The Criterion Collection advertises itself as “a series of important contemporary and classic films.” That is an understatement. It’s more accurate to describe Criterion as a moveable museum, containing films from all over the world, preserved in gorgeous detail, unpacked with creator interviews and essays written by film scholars. The folks at Criterion have gathered a community of like-minded individuals who believe that film is art and should be treated as such.
“It’s a perfect film.” ~ David Lynch, talking about his film ERASERHEAD
Mulholland Dr. is one of my favorite films. It is considered by many to be David Lynch’s masterpiece. Roger Ebert placed it in his coveted “Great Movies” list and called it “pure cinema” in his 2001 review of the film. I love Mulholland Dr. for the same reasons I love Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a space odyssey, Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. It’s a film I can guiltlessly get lost in. It is, like the films of Caveh Zahedi, made by someone who loved making it. Every detail is fascinating, even if the film itself doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Every moment feels like a labor of love, kind of like early Shyamalan films (deeply influenced by Lynch in their cinematography). Many of my fellow cinephiles and I have argued over the “meaning” of Lynch master works like Mulholland Dr. and it’s obvious predecessor Blue Velvet, and of course the very popular series Twin Peaks, soon to make a comeback, is always hotly debated among its cult followers. All of the debate, and picking-a-part aside, a Lynch film is not something to explain. It is only to be experienced. If you feel the need to have answers and a straightforward, clean cut plot, Lynch will only serve to frustrate. I love him.
ERASERHEAD is Lynch’s first great film, filmed in black and white on a meager budget in LA in 1977. It is fascinating to listen in on the interviews on the Criterion supplements disc. A thirty-one year old Lynch, with long, shaggy brown hair wearing a tattered old sun hat and dressed in suspenders, a jacket and/or sweater full of wear and holes, and up to three neck ties at a time assembled a small, motley crew of passionate actors, artists, and misfit creatives to work on a passion project that Lynch called “a dream of dark and troubling things.” The catch is, there was no guarantee that anyone of repute would want to screen the film after it was made.
ERASERHEAD has been called a horror film. That’s like calling Blue Velvet a mystery film. It just isn’t so straightforward as all that. In a 1976 interview, the year before its release, a young journalist cornered a reluctant Lynch on ERASERHEAD’s set in LA. During the interview, the reporter asked Lynch if he wanted to expound on his tag line for the film, “A dream of dark and troubling things.” Without missing a beat, Lynch unapologetically looked away from the camera and said “No.” Is the film itself the dream? Is it Henry’s dream? Is it Lynch’s dream? This interview is included on the Criterion supplements disc.
Chris Rodley is a filmmaker and writer who published his book, Lynch on Lynch, in 1997. The interview Rodley did with Lynch about ERASERHEAD is included in the Criterion essay booklet and is titled “I See Myself.” The film is set on a grey, dismal, industrial plain. Jack Nance’s wild-haired Henry seems to live between buildings, down dark alleyways. Rodley asked Lynch to talk about his great love of the project, which sustained him through five years of grueling work. Lynch said, “It was the world. In my mind, it was a world between a factory and 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. They’re living in those fringelands, and they’re the people I really love.” Of course, Lynch designed, built, and hand painted the entire set by himself. The detail is immaculate. They only filmed at night or when it was overcast, which complimented the black and white film and the murky greys and blacks of the set pieces.
We aren’t privileged enough to know whose dream ERASERHEAD is or what the film is about. We are privileged, however, to have the permission to just get lost in the absurdity and fantastic spectacle of it all. Lynch gives me permission to walk into a film and just watch it, in awe and wonder, with no firm conclusions, witticisms, or pithy aphorisms to come down on in the end.
The film opens in what we might assume is the blackness of space. A small planet floats above Jack Nance’s head. On the planet there is a man (Oscar-winning artistic designer Jack Fisk) with a horrible skin condition, sitting in a gloomy shack and staring out the broken window. He pulls a large lever. A large tape-worm looking critter floats out of Jack Nance’s mouth and into the air. Jack Nance plays Henry, a paranoid, troubled man with wide eyes and very tall hair. Henry lives in a dark, cramped room across the hallway from a gorgeous woman (Judith Anna Roberts) who lurks outside the elevator. Henry has an old radiator in his room that glows, oddly at night. Henry is alerted by the Beautiful Woman Across the Hall that Mary X called the floor payphone and asked Henry to come to dinner with her parents. At dinner with Mary (Charlotte Stewart), who we are lead to believe is Henry’s distant girlfriend, they attempt to eat small, “man-made” chickens prepared by Mary’s dad (Allen Joseph), Mr. X. Mrs. X (Jeanne Bates) has a psychotic meltdown and begins making bizarre noises at the table. Mary breaks down sobbing. Mr. X sits quietly and stares at Henry, a large toothy smile plastered across his face. After informing Henry that “there’s a baby,” Mrs. X backs Henry into a dark corner and begins kissing his neck as Henry writhes under her weight uncomfortably. Mary is a mess, constantly sobbing. She asks Henry if he is okay with raising their baby. Henry has no fucking clue what is going on and neither do we, thankfully.
The second act of the film features Henry and Mary as they attempt to care for their grotesque reptilian mutant baby, designed and created by Lynch. The baby creature calls out constantly from the surface of Henry’s dresser. The scene is unbelievably claustrophobic and disturbing. Henry tries to sleep. Mary angrily cries in bed and screams in the creature’s face to “shut up” so she can “just get a good night’s sleep!” In the middle of the night, Mary leaves Henry with the baby to sleep at her parents’.
The third act features a wild and unexplainable series of events. We are lead to believe that Henry is dreaming, at first, but is he? The infant creature wrapped in gauze on his dresser seems to be the trigger for what follows. Somehow, it’s all connected to the large tapeworm thing that leapt out of Henry’s mouth in the prologue. The baby is now sick and has the same lumpy skin condition that the Man in the Planet had. The glow in the radiator reveals itself to be a blonde woman with tumors on her face who sings “In heaven, everything is fine!” In a scene involving a decapitated Henry, we learn where the title of the film comes from, not that Lynch owed us that. Everything really goes to shit when Henry decides to cut the gauze off of the sick mutant creature and then stab it in the open organs with scissors. Or does it? The damn thing bleeds like a man-made chicken and then its body spits out an oatmeal-like substance. This seems to end Henry’s tortured experience, but we can’t be certain what the experience was.
So, is it actually a horror film? Well, if it scares you significantly, I guess it could be. It certainly is creepy. I’m not sure about scary. There’s nothing really to love, per se, about the plot. It’s performances are striking in that they all appear to be caricatures, but, much like the atheist absurdist existentialist works of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, or Thomas Pynchon or the early films of Joel and Ethan Coen, we do not view ERASERHEAD for the stirring narrative or inspirational plot points. I watch ERASERHEAD and will continue to watch it because I fell in love with the love that Lynch felt for it. Lynch, a meticulous painter, moves his “brush” with precision over each frame, catching every moment as he felt it, literally, “in the moment.” For example, the Lady in the Radiator was not a part of Lynch’s original script. As Lynch slept on Jack Nance’s couch and worked out of old closets and warehouse space on the LA lot with borrowed equipment from the AFI, he had a sudden thought about an old radiator. In the middle of the night, Lynch called up his friends and asked them if they had one. One friend said yes, she had one, but it didn’t work. Lynch only wanted to record what it sounded like when someone jumped off of the radiator and to the floor. Eventually, the radiator itself would work its way into the film and between takes Lynch would sit on the floor of the set and sketch pictures of a blonde woman who lived in the radiator. It had no rhyme or reason, but, it needed to be in the film.
I remember, as a high school student, working with my friends in their little independent film studio as we made films that were a conglomeration of “cool ideas” that just popped into our heads. What resulted were very weird but very lovely pieces of work.
The films of David Lynch, beginning with ERASERHEAD, ask us to consider the question: Does it matter who’s dream it is or what’s actually going on in the film if it was made with great love and is fascinating to watch? If there is one thing that can be said about Lynch films, they definitely aid in escapism. But, like most awe-inspiring films, the best ideas and scenes might just come to us at night and we may just end up pestering our friends at 2 am with questions. That is love. ERASERHEAD is love.
Joey Armstrong is a hospital chaplain from Western New York. He is also a playwright and amateur cartoonist. Follow him on Twitter @chaplainmystic and Medium, where he writes more reviews for film and television.
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