David Lynch (1977)

David Lynch’s first feature is unfathomable but abundantly suggestive.   The pasty-faced, worried-looking protagonist Henry Spencer – his hairstyle is a kind of electrified pompadour – lives in a one-room apartment in a grim building in the middle of what looks to be a post-industrial wasteland.  He finds himself caring alone for his mutant baby:  while its appearance is grotesquely inhuman, the baby’s relentless crying is what causes the mother to leave and return home to her parents.  Henry’s nightmarish supervision of the baby is intercut with sequences that take him deeper into paranoid fantasy.  The unnerving but seamless quality of the fantasy makes Eraserhead a continuously disorienting and beguiling experience.   There’s a strong current of sexual fear running through the imagery (culminating in a sequence in which Henry couples with a woman and their bodies deliquesce).  The momentum is built through rhythmical, various images of penetration, implied castration and decapitation – and revelations of what lies beneath surfaces and inside organisms.  Bodily fluids spurt out violently or spread seductively;   when Henry, near the end of the film, cuts away the swaddling bandages of his offspring, its innards are hideously animated.

The film is as sparse in dialogue as it’s rich in imagery.  Some of the compositions here are repeated in later work by Lynch:  for example, the ‘lady in the radiator’, a small doll-like figure – whose sugary costume and hairdo are overwhelmed by her swollen, decaying cheeks – performs in front of miniature stage curtains on a check tile floor.    According to Geoff Andrew’s note for the BFI screening, Lynch took five years to complete Eraserhead, presumably due to lack of funds.  That may have helped make this such a concentrated piece of work yet it’s an amazingly assured one too – in aural as well as visual terms.   The soundtrack alternates between a remorselessly chilly, moaning wind – which chimes with the baby’s whining – and noises that suggest machinery always on the point of gathering power in a hot, airless, subterranean chamber.   What makes this picture so remarkable is Lynch’s ability – already well developed – to make you share his fascination with the palpable images that he creates.  These are frequently repellent but, after initially recoiling from them, you always want to look closer.  The sequences that begin and end the film – with the head of a supine Henry across the screen in the foreground, a planet-like rock in the background and a dark, starry sky further back – are very beautiful.  They seem to be a visualisation of the audience being taken inside Henry’s (and David Lynch’s) head, and eventually coming out again.   Spencer is played by John Nance, as he was then known.  He was Jack Nance by the time he played his other well-known role, as the husband of the sawmill owner (Piper Laurie) in Twin Peaks.

7 October 2008