Eraserhead (1977). Written and directed by David Lynch. Starring Jack Nance and Charlotte Stewart.
We’ll get to that awful little baby-thing in a moment. First, we’re going to start with an art history lesson.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, artists across the Western world, especially in Western Europe, were observing and reacting to changes in the world around them. There have been and continue to be countless ways to describe the reasons for the artistic evolution happening at the time, but what it all boils down to is a bunch of people looking at the world, the people in it, and the relationships between them, and thinking, “Wow, that shit is fucked up.”
Art historians call this Modernism: a movement in literature, visual arts, and music that deliberately pushed back against the morals and conventions of the time. All movements in the arts push against the conventions of what came before them. That’s how art evolves. What the Modernists were working against specifically was the feeling of being bound to tradition, moralism, and oppressive objectivity. In literature this looked like the prose of James Joyce and Franz Kafka, or the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. In music, it sounded like the works of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. In the visual arts, it looked like the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse.
Film occupies a curious place in this history, because filmmaking as both a technology and an art form were born right at the end of the 19th century. Film didn’t have a past to push back against. Cinema, in terms of the cultural and commercial experience of public film screenings, barely even existed before the turn of the century. And the world’s first commercially screened film was firmly realistic. Louis and Auguste Lumière’s La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, 1895), which is less than a minute long, is exactly what the title implies: footage of workers leaving the Lumière family factory.
But film, as an artistic medium, spent barely a hot minute loitering in the realm of realism before it branched out and immediately began impacting and being impacted by the artistic environment of the time. As soon as filmmakers discovered how they could use the medium to play visual tricks and create impossible scenes, that’s what they started doing. When I first launched this film club, I wrote a bit about Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902), which presents a satirical take on a group of astronomers traveling to the moon. The fantastical absurdity of the film pokes fun at the stereotype of stuffy natural philosophers and gentleman explorers. It would be a little while before filmmaking became more aligned with the general sensibilities and philosophy of Modernism—we’ve already seen some of that—but the feeling of shaking off the rigidity of the past was there from the start.
If artists and writers were already feeling shaken up by the changing world at the dawn of the 20th century, that feeling was about to get a whole lot more intense with the advent of World War I. One reaction to the war was the development of Dada, or Dadaism, an artistic movement that took the anti-tradition, anti-establishment sentiments of the time and turned them up to eleven. Dadaism was firmly leftist in politics—eventually anarchist—and based on the idea that if rationality, logic, and capitalism had led to violence and war, then protest should come in the form of work created from nonsense and irrationality, breaking all rules of what art is expected to do and how people react to it. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s performance art, Hannah Höch’s political photomontages—this is what came out of the Dada movement.
One of the people intrigued by Dadaism was young French writer André Breton, who spent part of WWI working as a medic in a psychiatric hospital for traumatized soldiers and was, understandably, horrified by the experience. There had to be a better way to live, Breton thought, one that would not let the world spiral into widespread destruction again. In the early 1920s, Breton and other writers began combining the anti-establishment politics and approach of Dadaism with psychological ideas from Sigmund Freud, and in 1924 Breton published the first of many Surrealist Manifestos and launched the Surrealist movement.
Surrealism, as Breton conceived it, was a variation on the theme of Dadaism, with an added dose of psychology. If cultural devotion to reason, logic, and control had led the world into the horrors of WWI, the way to counter that and prevent future horrors was to embrace the illogical and irrational present in the unconscious mind—or at least, the unconscious mind as young European men obsessed with Freud’s work in the 1920s understood it.
It was in 1929 that the Surrealist movement gained its most well-known member in the form of 25-year-old Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, whose work is now basically synonymous with surrealism and whose drippy clocks we all had hanging on our college dorm room walls at some point. But it wasn’t a painting that brought Dalí into the fold—it was a film that he made with Luis Buñuel, who at the time was a first-time filmmaker but would eventually become one of the true legends of cinema.
Even if you haven’t seen Un Chien Andalou (French: An Andalusian Dog, 1929), you’ve probably at least heard about its infamous first scene, in which a razor blade slices an eyeball. That scene came from a dream Buñuel had, whereas the later scenes of ants swarming out of a hole in a man’s hand came from a dream of Dalí’s. They combined those two dreams and built a film around them with one guideline: in Buñuel’s words, “No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.”
Un Chien Andalou is only sixteen minutes long and it’s well worth watching. It’s a nonlinear sequence of dreamlike free association, a series of scenes that form no cohesive narrative. Buñuel and Dalí wanted the film to be uncomfortable and off-putting. They wanted the audience to come away from it not understanding any obvious symbolism or meaning. The audience at the film’s premiere in Paris included Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as André Breton and his Surrealist friends. And this group, of course, loved the film; the positive reception launched both Buñuel and Dalí out of obscurity as struggling twenty-somethings and into world-changing artistic fame.
Surrealism evolved, as all things do, and its influence changed and spread over time. There aren’t a whole lot of films like Un Chien Andalou, that embrace the surreal so thoroughly that they resist any attempt at narrative, but many films that followed it use elements of surrealism within the context of a narrative. These days when we describe a work of art as surreal, we are mostly referring to an irrational, dreamlike quality—but the word still retains an element of its Freudian roots, because there is often a belief that the irrational, dreamlike qualities of a work of art can be psychoanalyzed and understood in rational, mundane ways. Surrealist art also retains aspects of the movement’s political roots as well, as it is often used as a way of exploring dark, troubling aspects of human nature and society.
That’s where David Lynch and Eraserhead (1977) come in. Lynch once said that he had never watched the films of Luis Buñuel, but he cited inspiration from filmmakers who did, most notably Federico Fellini and Alfred Hitchcock—who are, of course, two of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Influence across cultures and generations is a complex and ever-changing thing, and film is a medium that came of age during a time when all kinds of artists were looking for better, more interesting, more intuitive ways to say what they wanted to say.
Here’s the thing about Eraserhead: everybody and their sister has already written in great and exhaustive detail about the movie’s production. It’s such a well-known story that I feel a bit silly even getting into it when so many others—including Lynch himself —tell the story so well. Leah Schnelbach recently wrote about the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016), which is just one example. There is also the film Eraserhead Stories (2001), produced by Lynch himself. In print there is Kenneth George Godwin’s 2020 book about the making of the film, as well as the interviews conducted by Chris Rodley for his 1997 book Lynch on Lynch, some of which have been excerpted on the Criterion website, and so much more. There are piles upon piles of books, interviews, and documentaries out there, covering every possible angle.
So it might not be necessary, all things considered, but I’ll talk a bit about the production of Eraserhead anyway, because it is a great story. It’s a great story about art and it’s a great Hollywood story. For all that critics loved to refer to David Lynch as a Hollywood outsider, both during his life and in recent obituaries, he and the people around him never really seemed to agree with that. (A true Hollywood outsider would not—could not—make a movie like Mulholland Drive, but we’ll get to that in a few weeks.)
It was 1970, and Lynch was a twenty-something art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He developed an interest in filmmaking as an artistic medium. Luckily for him, the United States government had also recently developed an interest in filmmaking as an artistic medium; just a few years prior, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had mandated the establishment of the American Film Institute, for the purpose of preserving America’s films and educating future filmmakers. The AFI Conservatory, the institute’s graduate film school, was founded in 1969, with Terrence Malick and Paul Schrader among its first class of students.
Lynch moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1970 to join the newly-created AFI, but he almost dropped out in frustration. He decided to stay when AFI dean and instructor Frank Daniel—the man who essentially set the standard for how screenwriting is taught—encouraged Lynch to stay and, vitally, offered him money to make the film he wanted to make.
That film was Eraserhead. Lynch would spend the next five years making the movie. At the time, the AFI was housed in the Greystone Mansion, a glorious Tudor Revival property with a very tragic and well-known past, as well as enduring fame as one of the most recognizable movie sets in Hollywood history. In the 1970s, nobody at AFI was using the estate’s dilapidated old stables, so Lynch essentially claimed them as his own personal movie studio. He sometimes lived there as well, sleeping in the same room that served as Henry Spencer’s apartment in the film, without the institute knowing. As Lynch tells it, AFI in those days was chaotic and disorganized, so he had free rein to pretty much do what he wanted.
Eraserhead took five years to produce, in large part because Lynch kept running out of money. His childhood friend Jack Fisk (the production designer behind many of Terrence Malick’s films, as well as many of Lynch’s movies and many others) and Fisk’s wife Sissy Spacek (who is, well, Sissy Spacek, and needs no introduction) provided a lot of the funding. Lynch also picked up a paper route delivering The Wall Street Journal to earn money. Catherine Coulson, wife of lead actor Jack Nance, contributed a lot of funding and production work on set, including as a camera operator; it was during the making of Eraserhead that Lynch began joking around about writing a television show in which Coulson would play a woman taking care of a log as though it were her child. That joke premise would later evolve into Coulson’s iconic role as the Log Lady on Twin Peaks.
It’s a remarkable achievement that Eraserhead doesn’t look or sound like a student film made in a barn over the course of five years with scraped-together equipment, scavenged materials, and money from a paper route. The artful, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography looks fantastic, using light and shadow to keep the audience on edge for every second of its running time; the film uses deep shadows in a truly unsettling way, such as in those scenes when we know there is something off in Henry’s room but can’t quite discern what it is. The cinematography is the work of two men. When the first director of photography, Herbert Cardwell, had to leave the production for financial reasons, he was seamlessly replaced by Frederick Elmes, who was also attending AFI at the time. Elmes would go on to work on Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990), as well as Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997), Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), and many of Jim Jarmusch’s films.
Lynch famously refused to ever say how he created the prop baby. Watch and read enough interviews and you get the impression that he found people’s obsession with the baby’s creation amusing, and his refusal to explain it both an inside joke and the natural continuation of the role the baby plays in the film. It exists to horrify and unsettle, so any explication of how it came about would lessen the impact. It worked, too; for decades there have been lurid rumors about how that baby was created that have only added to the film’s notoriety.
I could talk about Eraserhead’s visuals all day, but I also want to mention an aspect of the production that elevates the film to its legendary status, and that’s the sound design. There isn’t really a distinction between soundtrack and sound design in this film. Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet worked together to create the film’s soundscape more or less from scratch, using what materials they had on hand in their makeshift studio. There are musical elements in the Lady in the Radiator’s song “In Heaven” and in Splet’s renditions of organ music composed by American jazz musician Fats Waller. (Fun fact: Fats Waller is the musician who was once kidnapped off the streets to play the piano as a surprise guest at Al Capone’s birthday.)
But for the most part, the soundtrack of Eraserhead sits firmly in the realm of the uneasily ambient and gratingly industrial. Lynch and Splet were inspired by the atmosphere of the struggling, post-industrial Philadelphia where they met and first began working together on the short film The Grandmother. Both men moved to Los Angeles in 1970, Splet to head up the sound department at AFI and Lynch to become a student. There’s a video interview from The Paris Review in which Lynch talks about their collaboration through the years, including how they met and their work on Eraserhead—and the anecdote about how they got all of the magnetic recording tape they needed for their film by salvaging scraps at the Warner Brothers studio lot.
In an interview with author Chris Rodley, Lynch described the world he wanted to create in Eraserhead: “In my mind, it was a world between a factory and a factory neighborhood. A little, unknown, twisted, almost silent lost spot where little details and little torments existed. And people were struggling in darkness.” That was the guiding principle behind the sound design: worn-down machinery, failing industrialism, a crumbling world.
One place where this approach is particularly noticeable is when Henry (Jack Nance) first approaches Mary’s (Charlotte Stewart) house for dinner. Their conversation on the doorstep is accompanied by the constant, overwhelming noise of steam and machinery coming from behind a grate right next to the front door. It’s so very annoying. You can’t imagine why anybody would live there. You want to shout at them to get inside so they can hear each other properly. But this is their world. The sound of heavy machinery is always present, no matter what intimate or awkward moments it is intruding upon.
And, of course, nothing is better inside, because there is very little separation between inside and outside. The visual tone and lighting are all the same, and the soundscape is just as uncomfortable. The organic sounds are often even worse than the industrial sounds. The whining of the puppies at Mary’s house that at first sounds like a hiss, then a whisper, then a constant and inescapable sucking noise. Then there are the squelches and the splats, the layers of voices, music, and footsteps in the background that surround Henry’s apartment.
And the baby’s incessant cries. Those incessant cries! Once you hear them, you never forget them.
From the visuals to the sound to the squelchy practical effects, everything about Eraserhead is designed to make the audience uncomfortable—and that includes Nance’s performance as Henry. It is one of film history’s more notable defining roles for a lead actor, and not just because his amazing hair deserves its own star billing. Nance would go on to have a very troubled life, which would include the suicide of his second wife, a long struggle with alcoholism, and his own violent death in 1996. I don’t know if he ever spoke about how he felt about being tied so closely to a singular performance—but what a performance it is. Nance plays Henry with a wide-eyed passivity that would feel more at home in a slapstick comedy from an earlier era, perhaps a Charlie Chaplin film or a Laurel and Hardy sketch. In the world of Eraserhead, that bumbling awkwardness is one more deeply unsettling element in a film filled with them. We want Henry to react differently to all the strange and terrible things happening around him, and every time something makes our skin crawl while he does no more than stare, we feel a little more off-kilter.
The overall effect is tremendous. By the time Henry’s head pops off and gets turned into erasers, we’re also staring with wide eyes and absolutely no idea how to respond.
Unlike the earliest surrealist films, Eraserhead does have a narrative. It’s even a pretty straightforward narrative: a young couple have a child, the child is not what they expect, and they both deal with it poorly. Also a man’s head gets turned into erasers and there’s a woman squashing on overly large sperm while singing about heaven on a stage inside the radiator. But the point is, the surreal, dreamlike elements of the story are woven into and around that narrative. Lynch spoke about being inspired by the writings of Franz Kafka and the films of Federico Fellini, both known for blending the mundanities of life with the weird and fantastical. There is nothing more mundane than a story about a young couple in a factory city struggling after the birth of their child. There is no weirder way of telling that story than Eraserhead.
Because it is full of weird imagery, and because it is deliberately unsettling, and because there are literal giant sperm falling out of the ceiling at one point, audiences have been flexing their Freudian analysis skills on Eraserhead since it was first released. The most frequent and confident interpretation is that it’s the cinematic expression of Lynch’s own anxieties about fatherhood. In fact, there are countless articles that state that Lynch’s daughter, director Jennifer Lynch, was the inspiration for the Eraserhead baby, but all I can really find (in an admittedly incomplete search) are interviews where she acknowledges that she knows people believe that.
As with so many other things, Lynch himself always came across as more amused than anything else by the idea that people thought they could interpret the film with any confidence or in any universal way. In those interviews with Chris Rodley he said, “Certain things are just so beautiful to me, and I don’t know why. Certain things make so much sense, and it’s hard to explain. I felt Eraserhead, I didn’t think it. It was a quiet process, going from inside me to the screen.”
Eraserhead premiered at midnight at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 1977, after having been rejected by the Cannes and New York festivals. It was dismissively panned by Variety, but even before that happened Lynch was already re-editing the film to cut and rearrange several scenes. In spite of the unpromising premiere, the film caught the eye of distributor Ben Barenholtz.
Prior to working as a film distributor, Barenholtz had owned the Elgin Cinema in New York, where he had built a reputation for reviving Hollywood classics, showcasing up-and-coming talent, and showing experimental films that other theaters were reluctant to touch. One film shown at the Elgin was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, an abundantly bizarre surrealist Western. Barenholtz was fascinated by El Topo and he used it as the inaugural film of what would become known as the “Midnight Movies,” or odd, unusual, experimental, and decidedly not mainstream films that were shown at midnight. Another midnight movie given a home at the Elgin was John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, which should give you an idea just how far outside of the mainstream we’re talking about.
So Barenholtz was exactly the right person to notice Eraserhead. He was the one responsible for getting it into arthouse theaters across the country, where it enjoyed a good long run and found genuine financial success. That was how audiences saw the film for a few years—small theaters, late at night—until it was released on VHS in 1982, when it began its long and fruitful life as the movie cinephiles would pass around to their friends with the gleeful promise, “This movie will fuck you up.”
I don’t know that I have much to contribute to the never-ending discussion about what Eraserhead means, because my experience of watching it can basically be summed up by Lynch’s description of making it: it’s not so much about thinking as it is about feeling. This is one of the most uncomfortable films I’ve ever watched—and I mean that as an awed superlative, not a criticism. Everything we see and hear in the film makes me uncomfortable, and I love that. It hits right on what the original surrealists were seeking a century ago: a way of acknowledging and exploring a fundamental wrongness we can feel in the world, without being tied down by what is rational or logical.
Eraserhead was not my introduction to Lynch’s work. For me, and for a lot of people who were coming of age in the 1990s, the more memorable introduction was Twin Peaks, which hit primetime American television like a wrecking ball, letting everyone stumble into the ’90s with the reassurance that things really are as weird and dark and unsettling as they seem. We’ll talk more about that in a couple of weeks, but I just want to note here how Eraserhead is, in so many ways, the most naked and unvarnished of Lynch’s many variations on that theme. There is no normalcy hiding the weird and the upsetting. Lynch would go on to find infinitely creative and affecting ways to show that there is all too often something deeply wrong, something rotten, just beneath the surface of ordinary lives, but Eraserhead is all the wrongness, right there on screen, impossible to escape.
I hope people still recommend Eraserhead to their friends with the promise, “This movie will fuck you up.” I hope that’s how people recommend it well into the distant future. Because, hey, this movie will fuck you up. And that’s wonderful.
What do you think of Eraserhead? Feelings, interpretations, reactions? Fear and loathing in the radiator theater? Memories from when you first saw it? Thoughts on parenthood? What I’ve learned from reading about this movie is that there is no predicting what people will take away from it.
Next week: David Lynch may have disowned Dune (1984), but Frank Herbert liked it and sci fi fans will never let it go. Watch it on Max, Amazon, Apple, Fandango, or Spectrum.
