The Comfort and Mundanity of Eraserhead

Directed by David Lynch
Written by David Lynch
Starring Jack Nance (Henry Spencer), Charlotte Stewart (Mary X), Judith Roberts (Girl Across the Hall), Laurel Near (Lady in the Radiator), and Jack Fisk (Man in the Planet)
Cinematography by Herbert Cardwell and Frederick Elmes
Edited by David Lynch
Sound Design by Alan Splet*
Released in 1977

Discussion of David Lynch's debut tends to focus on the nightmarish imagery, the gross-out effects, or its relation to Lynch's daughter, then newborn Jennifer Lynch. My first viewing had similar results. Watching Eraserhead was like being plucked from reality and dropped into a bizarre, logic-free dream world with no grounding or explanation as a safety net. Expletives of disbelief were released  upon the first glimpse of Henry Spencer and Mary X's baby? animal? mutant? horrifying combination of all three? The sudden appearance of boils on Henry's tiny amalgam of creature and human caused screams, jumps, and tightly-shut eyes. His disaffected "You are sick!" was the perfect unsettling spice to the already freaky base scene. As reproductive, fetal, and lunar images and symbols piled-up in the latter half of the film, a sickening, uncomfortable sensation developed in the pit of my stomach. Afterwards, I had to attempt sleep, worried that some of Eraserhead's surreal essence had leaked out into the real world.

Upon a second watch, the disturbing elements of Eraserhead were still present, but moments of surprising comfort, mundanity, and humor wormed their way in as well. Is it odd that I experienced a small amount of happiness during such an immediately strange film? I should clarify that it is Eraserhead's existence and continued success that I took pleasure in, not quite the movie itself. Eraserhead is an uncompromised vision, straight from the mind of Lynch, and without outside interference. That such a dark, twisted world found an audience, albeit a small one, due to a few adventurous distributors and theater owners placing it on the midnight circuit is an inspiration. The tiny amount of wider cultural cache it has gained over the decades allows me to use phrases like "Man in the Planet" and "Lady in the Radiator" without people thinking I'm crazy, for which I am eternally grateful.

The extra-textual materials on the Criterion release reveal that Lynch and co. faced overwhelming obstacles during the film's making. Funding ran out multiple times, forcing production to halt only to continue years later. Virtually everyone on the team had to work an additional job. Lynch himself ran a paper route (sadly he did not deliver newspapers on a bike, a too-perfect image). The project survived the loss of its initial DP, Herbert Caldwell, nine months in. The story of the making of Eraserhead is triumphant. The stuff of treacly biopics.

Lynch litters his film with traces of the mundane. The opening consists mainly of Henry just walking back to his apartment, lone grocery bag in hand. The environs he passes through look wild due to the lighting, but there's a recognizable quality to the industrial maze of tanks, pipes, tunnels, and abandoned buildings that block his path. Henry's dinner at the X household follows the same track. The camera just sits back and watches as the group attempts to make awkward small talk and Mr. and Mrs. X cook dinner. Sure there's a litter puppies noisily sucking away in the corner, Grandma X is catatonic, and the cooked "chickens" jump back to life for a few seconds, but the core of the scene is oddly relatable. The hard faces of the X's, the deserted spaces, and the desperate sequence that gives the film its name are reminiscent of Great Depression era photographs. Anyone who spent a night at their grandparents' home as a child will appreciate the steel bed frame, tattered blankets, and worn-out wood furniture that make up Henry's apartment.





















These contrasting components (the common and the uncommon, the earthly and the otherworldly, and the real and the surreal) collide with each other and create the curious friction that gives Eraserhead its terrifying pull.


*Not a title I usually include, but half of the film's success is due to Mr. Splet. Also, his last name works as an onomatopoeia for many of the noises in the movie.


P.S.
A few weeks ago, I attempted to clarify why Eraserhead's special effects were so memorable. By coincidence, I read Maitland McDonagh's Criterion essay for Kuroneko. She used the word unheimlich, which I was not familiar with. I rushed off to Wikipedia and discovered that it's a Freudian phrase which translates to uncanny in English. Here is the definition per Wikipedia:

The uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of its being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize

I smiled to myself when I realized how perfectly that describes the creatures populating Lynch's universe. There's something human buried underneath all the paint, goo, and make-up of Man in the Planet and Lady in the Radiator, but they simultaneously look so off, that the mind rejects them and classifies them as unsettling. The cocktail of different animal and infant characteristics that form the baby works in much the same way.