The following notes on Eraserhead were written by Pate Duncan, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. A 35mm print of Eraserhead will screen at the Cinematheque’s regular space, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Friday, October 10 at 7 p.m. Admission is free!
By Pate Duncan
“I felt Eraserhead, I didn’t think it,” said David Lynch of his 1977 feature film debut, a nightmarish post-industrial body horror by way of American film noir. The film features a frightened man, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), and his wife Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) as they prepare for parenthood in an environment full of snakelike pipes and menacing sounds. Unsure that their baby is in fact a baby, the film follows Henry as he comes to terms with parenting a monstrous infant as a timid, reluctant father. Throughout, Henry is confronted by oddities that would become characteristic of Lynch’s sui generis style: tiny chickens that move and leak fluids on their dinner plates, a strange woman in his radiator (Laurel Near), falling spermatozoa that squish into white fluid as they hit the floor, a seductive neighbor down the hall (Judith Roberts), and improper affective responses from every character in the film, giving it its dreamlike quality. As such, any viewer of the film will certainly follow Lynch in this feeling-over-thinking sentiment. Lynch even referred to Eraserhead as his “most spiritual film”: he began practicing Transcendental Meditation during the film’s production, and in interviews has made note of (and withheld) a verse of biblical scripture that, for him, sums up the film.
No discussion of David Lynch’s filmmaking would be complete without an excursus on the late American surrealist’s origin story. Hailing from Missoula, Montana and steeped in a kind of 1950s gee-wiz affect, Lynch has spoken at length of uncanny childhood experiences within that suburban milieu—most famously, the appearance of an injured nude woman coming down the street one night—that many critics have linked to his vision of a constitutive negativity at the heart of midcentury American ideology and aesthetics. From there, Lynch eventually moved to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The city and the school both left indelible marks on Lynch’s artistry: the period saw white flight, clashes of racial and ethnic groups, and 1960s political and countercultural strife quite different from the Norman Rockwell suburban imaginary of Lynch’s earlier years, while the school exposed Lynch to the work of Francis Bacon and prompted his exploration of a variety of artistic media. His earliest works in painting, sculpture, and film evince an emphasis on materiality, texture, and tenebrist darkness that would persist in his feature filmmaking career. It was here where Lynch made Six Men Getting Six (1967), a looping projection and sculpture installation which does exactly what it says on the tin. Scholar Eugenie Brinkema notes that in this film and in Lynch’s other work, “the human form is reduced to esophageal length and stomach… Six Figures Getting Sick is, then, neither about men sickened nor a presentation of vomit as trope, theme, or narrative occurrence—it is the sickness of and on form.” For as symbolic as Lynch’s work might seem, even in this early juncture in his career, his oeuvre also seems to emphasize form in ways that are difficult to reduce to a kind of clean allegorical interpretation.
Eraserhead’s notoriously difficult production spanned about six years of exceedingly thoughtful and collaborative work, much of which took place over nocturnal shoots in the stables of the American Film Institute. The film was born from an initial treatment called Gardenback, sharing its name with one of Lynch’s earlier paintings. This close collaboration paired Lynch with a loyal cast and crew that would persist throughout his career: cinematographer Fredrick Elmes went on to shoot Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990), assistant director Catherine E. Coulson would go on to play the beloved Margaret Lanterman (better known as the Log Lady) in Twin Peaks, and Alan Splet’s sound design with Lynch would become characteristic of their later work together. The film features legendary production designer Jack Fisk as the Man in the Planet, and Fisk and his then-wife Sissy Spacek helped finance Eraserhead through fallow periods in its production. The film’s production design is noted for its impressive effects and their unconventional sources. Production manager Doreen Small noted that the film used real umbilical cords sourced from hospitals in the area (Lynch would also use actual human brains for a climactic death scene in Blue Velvet). Most striking, though, is the prop for the baby in the film. As Lynch’s biographer Kristine McKenna notes, Lynch has “never disclosed how he created the baby, nor have any of the cast and crew.” Lynch even lived in the set for Henry’s room for a certain amount of the production.
Lynch and his crew worked on the film for several difficult years before finally finishing in 1977. The film was rejected by the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Festival before finding its audience in the midnight movie circuit, where the film played side-by-side with John Waters’ gross-out comedies and Suzan Pitt’s avant-garde animated films like Asparagus (1979). Essential to its success is the kind of dream-logic that animates its somnambulatory plot, gorgeous high-contrast black-and-white photography, and craftily constructed sound design as a sonic equivalent to its visual emphasis on material textures. And yet, for all of Lynch’s ingenuity, typical auteur appreciations tend to minimize his work’s relationships to other artworks. Lynch showed his crew Sunset Boulevard (1950) before production began, and the film seems to rearticulate film noir’s low-key photography and triangulation of a male protagonist between a femme fatale and a more domesticated “good woman.” Similarly, Eraserhead borrows moments of slapstick physicality from the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the film seems to take its disquieting use of sound effects from the noisy sound gags of Jacques Tati. Pulling from horror, science fiction, noir, and midcentury European cinema, Lynch’s influences—like paints mixing on his palette—are as varied as the tonal register that emerges within the finished film.
Eraserhead has boasted a celebrated status within Lynch’s filmography. Famously reported as Stanley Kubrick’s favorite movie, the film’s aesthetic significance in Lynch’s artistic development—as well as the persistent opacity of the film’s meaning—have made it a significant work for scholars and fans alike to revisit following the director’s passing earlier this year. Lynch extended Eraserhead’s use of high-contrast black-and-white in The Elephant Man (1980); elaborated his use of dreamlike puzzle narratives into the fugue films Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006); and directly quoted the motifs of Eraserhead in his 2017 swan song, 18 more episodes of Twin Peaks. Aligning Lynch’s interests in sound, image, texture, and sensation, Eraserhead alchemizes the artist’s persistent emphasis on materiality into his characteristic vision of transcendental mystery.