Five days ago, we lost one of our best artists in David Lynch. An inventive surrealist with a penchant for mingling the darkly humorous with the jaw-droppingly horrific, Lynch built an incredible body of work across five decades, one that somehow transcended the cult niche he seemed destined for, profoundly influencing the mainstream. For what it’s worth, he certainly influenced me; I continue to cite Mulholland Drive as one of my top-five favorite films, and consider Twin Peaks: The Return one of the most stunning, innovative seasons of television ever produced. Lynch’s passing will likely lead to more than a few Old Favorites posts, but has also inspired me to fill lamentable gaps in my knowledge of his work. I decided to start at the beginning with Eraserhead (1977), a watch that has long eluded me.
Shot in stark, dreamy black and white, Eraserhead takes place in a gloomy, post-industrial hellscape and follows the surreal life experiences of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance, who would go on to play the folksy Pete Martell on Twin Peaks). While on vacation from his job at a printing factory, Henry receives a dinner invitation from his girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Spencer), whom he hasn’t seen in some time. The reason for this becomes clear when he learns that Mary has given birth, and that Henry is the father. This shotguns the couple into marriage, but their parenthood — which would have been challenging enough under normal circumstances — is complicated by the unsettling fact that their bay is a squalling alien creature.
If you ever wondered when exactly Lynch’s sensibility got so strange, dark, and disturbing, wonder no more: it was always that way. One would think forty-seven years later something might have come along to beat it, but I’m pretty sure this is the most fucked-up film I’ve ever seen. Not even Lynch’s later masterworks can exceed it in terms of sheer, visceral off-puttingness. This isn’t to say that it’s not a particularly enjoyable film to watch, especially on the narrative level. Rife with the stately blocking and long, awkward pauses that characterize much of Lynch’s zanier work, Eraserhead doesn’t have much interest in delivering story, instead doling out character interactions that follow a murky, nonsensical dream logic. In later work, Lynch would might occasionally decipher dreamy imaginings of this kind, but here he is totally unmitigated. Yes, there is body horror and deranged imagery, unsettling flights of fancy and demented black humor — all earmarks of Lynch’s oddball oeuvre. But the journey is almost entirely uncompromising, an extended, stream-of-conscious sequence of nightmare-fuel moments, given mindblowing heft by Lynch’s preternatural patience of craft, and deeply haunting, mood-warping sound design. I’m not sure I got what Lynch was trying to say with Eraserhead, but I also don’t care. This is a singularly warped piece of work, the formative DNA of a gonzo visionary whose storied career, given the strikingly uncommercial origins on display here, is something of a miracle.
