Eraserhead
Even by the considerably high standards of David Lynch, his 1977 feature film debut, “Eraserhead,” stands as probably the most unsettling experiment of the director’s career. Yes, “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive” and “INLAND EMPIRE” push up to the edge of the glass when it comes to surreal cinema, but all three still find themselves, comfortably, within the parameters of film noir. (The same can be said with his TV series, “Twin Peaks,” and it’s 1992 prequel, “Fire Walk With Me.”) “Eraserhead” is on another level entirely, one reserved for Bunuel and Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou” and other works I have not seen myself. It is the least accessible of Lynch’s films, and yet, critical viewing for anyone who wishes to experience the full extent of Lynch’s surreal genius as a filmmaker.
How does one even begin to describe this film? Let’s start with the main character, Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance. Henry is an unusual man. He works at a local factory, and lives in relative solitude. He has a peculiar way about him, accentuated by his hair, which resembles an eraser at the end of a pencil. (Hence the title.) He comes home from work one day and his next door neighbor (Judith Roberts) has a message for him: his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart), would like him to join her and her parents (Allen Joseph and Jeanne Bates) for dinner. It goes about as awkwardly as you would expect in a Lynch film, with writhing cooked birds, his girlfriend’s mother pushing him to marry Mary after she gives birth, but not without hitting on him herself, and Mary devastated at how things go. They move in together with the child Mary has had, but one look at it, and you wonder whether it’s even human. (Don’t worry; they wonder, as well.) Mary cannot stand it over at Henry’s with her spawn crying all the time, although Henry does not seem phased, although we come to figure out that Henry, who experiences hallucinations of his own (that seem amplified by the child’s presence), might have a lot more weighing on him than fatherhood.
One of the things that sets Lynch apart from a lot of major filmmakers is not just his unsettling narrative ideas and the depth of his noir visuals, but his interest in helping craft the soundtrack for his films, as well. He has been credited as a sound designer on a lot of his films (including “The Straight Story,” “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and “The Elephant Man”), and “Eraserhead” more than shows that he has a unique ear for sound when it comes to his movies. The music of Angelo Badalamenti has defined Lynch’s films in an aural sense for so long that it’s impossible to think of anyone else having such an impact, but the ambient soundscape of “Eraserhead” illustrates that Lynch is as much the author of his films’s soundtracks as any composer he may be work with. The sounds emanating from the soundtrack for “Eraserhead” are illustrative of the unnerving story that is unfolding in the images Lynch and cinematographers Herbert Cardwell and Frederick Elmes put on camera. This was Lynch’s first time working with Elmes, the start of a collaboration that also included “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart.” In a way, though, Elmes has been as defining to the visuals of Lynch’s films as Lynch has been to the soundtracks of his- there’s a conformity to the type of imagery and camera we see in Lynch films that helps orient the viewer even when the narrative enters the realm of the inscrutable, as “Eraserhead” does after a relatively straightforward beginning. When that baby enters the movie, the films dives head first into the surreal, overwhelmed by the Henry’s hallucinations and anxieties as Mary appears to leave the picture, never to return, and the most important woman in his life appears to be a deformed “Lady in the Radiator” (Laurel Near) only he can see. A big part of the reason that “Eraserhead” remains watchable after any narrative sense is lost is Nance’s performance as Henry, who is seen by the actor (and his director) less as a headcase and more as a regular person who has considerable emotional anxiety and uncertainty in navigating life. The sympathy shown Henry by actor and director is the lynchpin for “Eraserhead’s” ability to draw us into it’s bizarre web of horror images and disquieting sounds.
