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This great beauty in the color of meat
When Eric and I ran into his friends Boby and Anya at Great Scott in January, it was agreed that we should get together sometime and watch Eraserhead (1977), which I had never seen and the three of them not for years. I had screened Mulholland Drive (2001) for Eric in the fall; he wanted to return the favor. Organization being what it is, it took until tonight for this to happen. (It was also the pre-birthday of Eric's brother Ron, for whom I need to get a present: I do not think pizza counts.) Fortunately, I turned out to love the film so much, I don't resent the wait.
What perhaps struck me most about Eraserhead—beyond the extraordinary, luminous texture of its cinematography; if David Lynch's directing were a prose style, I'd be re-reading him all night—was the absolute banality of its material. It is perfectly valid to synopsize the plot of Eraserhead: a recently unemployed young man in a run-down industrial city finds himself shotgun-married and as shortly abandoned by his wife, left holding a baby he isn't sure he fathered and increasingly disconnected into his own fantasies. Out of the clink and hiss of the radiator, he imagines a soothing chanteuse; a tryst with his beautiful neighbor from occasional contact in the hall. He has nightmares, of responsibility, of impersonality. The baby cries all night and he doesn't know what to do. It is also valid to describe the pervasive decay and in/animate destabilization of his world, from the mats of dirt and weeds that infest his threadbare apartment to the "manmade" chicken that splutters darkly onto his dinner plate, its legs working sexually as the fork goes in; the curious isolation in which each unheimlich tableau occurs. The baby itself looks like something flayed or stillborn, a fetal, slickly reptilian teratism ("They're still not sure it is a baby!") that whines endlessly, exhaustedly, in and out of the magnetic hum and static, microphone feedback and mechanical shear that comprise the soundtrack, except when the radiator's unholy fusion of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop croons, "In heaven, everything is fine . . ." As opposed to all the dreary off-kilter down here? I still don't think it outweirds Buñuel or Cocteau, but I love that the dream sequence from which the film derives its title—a Kafkaesque short in which the protagonist's severed head is eventually rendered down for the most mundane of office purposes—is immediately differentiable from the everyday grotesquerie of his life, where I suspect most directors would not have been able to negotiate registers of weird without losing either their audience or their atmosphere. I love that the lens character is at once the everyman a viewer likes to get their bearings by and just as fantastic as anything else in the film. As the shock-haired Henry, John Nance has the beleaguered acceptance of a silent clown, as bemused by his marriage as by the ruts of mud to be navigated in a street; patiently sitting up with his sick and monstrous child, like the Little Tramp dropped into Jan Švankmajer or Salvador Dalí, and yet his daydreams are anything but shy or sweet: the wormlike baby-things the chanteuse crushes wetly underfoot, squirming as he pulls them in horror from his wife's bedclothes; who is the sore-encrusted man in the planet, throwing the levers as vision sparks and whites out?
I don't want to know how to read Eraserhead. Whether the surrealism is literal, symbolic, schizophrenic, I don't think its end goal is exegesis: it is only so useful to parse dream from not-dream, if the distinction is even legitimate. I do know that I will want to see the film again. Right now it's my favorite by Lynch. This may change tomorrow post-The Elephant Man (1980), which my mother and I have had out from the library for half a week now; it has John Hurt. But I would be surprised. I love finding things this beautiful and strange.
What perhaps struck me most about Eraserhead—beyond the extraordinary, luminous texture of its cinematography; if David Lynch's directing were a prose style, I'd be re-reading him all night—was the absolute banality of its material. It is perfectly valid to synopsize the plot of Eraserhead: a recently unemployed young man in a run-down industrial city finds himself shotgun-married and as shortly abandoned by his wife, left holding a baby he isn't sure he fathered and increasingly disconnected into his own fantasies. Out of the clink and hiss of the radiator, he imagines a soothing chanteuse; a tryst with his beautiful neighbor from occasional contact in the hall. He has nightmares, of responsibility, of impersonality. The baby cries all night and he doesn't know what to do. It is also valid to describe the pervasive decay and in/animate destabilization of his world, from the mats of dirt and weeds that infest his threadbare apartment to the "manmade" chicken that splutters darkly onto his dinner plate, its legs working sexually as the fork goes in; the curious isolation in which each unheimlich tableau occurs. The baby itself looks like something flayed or stillborn, a fetal, slickly reptilian teratism ("They're still not sure it is a baby!") that whines endlessly, exhaustedly, in and out of the magnetic hum and static, microphone feedback and mechanical shear that comprise the soundtrack, except when the radiator's unholy fusion of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop croons, "In heaven, everything is fine . . ." As opposed to all the dreary off-kilter down here? I still don't think it outweirds Buñuel or Cocteau, but I love that the dream sequence from which the film derives its title—a Kafkaesque short in which the protagonist's severed head is eventually rendered down for the most mundane of office purposes—is immediately differentiable from the everyday grotesquerie of his life, where I suspect most directors would not have been able to negotiate registers of weird without losing either their audience or their atmosphere. I love that the lens character is at once the everyman a viewer likes to get their bearings by and just as fantastic as anything else in the film. As the shock-haired Henry, John Nance has the beleaguered acceptance of a silent clown, as bemused by his marriage as by the ruts of mud to be navigated in a street; patiently sitting up with his sick and monstrous child, like the Little Tramp dropped into Jan Švankmajer or Salvador Dalí, and yet his daydreams are anything but shy or sweet: the wormlike baby-things the chanteuse crushes wetly underfoot, squirming as he pulls them in horror from his wife's bedclothes; who is the sore-encrusted man in the planet, throwing the levers as vision sparks and whites out?
I don't want to know how to read Eraserhead. Whether the surrealism is literal, symbolic, schizophrenic, I don't think its end goal is exegesis: it is only so useful to parse dream from not-dream, if the distinction is even legitimate. I do know that I will want to see the film again. Right now it's my favorite by Lynch. This may change tomorrow post-The Elephant Man (1980), which my mother and I have had out from the library for half a week now; it has John Hurt. But I would be surprised. I love finding things this beautiful and strange.
no subject
What perhaps struck me most about Eraserhead—beyond the extraordinary, luminous texture of its cinematography; if David Lynch's directing were a prose style, I'd be re-reading him all night—was the absolute banality of its material.
I think it may be the balance to my oft-stated position that how something is presented is just as important (if not more) than what is presented; this corollary being that no matter how wonderfully you gussy something up, it's gotta have at least a skeleton to hang all the pretty things on. (I've been noticing this more and more in modern low-budget horror films, but never thought to connect it back to Eraserhead... which, now that I think about it, is a modern low-budget horror film...)
All that said, though, I should go back and give it another try, because there is no piece of film containing Jack Nance I have not been wowed by save this one, and back then I had no idea who Jack Nance was...
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It reminded me more of Gogol or Dostoevsky—if Henry still had his job at the printer's, he would probably work in the next office over from Golyadkin or Akaky Akakievich, all anti-heroes of that luckless, disintegrating strain of the fantastic. He's not philosophical enough for Notes from Underground, but he's got hallucinatory poshlost to spare. I wonder if there are articles to this effect. If not, maybe I should write them.
(I've been noticing this more and more in modern low-budget horror films, but never thought to connect it back to Eraserhead... which, now that I think about it, is a modern low-budget horror film...)
Eric tells me it started as a project for the American Film Institute and evolved into his first feature film; I think their budget was less than shoestring. Speaking of which, have you ever seen Primer (2004)?
because there is no piece of film containing Jack Nance I have not been wowed by save this one, and back then I had no idea who Jack Nance was...
I didn't recognize the actor, so if I've seen him in other Lynch films, he didn't register (and clearly I must go back to look for him), but he is exactly right for Eraserhead. It almost is a one-man silent movie; the viewer's interest holds or falls on his look of perpetually assailed anxiety, and I think it holds.
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O ja. While I admire the director's attempt at a cinema verite approach to actual conversation, it took me all of the first scene to realize why scripts tend to clean up the bits where everyone's talking at once. Once I got past that, I was okay...
As for Nance, he was a Lynch regular right up until his death (though his crowning glory will always be Twin Peaks for me), but he did a lot of work with other directors as well. Colors, the remake of The Blob, and (of course) Hammett are big standouts for me.