31 Days of Halloween Day 4: Eraserhead (1977)
October 5th 2010 20:41
Day 4, and I am already sleeping with the lights on. I am such a horror lightweight now (very much like the fact that I can't seem to handle fairground rides anymore). Since I got back from abroad, I've been staying with my Dad, and I can't bear to think what his electricity bill is now.
Anyway, night four of my apparently sado-masochistic film buffery was served by Eraserhead (1977), director David Lynch's debut. Partly funded by the AFI (until he ran out of money), this is quite frankly the most bizarre movie I've ever seen, and has enough joyless, score-less, slow-moving scenes that would rival the likes of any post-modern student film out there.
Let's get the Un Chien Andalou comparisons out of the way first - yes, it's a surrealist movie, yes, it's in black and white, and yes, there is some weird shit involving eyes, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Unlike pure surrealist works, there is some kind of a basic plot, although sometimes it gets difficult to remember where it is.
The story follows Henry, played by this guy (not this guy), a printing company worker "on vacation", who lives in a pretty bleak-looking building resembling a disused hospital or asylum, and way past its freshness date. For the first 10 minutes or so, he doesn't say anything, but he does wear a contorted look of befuddled anxiety on his face (just now, I actually tried to do that for just under 2 minutes and I got a headache, so props to the late Jack Nance for pulling that off for the entirety of the film).
Henry has just been invited to dinner by his girlfriend Mary's parents. And so he goes, and then sits with them in the living room. Then his girlfriend starts barking uncontrollably and cries. After that, they sit down to dinner, with Mary's father bragging about the man-made chickens he just bought and cooked. Enlisting Henry to carve because he lost the use of his arm (after losing it and then gaining it back), the chicken gyrates a little on the plate, and appears to start bleeding, whereupon Mary's mother, fresh from using her catatonic mother's lap to mix up the salad, lets out a borderline orgasmic, caterwauling sob.
In the hallway, Henry begins to get upset when Mary's mother, acting increasingly weirder, advises him that there is a baby at the hospital, of whom he is the father. She then proceeds to try to give Henry some kind of vampiric, interrogative hickey in an effort to divulge whether or not the two had "had intercourse". Henry simply responds that he loves Mary, who arrives just in time to opine that she doesn't even think it is a baby. And she's not wrong, you know.
Resembling an alien-like worm, the feeble reason for its ghastly appearance is that it was "premature" although I dread to think how that would have felt while crowning if it had had a few extra weeks in the womb. After a few sleepless hours and some rather cruel, non-maternal yelling, Mary buckles under the stress of the first night of infant mutant parenting, and eventually leaves. Taking a rather more straightforward, calm approach, Henry attempts to bond with his newborn baby Admiral Ackbar, but quickly finds that it becomes increasingly difficult to determine his needs. Worse still, with each moment he tries to leave, the baby's cries (which are utterly adorable, in a hideously ugly sort of way) grow louder and more frenetic, and the needy little bastard's skin even develops something akin to hives.
So Henry is essentially trapped, with very little company except the sexy slut across the hall and the chipmunk-cheeked lady taking up residence in his radiator (who is the only one to crack a smile in the whole film). In true Lynch fashion, she is not explained, but since nothing else in the movie is, you needn't worry about it.
Credit must go to the late Jack Nance, whose every minute facial expression, nervous twitch, brow furrowing serve as the perfect antidote to mute some of the genuinely insane crap that we are watching. His subtle, nuanced performance provides some much-needed grounding in many of the film's key (and bizarre) scenes.
The majority of the film takes place in a very tiny rooming-house style apartment, and the dirty, ex-clinical feel that seems to suggest that Henry's building might once have been a hospital might serve as an indication that this movie is set several years into the future, where people scramble to make sense of things that are obsolete. The imagery is chock-full of pipes, fallopian tubes, elevators with little travelling slivers of light, all depictions of things that should go somewhere, but, in this movie, truly don't. And much like the ill-begotten baby, the protagonist's vacation, his newfound fatherhood, and even his unhappy marriage, the purpose of these conduits are disused, unwanted, or simply out of place.
Since Lynch himself has never stated the film's message, I can only offer my fragments of an interpretation, and hope that some of it sticks. My amateur thoughts on film-making are that if you intend on making a surreal film, then every detail - every piece of dialogue, every noise, every character costume, every twitch, every seating position, every prop and every shot - are pointed and must mean something. You have to get the details exactly the way you want them, because if you have the slightest idea that your movie might be left open to audience interpretation, you've got to give them a lot of details to look at, because that's all they'll be analyzing.
Anyway, night four of my apparently sado-masochistic film buffery was served by Eraserhead (1977), director David Lynch's debut. Partly funded by the AFI (until he ran out of money), this is quite frankly the most bizarre movie I've ever seen, and has enough joyless, score-less, slow-moving scenes that would rival the likes of any post-modern student film out there.
Let's get the Un Chien Andalou comparisons out of the way first - yes, it's a surrealist movie, yes, it's in black and white, and yes, there is some weird shit involving eyes, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Unlike pure surrealist works, there is some kind of a basic plot, although sometimes it gets difficult to remember where it is.
The story follows Henry, played by this guy (not this guy), a printing company worker "on vacation", who lives in a pretty bleak-looking building resembling a disused hospital or asylum, and way past its freshness date. For the first 10 minutes or so, he doesn't say anything, but he does wear a contorted look of befuddled anxiety on his face (just now, I actually tried to do that for just under 2 minutes and I got a headache, so props to the late Jack Nance for pulling that off for the entirety of the film).
Henry has just been invited to dinner by his girlfriend Mary's parents. And so he goes, and then sits with them in the living room. Then his girlfriend starts barking uncontrollably and cries. After that, they sit down to dinner, with Mary's father bragging about the man-made chickens he just bought and cooked. Enlisting Henry to carve because he lost the use of his arm (after losing it and then gaining it back), the chicken gyrates a little on the plate, and appears to start bleeding, whereupon Mary's mother, fresh from using her catatonic mother's lap to mix up the salad, lets out a borderline orgasmic, caterwauling sob.
In the hallway, Henry begins to get upset when Mary's mother, acting increasingly weirder, advises him that there is a baby at the hospital, of whom he is the father. She then proceeds to try to give Henry some kind of vampiric, interrogative hickey in an effort to divulge whether or not the two had "had intercourse". Henry simply responds that he loves Mary, who arrives just in time to opine that she doesn't even think it is a baby. And she's not wrong, you know.
Resembling an alien-like worm, the feeble reason for its ghastly appearance is that it was "premature" although I dread to think how that would have felt while crowning if it had had a few extra weeks in the womb. After a few sleepless hours and some rather cruel, non-maternal yelling, Mary buckles under the stress of the first night of infant mutant parenting, and eventually leaves. Taking a rather more straightforward, calm approach, Henry attempts to bond with his newborn baby Admiral Ackbar, but quickly finds that it becomes increasingly difficult to determine his needs. Worse still, with each moment he tries to leave, the baby's cries (which are utterly adorable, in a hideously ugly sort of way) grow louder and more frenetic, and the needy little bastard's skin even develops something akin to hives.
So Henry is essentially trapped, with very little company except the sexy slut across the hall and the chipmunk-cheeked lady taking up residence in his radiator (who is the only one to crack a smile in the whole film). In true Lynch fashion, she is not explained, but since nothing else in the movie is, you needn't worry about it.
Credit must go to the late Jack Nance, whose every minute facial expression, nervous twitch, brow furrowing serve as the perfect antidote to mute some of the genuinely insane crap that we are watching. His subtle, nuanced performance provides some much-needed grounding in many of the film's key (and bizarre) scenes.
The majority of the film takes place in a very tiny rooming-house style apartment, and the dirty, ex-clinical feel that seems to suggest that Henry's building might once have been a hospital might serve as an indication that this movie is set several years into the future, where people scramble to make sense of things that are obsolete. The imagery is chock-full of pipes, fallopian tubes, elevators with little travelling slivers of light, all depictions of things that should go somewhere, but, in this movie, truly don't. And much like the ill-begotten baby, the protagonist's vacation, his newfound fatherhood, and even his unhappy marriage, the purpose of these conduits are disused, unwanted, or simply out of place.
Since Lynch himself has never stated the film's message, I can only offer my fragments of an interpretation, and hope that some of it sticks. My amateur thoughts on film-making are that if you intend on making a surreal film, then every detail - every piece of dialogue, every noise, every character costume, every twitch, every seating position, every prop and every shot - are pointed and must mean something. You have to get the details exactly the way you want them, because if you have the slightest idea that your movie might be left open to audience interpretation, you've got to give them a lot of details to look at, because that's all they'll be analyzing.
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Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
I love Eraserhead. Hell, I love David Lynch. Well, most of what he's done. Check out my own reviews if it tickles your fancy.
Comment by The Film Geekette
The Film Geekette
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
Nice to see some other horror reviews from someone who genuinely enjoys them. And recognises the good from the bad (although I haven't read your Army of Darkness review yet, not such a fan of the splatstick stuff)