Eraserhead (dir. David Lynch, 1977)
Every David Lynch film contains elements of horror even if they are not necessarily proper entries in the genre. The Elephant Man is a touching biographical drama about Joseph Merrick, but it’s often filmed and lit like a horror film. What are the third-stage Guild Navigator or the pustules caking Baron Harkonnen’s skin in Dune, but grotesque body horror? The Straight Story is about mortality, aging, and the approach of death, while also being about a man driving a couple hundred miles on a riding lawnmower. Films such as Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive could more appropriately be called thrillers, but a thriller is just a horror movie with pretensions to respectability.
Eraserhead, though? Horror seems like about the only genre you could outright call it, but even that’s reductive. It’s often as funny as it is scary, but I’d never call it a comedy. David Lynch himself has been quoted as calling it “a dream of dark and disturbing things.”
The strange thing, though, is that I have been unable to source that Lynch quote to any interview, though it appears in seemingly every piece of writing about the film. It’s appropriate, I suppose: not only is it is an apt summary of Eraserhead, it falls in line with the legendary status of the film and its troubled making. The production took place over a five year period. Its funds came from a mix of grants from the American Film Institute and money from the crew’s day jobs. For a year, Lynch lived on the set. Jack Nance had to keep his hair styled like Henry Spencer’s for the entire production period, earning him canon status as the patron saint of actors everywhere. Perhaps most famously, Lynch has refused for decades now to describe just how he made the baby prop [1]. All of it only adds to the mystique of an already enigmatic film.
Eraserhead follows Jack Nance’s character Henry Spencer. Henry discovers that he and his girlfriend Mary have become unexpected parents to a severely deformed child that resembles nothing human. The raising of this baby puts incredible strain on both of them, causing their relationship to collapse and Henry’s psyche to crack. It ends in infanticide.
But that’s only plot description. To watch it is to experience a nightmare. Spencer’s world is falling apart. Everything takes place in a blasted-out industrial landscape. The sound design allows no silences. The ambient noise is electrical buzzing and the drone of machinery. Something as simple as a chicken dinner becomes horrifying as the “man-made” meat twitches and bleeds when you cut into it. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything natural at all. Even the plant next to Henry’s bed is only a clump of dirt with a stalk sticking out of it. Henry is haunted by visions of strange people and stranger things: giant spermatozoa that squelch when crushed; a Lady in the Radiator with grotesque cheeks who shuffle-dances and lip syncs to a song emanating from somewhere; a Man in the Planet, horrifically scarred and observing it all from his window. There’s a scenario that plays out where Henry loses his head, which is rendered into pencils dubbed by a man at the factory as merely “okay.”
It’s difficult not to take all this in a straightforward manner. Eraserhead is the dream of man fearing the pressures fatherhood. That dreaming man could be Lynch himself. He and Henry share the same wardrobe and hair. Lynch worked as a printer in a bad part of Philadelphia. He and his wife married due to an unplanned pregnancy and had a daughter born with a clubfoot.. The marriage would ultimately fall apart, albeit more because of the ordinary pressures and problems of life than a mutant child. And it’s not like artists don’t mine their own lives for material, anyway… But one dreaming person may as well be any other.
You could describe the stranger events of the film as dreams that Henry has that serve as symbolism for his own life, but describing them then as dreams-within-dreams feels a bit silly, though. That’s not how dreaming works, whatever Christopher Nolan may think. Everything is equally unreal, and applying one-to-one symbolism for the evens in the film is as much of a waste of time as actual dream analysis. Dreams are the detritus of waking life: images, sounds, and sensations drawn from our daily experiences and are haphazardly joined together as we sleep.
Dreams are important only in so much as the emotions we draw from them or by what meaning we later give them, and that is very much in line with Lynch’s work, here in Eraserhead and elsewhere. It’s surrealist art in the original sense: drawing elements from the subconscious mind as raw material to create something new.
[1] It was almost certainly constructed from the remains of a fetal calf or lamb. Lynch’s visual artwork has made use of animal body parts and taxidermy on several occasions, including if I remember correctly, an attempt at a Build-a-Fish kit using actual fish parts.
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