Eraserhead (1977)

Official trailer

Henry

Henry Spencer lives alone in a tiny, cluttered room in a decaying industrial city, all smokestacks, hissing pipes, puddles and wasteland. He’s a shy, stiff, painfully polite little man in a suit, with a pocket full of pens and a tower of hair standing straight up on his head, and he looks permanently alarmed, as if the world might hit him at any moment. He’s right.

His girlfriend, Mary, has stopped seeing him. Then her mother invites him to dinner, and Henry learns that Mary has had a baby, possibly premature, and that he’s the father.

They marry, and Mary moves into his room with the baby. The baby is a small, wrapped, bandaged creature with a long neck and a strange, reptilian face, and it cries constantly, a thin, wheezing wail.

David Lynch made Eraserhead over about five years, starting in 1971, on a tiny budget, mostly in the old stables at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. It came out in 1977, and nearly fifty years later, few films have ever been stranger or more unsettling.

Eraserhead disturbs me like almost nothing else on film. I find it hilarious and horrible in the same breath, and I think it’s the purest thing Lynch ever made, a nightmare built by somebody with no interest in pleasing anybody.

The Dinner

The film’s funniest and most disturbing scene is the dinner at Mary’s parents’ house. Her mother is fierce and intrusive, her grandmother sits frozen in the kitchen while someone moves her arms to toss the salad and her father talks about how the neighborhood used to be all fields, grinning a fixed, terrifying grin.

Then, beaming, he asks Henry to carve the chickens, tiny man-made chickens, and when Henry cuts into one, it twitches its legs and blood pours out. Mary’s mother starts having a kind of fit. Then she corners Henry, demands to know whether he’s had sexual relations with her daughter and kisses his neck while he flinches in terror.

It’s absurd, excruciating and hilarious. It captures a very particular horror, the awkwardness of meeting a girlfriend’s family, magnified into a nightmare. Every silence lasts too long, every smile is wrong and poor Henry never knows what’s expected of him. Anyone who’s ever sat through a tense family dinner will recognize the feeling, stretched until it snaps.

The chicken is the moment I’d put in a time capsule. The legs start kicking, the blood wells up, Mary’s mother goes into her fit, and I can never decide whether to laugh out loud or crawl under the table with Henry.

The Baby

The baby is the film’s great mystery. Lynch has never explained how it was made, and nobody who worked on the film will say, even now. It moves, it breathes, it cries and it looks horribly alive, a grotesque, fragile creature wrapped in bandages, and horror has few more memorable creations.

The film is, at heart, about the raw terror of becoming a parent. Henry is overwhelmed by a strange child he doesn’t understand and can’t bring himself to love, and the baby’s constant crying drives Mary to leave him. Alone with it, he’s trapped, sleepless and desperate.

Lynch has said the film reflects his own anxieties when he became a young father in a rough part of Philadelphia, and you can feel that dread in every frame. The monster is incidental. The film is about exactly what it feels like to be responsible for something you can’t cope with.

The Sound

The first thing you notice about Eraserhead, after the images, is the sound. Almost every scene is filled with a deep industrial rumble: hissing steam, grinding machinery, distant wind and a constant low hum. It’s oppressive and hypnotic, and it makes the whole world feel alive, watchful and hostile.

Lynch created it with sound designer Alan Splet, and few soundtracks have been as influential, a precursor to industrial music and ambient horror. Eraserhead is a film you feel vibrating in your chest.

The sound is a big part of why this is a 9 for me. Lynch and Splet built a hum that never lets up, and I’m convinced the film would be half as frightening with the pictures alone and the audio switched off.

The Lady in the Radiator

In his room, Henry stares into his radiator, where a strange little woman with swollen, puffy cheeks performs on a tiny, brightly lit stage. She shuffles back and forth, smiling, stamping on sperm-like worms that fall from above, and sings a song called In Heaven, promising that in heaven, everything is fine.

The song, by Peter Ivers, is eerie and oddly beautiful, and the Lady is among the film’s strangest, most touching images. She seems to offer Henry a sweet escape from all his misery, a heaven where he can finally be at peace. What that peace might cost is the film’s darkest question.

Dreams and Erasers

The title comes from a dream. Henry’s head pops off and rolls into the street, where a boy picks it up and takes it to a pencil factory. There, a worker drills a sample of Henry’s brain and uses it to make eraser tips for pencils, testing them on a notepad and brushing away the shavings.

It’s surreal, funny and deeply disturbing, and it reveals Lynch’s gift for dream logic, the way nightmares make perfect sense while they’re happening. The whole film has that quality: a story that follows rules you can feel but never explain.

A Five-Year Shoot

Eraserhead was made almost by hand. Lynch was a student at the American Film Institute, and the shoot stretched on for years as money ran out and came back.

At one point, he took a paper route to fund it, delivering the Wall Street Journal. Jack Nance, who played Henry, had to keep his towering haircut for much of that time.

The long, patchy shoot shows in the film’s look, and it’s part of its charm. It feels like something made by obsessives, in secret, with no idea whether anybody would ever see it. That devotion is part of why it still feels so alive: nobody made this to please a studio or an audience, and you can tell.

The Midnight Movie

When it came out, Eraserhead found almost no audience. Then it became a midnight movie, playing late-night screenings in New York, Los Angeles and other cities for years, and it slowly built a fierce, devoted cult following. People came back again and again, bringing friends, and it became a rite of passage for adventurous filmgoers.

It launched Lynch’s career. Mel Brooks saw it and hired Lynch to direct The Elephant Man, which earned eight Oscar nominations. Lynch went on to make Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, and many of his obsessions, the hum, the dread, the absurd humor, the strange women singing, are already here.

Jack Nance

Jack Nance’s performance as Henry is a marvel of stillness. He barely speaks, and when he does, it’s in a hesitant, polite murmur. Most of his acting is in his face and body: the startled eyes, the stiff shoulders, the careful way he holds his little paper bag of groceries as if it might explode.

He became part of Lynch’s regular company, turning up in Dune, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, and playing the gentle sawmill man Pete Martell in Twin Peaks. But Henry is the role he’ll always be remembered for. That impossible hair is one of the great images in cult cinema.

Nance is the thing I admire most in the film after the baby. Carrying a whole feature on a startled face and a paper bag of groceries takes a nerve most leading men don’t have, and he never once winks at the audience or asks it to feel sorry for Henry.

The Girl Across the Hall

Across the hall from Henry lives a beautiful, mysterious woman who knocks on his door one night, locked out of her apartment. When Mary leaves, she visits again, and she and Henry sink together into his bed, which becomes a pool of milky liquid as they vanish beneath it.

The scene is tender, erotic and deeply strange. Later, she sees Henry’s baby, and her reaction, and what she’s doing when Henry next sees her, shatters his last hope of comfort. Judith Roberts plays her with a dreamy, knowing air, and she’s another of Lynch’s mysterious women, a figure of longing who can’t save the hero.

A Director’s Director

Eraserhead has always had admirers among filmmakers. Stanley Kubrick reportedly called it one of his favorite films and screened it for the cast and crew of The Shining to put them in the right mood. Countless horror directors since have borrowed its sound, its dread and its grotesque body imagery.

It’s the kind of film that other artists study, and you can see its DNA in everything from industrial music videos to modern arthouse horror.

Hard to Love

Eraserhead is slow, deliberately repetitive and relentlessly bleak, and some viewers find it boring, baffling or simply unpleasant. The baby, in particular, is hard to look at, and the ending is violent and disturbing.

For those who connect with it, it’s a triumph, a pure, uncompromising vision of anxiety and dread, and a debut with few equals in film history. I connect with it completely, and the bleakness that drives some viewers off is the quality I respect most in it.

Craft Note

Is Eraserhead (1977) worth watching?

Eraserhead is a 9 because nothing else looks, sounds or feels like it, and Jack Nance’s Henry, that baby and the endless hum have stayed lodged in my head. The one point it loses is for the slowness. Some of the repetition in the middle tests even my patience, and I’d have trimmed a few of those long stares into the radiator, even knowing that the slowness is part of what makes it pure Lynch.

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