Through a Glass Darkly

Eraserhead (1977): In a review of Lost Highway, the Brazilian film critic Bruno Andrade likened Lynch's films to "live television broadcasts of nightmares." By this I think he means that their naive spontaneity – exploding the viewers' assumed rules of genre, realism, narrative causation – doesn't allow the viewer a safe vantage to approach the films from; their disturbing images come from nowhere and vanish without clarification, as if they didn’t have an author carefully assembling them but were an inexorable transmission from someone's tormented unconscious.

This is, pending a viewing of Inland Empire, Lynch's most relentlessly bleak world: a monochromatic sealed chamber of misery, discomfort, and decay. The setting is a rundown industrial district of Philadelphia that possesses only vestiges of humanity (there are, I would say, a total of fifteen living souls seen in the whole film, and at least a third of them I struggle to call "human"). The sheepish protagonist, Henry Spencer, looks as if a science experiment blew up in his face and the shock was frozen into his exterior. He walks through this rusting wasteland on the way from his factory job to his ratty apartment building – the lobby is so deadly empty it feels as though all the air was sucked out into a space vacuum. His letterbox, which he reflexively checks, never has mail. The apartment is laden with needling details of poverty and disuse, so that it never ceases to feel discomforting: the room is cramped, the bed is moth-eaten, the radiator is loud, the space is dotted with mysterious piles of grass and dirt as if all the muck from outside is beginning to creep in. He visits his girlfriend Mary's house – his only companion, although their relationship is estranged – to meet her parents, where it is revealed that Mary has just given birth, even though Henry has not known her long enough for that to be possible. Indeed, this "baby" is not normal at all, and becomes a source of irritation and horror. 

I won’t spoil any more. All of this is to say that Eraserhead is the film of a young man with monstrous anxieties about adulthood: wageslavery, destitution, illness, alienation, loneliness, immobility. Lynch, a child of the 1950s, interpolates many motifs of media from his youth into a corrupted, post-nostalgic form: the aestheticization of the ‘atomic age’ (seen framed on Henry's wall, then re-emerging through the diseased “baby”), the Norman Rockwell vision of domestic life (his meeting with Mary's family), The Twilight Zone (the starlit opening, the black-and-white journalistic profile of an existentially doomed character). 

I think the film lacks the consistent inspiration needed to be really great. It’s constantly uncomfortable, but in ways that are not always artistic. In the middle especially, there are too many shots of gross, squelchy things; too much loud droning; too much colicky squealing hammering on the viewer’s lizard brain. In its good sections, though, Lynch proves an inimitable artist.

Score: 3.5/5