The Governors Awards (Honorary Oscars) will be held on October 27th, 2019. We've been discussing two of the honoraries: Directors Lina Wertmüller and David Lynch. Here's Mark Brinkerhoff...
Having just retrospected Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s penultimate film (to date at least), let’s venture back to 1977’s Eraserhead, the debut film of American cinema’s enfant terrible ne plus ultra.
To say that Eraserhead is weird would be a profound understatement. Not only is it deeply weird, but it’s wildly inventive. Made for a tight (even for the mid-‘70s) $10,000, Lynch’s first feature, shot in glorious black and white, seems like both a precursor and a post-script to the legendary director’s storied career...
Aptly described as “body horror,” Eraserhead serves up a disorienting blend of fever dreams for its woebegotten protagonist, Henry (Jack Nance)—and for us, the audience. Set in an industrial wasteland, there are bricked-out windows, eerie pools and pits (toxic waste dumps?), and troubled mates, mentally unwell matrons, and an extraterrestrial-seeming newborn. (In this heaven, everything is not fine.) And that’s just a taste of the disturbing imagery (not to mention sounds!), which also includes tapeworm-like creatures, strange meats, and characters with odd, inexplicable facial growths. It’s a trip, to say the least.
E.T.?
Watching Eraserhead, I’m reminded how influential Lynch has been as an artist, from the very beginning. Take note of Ridley Scott’s Alien and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. since clearly they did of Lynch! (For a director whose oeuvre is as famed as he, it’s one of his lesser-discussed legacies.) Their pastiche would appear to nod directly at elements of Eraserhead, if not the atmospheric black and white that does such wonders for Lynch’s meditative mood piece.
Lynch doing the makeup, too.Is Eraserhead a dystopian response to the sturm und drung (environmental, social) of the 1970s? Is Henry a surrogate for Lynch himself? Regardless, Eraserhead remains a mind bender if there ever was one, and that seems to be Lynch’s raison d’être above all.
Eraserhead is streaming now on the Criterion Channel. On YouTube, you also can check out a young David Lynch get interviewed about Eraserhead, circa 1979.