Sean Burns
“Then I got Mary pregnant. And man, that was all she wrote.” – Bruce Springsteen, “The River.”
According to director David Lynch, when the lights came up after the first screening of his 1977 debut feature Eraserhead, an older woman sitting next to the filmmaker’s mother muttered, “I wouldn’t want to have a dream like that.” It’s an amusing anecdote but also applicable to most of the eccentric American surrealist’s body of work, hours of film and television that often feel like you’re having someone else’s nightmare. “We live inside a dream,” was an oft-repeated refrain on Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal Twin Peaks. Most of the time, it’s one from which the characters wish they could wake up.
An untempered blast of sickly comic, black-and-white body horror, Eraserhead is dauntingly abstract in form yet in other ways perhaps the simplest and most emotionally accessible of Lynch’s movies. It’s the story of meek, ineffectual Henry Spencer, portrayed with a stopped waddle and towering coiffure by Jack Nance, who somehow managed to impregnate his girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and spends rest of the film’s 89 minutes in an increasingly claustrophobic chamber of horrors. After being introduced to his new in-laws in a ghoulishly funny family dinner sequence that’s like if Meet the Parents took place in hell, Henry is repulsed to discover that he and Mary’s offspring is a sickly, skinless creature that’s constantly crying.
It’s a ghastly thing, this baby – a damp, gurgling mutant demanding round-the-clock attention. It’s a potential parent’s worst-case-imagining of an ugly, unlovable time-suck taking over every waking moment of your life. Basically, if you’ve ever had a panic attack worrying that you might have accidentally knocked up your girlfriend, Eraserhead is the movie you can’t stop seeing in your head.
Henry lusts after a beautiful girl across the hall (Judith Roberts, billed in the credits as Beautiful Girl Across the Hall) while dreaming about being serenaded by a lady in the radiator (Laurel Near) who stomps on troublemaking spermatozoa while reassuring him that “In heaven, everything is fine.” But it’s not fine here. Especially in the sleep-deprived psychosis of this purgatorial existence with a disgusting child that Will. Not. Stop. Crying. Eventually, Henry does the unthinkable.
Back in the ‘80s, I remember my uncle telling me about seeing a T-shirt for sale in Harvard Square that said, “I Am Eraserhead’s Baby.” Lynch has stubbornly refused to ever reveal what went into creating the prop puppet – speculations range from a lamb fetus to a skinned rabbit – but the director’s daughter Jennifer Chambers Lynch has recalled playing with it on the set, while shooting of the film stretched out for most of her early childhood.
(It’s hard not to worry about what any poor kid would think after watching their father’s grotesque infanticide fantasy, especially since she was an unplanned child born with severely clubbed feet. But since the kid in question grew up to write and direct the playfully perverse Boxing Helena and pen the haunting TV tie-in The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, we can assume she’s made peace with the project, if probably not going so far as to purchase one of those shirts in Harvard Square.)
The screenplay for Eraserhead was 21 pages long, which according to the usual page-a-minute, script-to-screen ratio suggested it would be a 20-minute short, which is how American Film Institute student Lynch originally got approval for the production. Then filming went on for years, tucked away in derelict stables owned by the school, where the skeleton crew became a de facto family. Projection designer Jack Fisk kept things afloat with periodic cash infusions from himself and wife Sissy Spacek. Nance’s wife and future Twin Peaks Log Lady Catherine E. Coulson worked as a camera assistant while cooking meals for the cast and crew. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes would go on to shoot Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart for the director, while sound designer Alan Splet became one of Lynch’s closest collaborators. After filming on Eraserhead finally finished, the two spent more than a year working on the chilling, industrial soundscapes.
Released the same year as blockbusters Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit, Eraserhead had a significantly less conventional release strategy. Ben Barenholtz of Libra Films booked the picture for late shows at New York’s Cinema Village with barely any publicity, insisting that once word of mouth got around there would be lines around the block. He was right. Eraserhead played for years straight on the midnight movie circuit, still screening fairly regularly in major markets. On the A Very Good Year podcast, critic Jordan Hoffman pointed out how the film’s spacey, somnambulist rhythms lend themselves to late night audiences nodding off during the film, drifting in and out of consciousness and feeling like they’ve had the most fucked up dream of their lives. I’ve fallen asleep during midnight screenings of Eraserhead many a time – most recently this past May – and it does curiously enhance the experience. I guess some of us actually do want to have a dream like that. Just so long as we wake up.
“Eraserhead” is streaming on Max and the Criterion Channel.
