Film review: Eraserhead (1977)

So, David Lynch just died, and as we own Eraserhead (I bought it for Jami a while ago because she saw it as a teen and it blew her mind, to the extent that she bought the (very strange and dissonant) soundtrack album on vinyl) I thought we should watch it.  I have always put it off because it looks so gloomy and oppressive, and while there are certainly elements of that, it's so strange and has such surprising flashes of humor (on top of the truly disgusting special effects (mainly the baby, which for my money is far more impressive than ET), 

which Lynch did himself, this being the equivalent of a student film on a shoestring, but refused to say how he did them) that it didn't bring me down.  If anything, it has the nourishing effect of a great work of art, albeit one that challenges rather than seduces.  So what is it about?  Well, that's another thing that Lynch steadfastly refused to get into, and indeed doing so is probably a fool's game.  It's well-known that Lynch himself was married young (and separated during the making of this film - that dragged on for years, partly because he was so broke), had just had a child, and said child was born with a club foot.  So it's easy to see the film as the expression of a man feeling trapped and unprepared for family life, particularly as he'd always intended to give his life to art.  After a truly surreal prologue involving something like the moon and a horribly scarred man (played by Sissy Spacek's then-husband - apparently she helped out on set) who pulls on some train-points-like levers, we see our protagonist, Henry (whose stacked hairdo is never explained, but is not (as I'd thought) the explanation for the film's title) returning to his dreary apartment in what looks like an industrial estate only to be told by his sultry neighbor-across-the-hall that Mary has been calling him.  This does not seem to make him happy (to be honest, very few things do - I can think of one occasion in the film when he smiles) but next we see him walking through the dark (everything takes place at night) to a very shabby little house where Mary is scowling out through the screen door and tells him that he's late.  This sets them at odds immediately, and there follows the most nightmarish "meet the parents" sequence imaginable.  Highlights include him being asked to carve the tiny chickens they are served 

only to see what looks like blood gush from their nether regions, a taste for the bodily-fluid-based horrors that are to come.  The whole family is strange in an exotic range of ways, from the inanely grinning plumber father to the the apparently immobile grandmother, to the alternately petulant and sexually aggressive mother, 

who badgers Henry about whether he and Mary have had "intercourse" because, it emerges, a baby has arrived (at which Mary corrects her that "they don't even know if it's a baby yet") and thus they have to get married and go and collect it from the hospital.  Then we cut to Henry's apartment, where Mary is trying to feed the tightly-swaddled, clearly alien child who is mewling pitifully.  She is clearly disgusted (a running theme) and gives up, until Henry arrives home and we see the one moment of happiness as he gazes at mother and child and then flops on the bed to stare into the radiator.  But the happiness is not to last: the next scene has the couple being kept awake by the crying baby until she storms out to go home (after a very Lynchian scene of her taking an absurdly long time to pull her suitcase out from under the bed that made such an impact on young Jami that she had described it to me years ago).  Henry wonders if perhaps the baby is sick 

and checks its temperature, only to find it perfectly normal, and then the very next second he looks back at the baby to see it covered in horrible boils and he says mildly "oh, you are sick").  Anyway, things don't get much better, but we do get famous scenes of a tiny woman with swollen pockmarked cheeks appearing on a tiny stage inside the radiator where, with hands clasped nervously in front of her, 

she sings "In heaven, everything is fine" (a song I heard in 1988 covered by The Pixies), and several scenes involving tadpole-like versions of the baby, first being pulled out of Mary as she sweats in bed and then raining down on the lady in the radiator (I may have the order reversed) where they splatter disgustingly.  The sultry neighbor reappears and seduces Henry in what looks like a pool of milk (but later shows up at her apartment with another man)... 

You get the idea.  Lynch has, more successfully than any other film-maker I've encountered, put a dream on film.  It's quite remarkable how fully-formed his vision was in this first film, put together on a shoestring.  The beautiful high-contrast cinematography.  The obsession with the wind and flickering lights.  The scenes held so long that you pass through discomfort to absurdist humor.  The body horror.  (Oh, the real reason it's called "Eraserhead" is because Henry's head falls off 

(replaced by the baby's face) and is found by a boy who takes it to a couple of seedy salesmen (one called Paul, who is berated, in another Lynchian moment, by his thuggish boss) who in turn take it to a man with a machine that makes pencils, who uses its insides to provide the erasers.  So there you go.)  The film is mesmerizing both because it's such an alien vision, but also because we get occasional very definite winks from the filmmaker that let us know he knows what we think, and knows that we are discomforted, and is amused by this.  We may not get him, but he gets us, but does not feel the need to pander to us.  Lynch is sort of like Superman: an alien raised in small-town America who loves it but has seen the universe beyond it, too.  A true original, who united such exalted but diverse filmmakers as Kubrick, John Waters and Mel Brooks in loving this startling first film.