I was twenty-one and a half-assed film student when I first watched David Lynch’s cult classic. It was 2001. Back then, Eraserhead—Lynch’s first feature-length film—was so difficult to find in the East Bay suburbs that the only copy I could get my hands on was a LaserDisc from the library at San Francisco State, which is where I watched it between classes. I remember it being an exceedingly bizarre movie, as expected, but I wasn’t swept up by it like I had hoped. Or much disturbed by it.
Seventeen years later, I decided it was high time to re-watch it. I am a far different person now than I was when I first watched it. The obvious difference is that I’m much older now—grizzled even—and seen a lot. And I’m now also fortunate to be the father of a nine-month-old boy. Over the summer, while holding my sleeping son against my chest, I had watched Lynch’s first two seasons of Twin Peaks for the first time. I also re-watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Lynch’s most ghastly, atrocious work that I’ve ever seen) and his terrific unsung film, The Straight Story. Altogether, that was the experience, the new life lens I brought into re-watching Eraserhead late into the night while my wife and our son slept in our bedroom.
Throughout the nearly two-hour-long film, I was continually delighted, surprised and astounded by how much of Lynch’s cinematic language from his latter films was already on full display in his first feature. On one level, that alone deeply entertained me. And as I got swept up in the film, which is basically a surrealist horror film about the fear of fatherhood, I couldn’t help but see how the cinematic elements in Eraserhead would ultimately resurface again and again in Lynch’s latter works. Just look at all the Lynchian elements I spotted in the film’s first hour and six minutes:
• a wild, dream-like narrative with non-sensical story elements like The Man in the Planet, or my favorite from Eraserhead, the testicle-stomping Lady in the Radiator;
• a soundtrack that is inseparable from the visual language of the film featuring ambient sounds, which is a staple of Lynch’s cinema;
• exceptional cinematography;
• a focus on the grotesque;
• surrealistic imagery (I’m thinking of all the sperm-like creatures and visuals in Eraserhead);
• Lynch’s uncanny ability to make common human motions, like massaging one’s eyelids, seem grotesque;
• The zig-zaggy floor pattern in the lobby of Henry’s apartment complex is just like the floor in the iconic Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, which hit TV in 1990;
• Latent sexual overtones and tensions such as all that funny business between Henry and his foxy neighborhood (who looks like a top-shelf version of Sandra Bernhard);
• All the strange, stilted human behavior between characters which has a way of making humans in Lynch’s films often seem mechanical, like robots with periodic character malfunctions (Bill’s unrelenting smile at the dinner table with Henry is a prime example);
• Lynch’s uncanny ability to make seemingly innocuous objects or animals, such as the radiator in Henry’s room, seem ominous (Think of the shot of the mechanical saw in the intro to Twin Peaks, or the shot of the red rose and the white picket fence in the classic opening sequence of Blue Velvet:
• Unusual human behavior like Mary’s seizure-like coughing in the living room scene near the beginning of Eraserhead, which reminded me of the espresso-drinking scene starring Angelo Badalamenti in Mulholland Drive;
• The dark wildness behind the veil of domesticity like Bill’s unveiling before dinner in which he steps from behind the table to rant and show Henry his crooked knees;
• Lynch’s incredible knack for making a seemingly mundane scene, like preparing dinner in the kitchen into an absurd, spirited scene by simply making the grandmother into an essentially lifeless puppet to toss the bowl, then smoke a cigarette all while she stares off like she’s a lifelong hardcore French existentialist;
• Weird dancing! (In Eraserhead, this comes from the Lady in the Radiator. But it’s the exception when a Lynch film or production doesn’t have at least one scene of bizarre dancing. Some classic examples include: the Pabst-Blue-Ribbon-dancing-on-cars scene in Blue Velvet; the Man From Another Place’s jazzy dance in Twin Peaks, or the carnal-yummy-nakedness in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Twin Peaks itself is rife with a bunch of kooky dance sequences.)
• Electrical short circuits! (like when the bulb glitches out in the living room before Mary’s mom tries to make it with Henry);
• Haunting imagery like “the baby” when it suddenly becomes ill;
• Lynch’s fetish with dramatic overtures through singing to push the narrative forward in an emotive manner like the Lady in the Radiator’s singing “In Heaven,” or the song played at the bar in Twin Peaks as a foreboding sign, or the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive.
• Lastly, the scene of Henry in the radiator is just like Agent Cooper in the Black Lodge at the end of the second season of Twin Peaks.
In a way, I can’t help but now see Eraserhead as David Lynch’s core cinematic playbook since it contains so many stylistic elements he would re-use in practically every single one of his subsequent creations. Because of that, Eraserhead is arguably the purest expression of his cinematic vision, which is why it is now my favorite of his films along with Mulholland Drive.
And if you ask me, Eraserhead is the ultimate surrealist horror film of all time. It even creeped me out; after I finished the film, I quietly snuck into our bedroom and slipped into bed. As I tried to fall asleep, I heard our sweet little boy make a teensy whimper like he usually does when he awakens for his early morning feeding. But with the experience of Eraserhead fresh in my mind, I turned toward his crib, much like Henry in the film, my eyes affright, suddenly scared that our baby may whimper through a long, long night. And so, I learned that Eraserhead is probably not the best film to watch when you are either (1) going to have your first baby, or (2) have a baby that is less than a year old.
My revisited verdict: Eraserhead is well worth watching, again and again. If you’ve never seen a David Lynch film, you might as well start here. His iconic cinematic language is already here.
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