Viking Night: Eraserhead
By Bruce Hall
March 29, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

One is the loneliest number.
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

In the very first column, I think I made a little joke about David Lynch. At the time, you may have been led to believe that I don’t like the guy. Truth be told, it’s nothing personal. It’s not Lynch that I can’t stand; it’s the way his movies make me feel that I hate. Let me put it into perspective. When I was in college studying music, my studies brought me to a composer named Arnold Schoenberg. He’s best known for atonal music, which is difficult to listen to because it has no tonal center. Writing that kind of music is a very intellectual exercise that feels more like designing a submarine than writing a song. And on a piano, the material sounds like a couple of kittens wrestling across the keyboard. In my head I think I understand how it all works and I appreciate the effort that went into creating it. But I’m sorry; to my ears it just sounds like cats on a piano.

So it is with David Lynch, but the problem is probably me, not him. Lynch might be the most subversive and original filmmaker alive, but most of his projects are acts of deep personal catharsis that I am not keen to experience in a room full of other people. He’s a guy with a lot of raw things inside, he’s not afraid to get them out on screen and he’s damn good at what he does. Yet like the musician I’ve compared him to, he has had a hard time getting the mainstream world to accept his way of doing things. But Lynch isn’t that kind of a director, and I doubt he’d be happy with that kind of success.

That’s the irony of getting working your problems out through art. It’s the best way in the world to organize your thoughts, but if you want to do it for a living other people have to like it too and that’s not an easy balance. It’s a double edged sword, but it comes with the territory. Every artist faces this sooner or later, and David Lynch did with his first feature, Eraserhead.

In this film, dialogue tends to be secondary to the weight of emotion and the force of ideas, each represented by raw, often repulsive imagery. Shadow is as important as light, but when you do see light it’s usually directing your attention to something. Sound is as important as music but when you do hear music its purpose is to contribute to the film’s haunting, dreamlike narrative. Simply put, Eraserhead is an incredibly disturbing yet fascinating look into one man’s paranoia as he comes to terms with intimacy and fatherhood. On paper that looks simple, but the subject matter deals with the sort of primal emotional states everyone feels but nobody likes to talk about. In Western cinema, using surrealism as a tool to explore these kinds of things fell out of favor shortly after the Great Depression, and that’s probably why it’s so jarring when you see it today.

The focus of Eraserhead is Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a meek, socially awkward man who drags his feet and speaks with an indistinct mumble. We first meet him as he stumbles down the street, on the way home with a bag of groceries. As he shuffles along through a series of decrepit, abandoned factories and storefronts, the film’s bleak urban setting quickly establishes itself as the primary backdrop. And with his rumpled black suit and sky high haircut, Henry himself comes across as a tragic combination of Cosmo Kramer and Elwood Blues.

If his unfortunate appearance and the decaying post industrial wasteland around him weren’t depressing enough, Henry lives in a decomposing tenement that looks like something out of an H.R. Geiger painting. There, he is roommates with a constantly hissing radiator, a brick wall for a view and a battered array of mismatched furniture that would have been out of date in 1940. There are clumps of earth and grass cuttings all over the place and his nightstand is adorned with a dead tree, haphazardly hunched over a miserable looking pile of dry soil.

Henry is a paranoid, vaguely unpleasant man whose very existence seems to be an, endless parade of hypnagogic despondency. And because this misery is so organically woven into the movie the viewer can’t help but share it. Lynch’s most notable films excel at this process, filling you with a creeping sense of dread but somehow leaving you unable to look away. You don’t watch these movies so much as they just force their way into your head, like a blood curdling bad dream. Lynch also has an unparalleled eye for framing a shot in a way that looks simple at first, but if you pause to look closely the image conveys worlds of meaning. I can think offhand of six or seven still shots from this movie that are suitable for framing, no doubt to be displayed in the darkest nether regions of Stephen King’s most vivid nightmares.

Miserable or not, Henry’s life is at least predictable, until an old flame named Mary (Charlotte Stewart) calls up to invite him to dinner with her family. Thinking she’s interested in reconciliation, Henry accepts. Once introduced to Mary’s bizarre relatives, Henry is informed that his former love has given birth to his child, and that he is expected to marry her and provide for his new family. Henry seems more unable than unwilling to resist, as the whole situation seems to overwhelm him.

The remainder of the film explores the abject horror he feels at the prospect of being forever tethered to a responsibility he doesn’t feel equipped to handle. The "baby" is a deformed, fleshy little thing wrapped in gauze bandages and constantly mewling with the most uncanny, spine tingling little voice. The sound effect used for the baby’s vocalizations alone is enough to give you nightmares, but things quickly go from bad to worse. Once Mary and the tot move in with Henry, the pressure is too much for them. She eventually abandons them, leaving her terrified spouse alone to deal with their unholy offspring and his own increasingly horrifying thoughts.

If the first half of Eraserhead was merely unsettling, the second half is about the closest thing to a waking nightmare that you’ll ever experience. Henry is completely appalled at the idea of parenthood, and as difficult as it is for him to form relationships with adults, it’s even that much harder with an infant. The hopelessness and disorder that engulf his mind manifest themselves in bizarre hallucinations and dreams that are as difficult for viewers to watch as they are for Henry to endure. Here is where the surrealist ambitions of Eraserhead work to perfection and the results will either leave you inspired and amazed, or they’ll make you want to take the movie out of the DVD player, smash it, burn it, bury the ashes and call in a priest to banish it to hell.

Any new parent experiences fear and uncertainty as they embark on one of life’s greatest challenges. But for many this fear generates the sort of emotional suffering that usually only afflicts people in Greek mythology and Eraserhead successfully compresses that feeling into an 85 minute battering ram of dread.

This bears repeating: Eraserhead contains the black hideous torment of a thousand nightmares in every frame, and there are few movies you’ll ever see that do a better job of making that so tangible. The film’s imagery quietly pounds at your psyche from the word go. Gnarled trees, twisted pipes, clumps of dirt and shafts of light piercing seas of barren blackness are only occasionally interrupted by gooey giant wiggly things, dancing maggots, and babies so hideous their own mothers don’t love them. The soundtrack is a mash-up of industrial noises, home made effects and eerily disturbing music pushed through a reverb and cut with filters until all that remains is a ghost.

Exposure to David Lynch usually leaves you feeling like you’ve been somewhere else, and I think that may be why so many very odd people love his work. There’s an artistry to his films that make you feel engaged when you don’t want to be, and make you watch even though you’d prefer to look away. It’s not something I enjoy experiencing, but if the purpose of a movie is to take you someplace that you’ve never been before, it’s hard to argue that Lynch isn’t a gifted man.

Eraserhead is the sort of film I’d only recommend to people who consider themselves students of cinema, or anyone who enjoys being challenged by their entertainment. The purpose of this movie is not to charm you, and it isn’t even interested in scaring you. Eraserhead is the process of one man exorcising some very powerful demons, tearing a page from a diary written in ink from his own soul and splashed onto the screen in a way that forces you to share his terror. It’s amazing, provocative, disgusting, confusing, and everything in between. Whether you like it or not, it is indisputably a true work of art but whether you consider that a gift or a form of torture is up to you. Personally, I consider it both. It’s not exactly cats on a piano, but it’s not something I want to go through on a regular basis, either. On the other hand, the music of Arnold Schoenberg I definitely consider a form of torture. Call me unsophisticated if you want.