Directed by David Lynch
Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates and Judith Roberts
Here's a rare example of a movie that I didn't hear about for the first time in an Ebert companion. This time, it was An Album of Modern Horror Films, by some random person whose name I can't even remember. This particular book was well-worn and had been checked out something like 17,000 times from my middle school library, and it mentioned a surrealist body horror film called Eraserhead somewhere in its mustard-stained pages. For the record, that book is also where I first discovered Prom Night, Love at First Bite, and Alice, Sweet Alice, so huzzah for this priceless tome.
I don't know if that book was being entirely accurate, because Eraserhead is anything but a horror film. It's occasionally quite gory, but it is more a bizarre drama about anxiety than anything else. Of course, the film-maker in question is David Lynch, a guy who I've seen a decent amount of films from (Lost Highway, Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet to name a few) and also a guy who has a reputation for being strange. This was his first real movie, a passion project that he pursued for five years while he was working at the American Film Institute. The film kept running out of funding, putting the filming on pause, but Lynch stuck with it and the result was this - a movie that was in and out of theaters in a heartbeat but gained serious steam in the ensuing years playing the midnight movie circuit, to the point that it is now considered one of the best films of all time. Is it? In my book...not quite. But a film doesn't acquire a story like this without some merits.
Warning - this isn't going to be one of my typical reviews, where the following few paragraphs focus exclusively on the plot. Why? This isn't a typical movie. The first thing that needs to be conveyed about Eraserhead is that it is an atypical watch. For starters, there is very little dialogue. I don't have exact statistics for you, but I'd be willing to bet that the film's characters don't speak more than 300 words. Instead, Lynch tells this story in an intensely visual way, with characters skulking about decorated sets and locations for long stretches of silence with somber, moody music as the backdrop. Sound and sound editing also play a big role in telling the film's story, with the more disturbing things that occur featuring loud screeches that get turned up to 11 on the sonic oscillator. +2 points to you if you get that reference.
The movie's protagonist, as it were, is Henry Spencer, factory printer (a job that all cool people have, by the way) who inhabits a beauty-free industrialized world and lives in a one-room apartment adorned with stacks of dirt and dead vegetation. The symbolism of this escapes me - perhaps it represents Henry's lifeless existence? Spencer is played by Jack Nance, and man was this guy a trooper - he kept the haircut you see in the movie poster above for all five years that this movie took to film in its varying intervals.
The narrative hinges on Spencer's girlfriend, the shy and strange Mary X (Charlotte Stewart). An early dinner sequence with Mary and her family establishes that Mary has recently had Henry's baby. We then are introduced to the baby, a mutated creature with a worm-like appearance. It mews like a human baby, with surgical tape wrapping its body. The constant noise of the baby soon drive Mary away from the house, leaving the frazzled Spencer to take care of it by himself. There is a curious incident not soon thereafter where he repeatedly attempts to leave his apartment only for the baby to start crying as soon as he opens the door. Not soon thereafter, it becomes sick and develops black marks all over its face.
If you haven't gleamed it by now, this isn't a film that unspools with first, second and third acts. The story plays out in a repeated series of fantasy and dream sequences. We get more than one appearance of the Woman in the Radiator (Laurel Near), operatic singer with massive cheeks in Henry's radiator who appears desperate to please a nonexistent audience. The first character we see in the film is another one of these apparitions - the Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk), who frantically pulls levers inside a black planet that I'm fairly certain is meant to be an allegory for male sexual urge. If you keep those two things in mind, the movie becomes infinitely easier to understand, particularly in the late stages when the spoken words become even more sparse and the movie starts hurtling blood at you.
The movie plays out as an extended metaphor about the fear of fatherhood. The baby's monstrous appearance is the most obvious tell on this, as such a dependent creature must appear to a new father. The Woman in the Radiator at one point stomps many smaller versions of the baby; considering the ending of the film, this character seems to be Henry's dark, tempting side. Speaking of the ending, if you keep in mind the symbols that I've laid out thus far, it really is some pretty sickening stuff. More sickening than what we see on screen, even.
David Lynch has an entire filmography of weird movies, but this is probably the magnum opus of weird. Believe me, no matter how weird this movie may seem to you having read the review thus far...they top it. There's a bit in the dinner sequence with Mary's family where Henry carves a chicken that starts to move in time with Mary's mother moaning in apparent sexual ecstasy. I'm not going to lie...I considered turning the movie off and trying to find an easier-to-understand 1970s film instead. Obviously I stuck with it, and while I don't consider this an enjoyable movie, Lynch has created something here that everyone should check out once in their lives.
Rating time: *** out of ****. I really did like this movie, but not in the way that I would ever want to watch it again. And since the Woman in the Radiator sings about how in Heaven everything is fine, I figured that...
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