been wheezing on for eons. The action of Eraserhead all has something to do with Henry’s alien-infected sperm, maybe. But that’s trying to explain it again, the impulse Lynch is forever fighting us with, frustrating us over. We want it to make more sense. We always want it to make more sense. He uses it on us the way we use red laser lights on cats, who don’t understand they will never catch that red dot just as we don’t understand these things that almost make sense will never make sense. It’s what people love and hate about David Lynch movies, and of course it was there from the beginning.
In a way, Eraserhead is everything we love and loathe and fear from David Lynch movies. I never got back to it again for many years because it was followed by many shiny objects that are even better, such as The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet. What we see of the world of Eraserhead is bad enough and industrial enough to qualify the picture as dystopic. There’s no explanation for the baby but industrial pollution is one of the strongest suggestions, along with aliens from outer space considerations, here to mop up perhaps after we have botched the job of stewarding the planet.
Eraserhead moves slow but it cracks jokes. It has a meditative stillness at its center that is like sleep paralysis, the moments before we lose consciousness. It often feels like dreaming, although it is also embedded with explicitly dream sequences. One of them offers up a sort of explanation for the title that goes beyond Nance’s grown-out crewcut hairdo, which looks like an eraser at the end of a standard yellow pencil. Does it even matter? No, not really. Who cares what the title does or does not mean?
Lynch works the shock value of the baby well. Part of the magic is his sound design, which hits like heavy industrial noise that has been wheezing on for eons. The action of Eraserhead all has something to do with Henry’s alien-infected sperm, maybe. But that’s trying to explain it again, the impulse Lynch is forever fighting us with, frustrating us over. We want it to make more sense. We always want it to make more sense. He uses it on us the way we use red laser lights on cats, who don’t understand they will never catch that red dot just as we don’t understand these things that almost make sense will never make sense. It’s what people love and hate about David Lynch movies, and of course it was there from the beginning.
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