Eraserhead

Kubrick's Star Child through Lynch's bleaker filter.

Rumor has it that David Lynch’s Eraserhead was one of Stanley Kubrick’s favorite films. It has every reason to be, of course—it’s basically 2001’s antithesis. Both films consider man’s role in the universe, and neither seem to believe that we can do anything but tip the iceberg of its profound secrets. The difference is that Kubrick’s film ultimately honors man’s desire to explore the fathoms of the unknown with ever-advancing technology, and Lynch finds human achievement to be repugnant and sickening. You can’t please everybody.

Lynch has always been a director whose films force us into interpretive mode, lest they grow unwatchable. His best films (Muholland Drive, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart, and Blue Velvet among them) are a series of surreal and lurid images that certainly do not fit into any sort of clear narrative, but are undeniably related thematically. Eraserhead was Lynch’s first film, and it fits into this bizarre continuum of randomness that points to (without clearly spelling out) ultimate clarity. To watch it is to immerse yourself in an experience in which you cannot calculate or estimate what is going to happen in the scene following the one you are currently watching, because there is no story to follow that allows the benefit of prediction. Instead, you are required to take each image thrown at you and interpret it against previous scenes, in an effort to understand the big picture. And there is a big picture, though you probably won’t get it in the first viewing. Hell, you might not get it in your fifteenth viewing, but it’s in there somewhere, locked deeply in its terrifying, comedic dreamscape. It’s metaphorical coherency disguised as artful incoherency.

The above description certainly fits the best work by Kubrick too, though that late, great director certainly isn’t as blatant. His strategy was to give his audience at least the semblance of narrative, and then to deconstruct it altogether as his images and ideas grew more and more impenetrable. 2001: A Space Odyssey began as a science fiction epic about humanity’s first contact with alien intelligence, and it proceeded to confound the viewer by revealing the ultimate fruitlessness in the human attempt to infiltrate the universe. What begins as a story ends as a head-trip. Eraserhead works in the opposite direction; it mystifies us from the get-go, and only as we begin to consider its images together does the finished puzzle start to make any sense at all.

And Lynch is not painting a pretty picture. Eraserhead is an angry, disenchanted film about the mendacity of daily routine, and how we have invented a civilization built on this deception, even as the reality of our superficial nature creeps in through our actions, our interactions, and our fantasies. Werner Herzog put it this way: “There is an ocean beneath the thin laver of ice that is civilization. There are miles and miles of deep ocean, of darkness and barbarism. And I know the ice can break easily.” In Eraserhead, the ice has broken, and the ocean underneath has begun to swallow those who are still holding helplessly onto the melting floes.

The man desperate holding on is Henry Spence (John Nance), a recluse with frizzy hair who is perpetually on vacation from his job, even though he spends nearly all of this time in his one-room apartment, sitting by his heater and lusting after the sultry woman next door. Spence’s quiet little existence is literally turned upside down when a hideously deformed baby is thrust into his life by a near-mad woman with whom he had a one-night stand. This child, a hairless, long-snouted head with a serpentine body, spends its time crying vulnerably on his dresser drawer, and most of the film is a series of bizarre dreams and experiences that Spence has as he tries to care for the little creature as much as he can, even as it repulses him.

The film’s lack of dialogue (what little is present is utterly mundane), coupled with its distinct, meditative reflections on man’s technology, almost immediately bring 2001 to mind. But Kubrick’s long, poetic shots of our majestic progress have been replaced with disturbing images of man’s creation that suggest we are slaves to our grotesque invention, not its master (Kubrick would suggest that we are slaves to the universe, but perhaps not to our own inventions—HAL is eventually unplugged, after all). In Eraserhead, buildings ascend the skies like twisted, knotted trees, and rooms are covered with dust, dirt, and oozing worms. Manufactured baked chickens dance grotesquely on plates and bleed from their orifices, hideous mockeries of life. Elevator doors open and close as if they are being pushed manually, and they slam shut begrudgingly. Even contrivances as basic as pencils are created using human brains as erasers, a metaphor for the destruction of the human imagination by technology created for the sake of mindless convenience.

The infamous, gory “eraser head” scene deserves particular recognition, because it is the only moment in the film when something happens that we are allowed to predict. A boy runs into a pencil shop holding a decapitated head, and the clerk at the front desk rings a service bell. We foresee that someone will answer the bell, and this realization comes like an alien experience in a film in which unrelated images are tossed at us with calculated incoherence. The scene’s payoff, when the head is sawed open and brain matter is used to make erasers, couldn’t have been predicted, but for a brief moment when we listen to the service bell ring, we are allowed to assume that it will summon someone who will come through the back door behind the desk. It’s the notable exception to the film’s rule of randomness; it suggests that if human progress destroys us unsystematically, we can at least be assured that when the entrepreneurship bell rings, an opportunist will always rush to its aid, ready to drain man of his mind.

We should also consider the hideous baby, who obviously symbolizes the repugnancy of man’s greatest achievement—the creation and nurturing of new life. All of our technological progress is measured against our offspring’s ability to evolve with it; 2001 believed this too, and it also ended with images of an unusual infant, though it was an angelic force looking hopefully over the earth. Lynch’s baby is the anti-Star Child—a creature that serves the same purpose but refuses to represent our progress as a thing of beauty. In one of the film’s most unnerving scenes, the baby laughs quietly to itself, seemingly at Harry’s inability to untangle himself from his own monotony. This moment serves the same purpose as the Star Child’s thoughtful hover over the globe; unlike the Star Child, Lynch’s Baby clearly isn’t impressed with what he sees. The film’s final sequences, centered on the Baby’s growth to proportions wildly out of control, reveal that our children’s chances against our rapid technological progress are malformed at best and impossible at worst. Lynch not only lacks Kubrick’s optimism, he scorns it.

Lynch also looks disapprovingly as humanity’s obsession with its superiority over the rest of the universe. This superiority is a fantasy, and Lynch constantly reinforces its thin veil that only barely masks reality (reality here, of course, is Herzog’s “deep ocean”). I have already mentioned the bleeding baked chicken, which dances sardonically at humans who would pretend that devouring it is anything less than inherent brutality. More crucial are the dreams in which a deformed woman standing shyly on a dimly-lit stage sings simplistic lyrics about how “in Heaven, everything is fine.” The sequence immediately brings to mind the similar, overblown “Christmas in Heaven” musical number in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, as both deride the simplicity of the human perception of the Afterlife (streets of gold and seventy-one virgins do see rather humdrum, don’t they?), though Lynch’s interpretation is far more dark and angry. Python implies that our invention of a banal Heaven derives from our superficiality; Lynch probes deeper and suggests that Heaven is our scapegoat, our desperate plea for purpose that keeps us from recognizing and correctly dealing with the callous truths of existence. After all, we cannot clean the worms on our apartment floor if we have our minds turned to the Afterlife. Thus, our dreams of heaven turn just as repulsive as authenticity. Pascal’s Wager is reduced to a grotesque image of a misshapen chorus girl.

My earlier Herzog references are appropriate, as Lynch is openly a huge admirer of Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small, which bears some notable similarities with Eraserhead—namely in its non-linear structure and the stark, black-and-white images of dreamlike nonsense. That film dealt with several dwarves’ takeover of a mental institution, and it chronicled the careful deconstruction of civilization as the little people lost more and more control. Herzog eventually ended the picture with cannibalistic chickens and a car driving itself in a circle in the center of the hospital. One cannot help but wonder as we watch Herzog’s absurd opus whether or not this childish chaos is how God sees humanity. Eraserhead expands upon this idea by book-ending with images of a god-like observer holding a lever—listed in the credits as “The Man in the Planet”—and makes him no less monstrous than the world that he watches over. He sits attentively like the Thinking Man, but his eyes are indifferent, and his appearance is as hideous as that of the Baby or the heavenly chorus girl. So this is Lynch’s God, and his interpretation begs the question: Are we created in God’s image, or is God created in ours? The answer, as Henry’s world descends into hallucinogenic hell, leads to another question that one-ups the previous query: If the universe is as grotesque as Lynch suggests, what’s the difference between a god-made man and a man-made god? Neither scenario stops us from inventing fantasies to help us deal with our unfortunate veracity. This is a conclusion that would horrify the universe of 2001, which was above all else benevolent even as it kept humanity at an arm’s distance.

Readers familiar with Eraserhead are no doubt shaking their heads at many of my readings of the film’s murky text. And that’s fair—God knows I’ve found myself shaking my head at various other interpretations. It’s frankly a difficult film to read, and because it is such a compelling act of pure symbolism, interpretations will be wide and conflicting. The common reading found in most academic work has seen Eraserhead as primarily a reflection of sex (Richard Scheib has a good write-up of this reading over at the SF, Horror, and Fantasy Film Review website). I grant such a reading—the Baby certainly reflects the consequences of procreation, and the reappearing sperm-like creatures who are constantly trampled on throughout add to this case—but only to a point. Lynch is clearly working on multiple levels here; the cascading, towering buildings, the brain-eating pencil machine, the dancing baked chicken, and the heavenly chorus girl certainly provoke ideas that reflect synthetic creation over natural birth. To toss out these images with the simplistic sexual reading undermines the complexity of Lynch’s whole puzzle and only focuses on a few of its hazy (albeit essential) pieces.

I also think that we must take Lynch’s fascination with Herzog’s Dwarves and Kubrick’s alleged appreciation for Eraserhead into account, because they indicate that Lynch was channeling both of these quirky filmmakers. A scene later in the film is one that would have fit just fine in either of those directors’ body of work: Henry and the woman next door make love, and Henry’s bed turns into a swampy abyss that they slowly sink into as they embrace. The moment is as bizarre and cryptic as anything in the third act of Kubrick’s 2001 (not to mention his oversexed A Clockwork Orange), and it coincides closely with Herzog’s own obsession with man drowning in his own blunted purpose. The fact that Eraserhead is so thematically similar to 2001 and visually drawn to Dwarves, and that many of their images could be interchangeable, more than suggests a marriage between the pictures. I’m not sure that this information will lead to a definitive reading of Eraserhead, but it does reveal insight into Lynch’s own mind, and it indicates, in a world of Henry Spence’s monotony and sickening babies, who among us aren’t having their brains turned into pencils. Watch all the films together, and you might get three famously impenetrable pictures turned into one, gigantic picture that’s nearly attainable. Nearly.

Cast:
John Nance: Henry Spence
Laurel Near: Girl in the Radiator
Judith Roberts: Girl Across the Hall
Charlotte Stewart: Mary X
Allen Joseph: Mr. X
Jeanne Bates: Mrs. X
Jack Fisk: Man in the Planet

American Film Institute presents a Libra Films production. Written and directed by David Lynch. No M.P.A.A. rating, but contains horrific and grotesque images that would most certainly be too disturbing for young children. Running time: 108 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: September 28, 1977.