"Dude, what the hell am I watching?"
Words that are so very often associated with David Lynch, one of modern cinema's most creative, imaginative auteurs, and one of my personal idols. The surrealist elements in his movies are incredibly unique, beautifully grotesque and often incomprehensibly weird. But since the beginning of his film career none of his works have quite reached the level of strangeness that is achieved in his first feature length movie, Eraserhead (Except maybe Inland Empire, but I'll talk about that some other time). The plot is hard to explain, because a) there really isn't much of one, it's a very visual film and b) if you haven't seen this movie already you should do yourself a massive favour and watch it so I don't have to even try to explain it.
Basically it's about an average guy named Henry (played by Jack Nance, an actor who appeared in pretty much all of Lynch's work before his death in 1996) who has a weird mutant baby with his girlfriend and then has some really, really weird dreams and stuff happen to him. Honestly, that's the best summary I can come up with. It's nearly impossible to convey the plot of this movie using words, because there basically isn't a coherent, forward moving narrative here.
But don't get me wrong, that's not a bad thing. In fact, quite the opposite. David Lynch describes Eraserhead as "a dream of dark and troubling things", and that's exactly what it is. A dream. Most of the things that happen in this film happen for no reason at all. Strange fluids pour out of things. Mutant babies cry all the time, apparently. There's a chipmunk lady living in Henry's wall heater who likes to sing (what?). Creepy worms float through space. And it goes on and on and on. Calling it a dream is pretty accurate, because anything can and will happen in a person's dream, for no reason at all. And that's one of the reasons Eraserhead works so well, it puts the viewer directly in Henry's tense, paranoid brain, front row center to his surreal, dark and disturbing nightmare. We (the audience) are just as confused and oblivious as he is for most of the movie, it's almost like Lynch put a camera in his head and taped a dream he had.
But while the movie is weird and nonsensical, the interactions Henry has with people and some of the situations he is put in are all too familiar to the average person. Coming home from work, going to his girlfriend's house for dinner, meeting her parents, these are things that normal people can empathize with. But Henry's demeanor is almost always intensely uneasy, he locks up when engaged in conversation, and just seems generally ill at ease all the time. Which makes sense, considering the things that happen to him over the course of the movie. Henry experiences and dreams some really weird stuff, and it's an interesting juxtaposition placed beside the fairly normal, ordinary circumstances that the film opens with.
Another thing that always stands out for me in Eraserhead is the use of audio in the film. There's almost always some kind of background noise in every scene, whether it's a train, random machinery, the howling of wind, a thunderstorm, or a mutant baby screaming, it's almost never entirely quiet. But when it is finally silent, things become really freaky. The viewer gets accustomed to the background noise, and when it's not there the silence kind of tricks your brain into thinking that something really weird or unexpected is going to happen (and it usually does). This is a pretty cool technique.
Overall, Eraserhead is an entirely unique film. It's a surreal string of creative imagery that draws the viewer directly into David Lynch's messed up dream, and it never fails to captivate me, even after several viewings. A lot of people hate it for it's nonsensical plot and "excessive" use of gore but whatever. The bottom line is there is absolutely nothing like it and that in itself makes it a massive success, not to mention the fact that it launched David Lynch's extremely successful film career.
And I think the chipmunk lady was adorable.
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