Movies - Eraserhead

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	Movies - Eraserhead

Eraserhead (released in France as The Labyrinth Man) is a 1977 cult film written and directed by David Lynch and starring Jack Nance. The film has become a cult classic due to its surreal imagery, strange soundtrack and its generally dreamlike aura. In 2004, the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Synopsis

Eraserhead is a difficult film to understand, and it is open to various interpretations. The story does not have a strictly linear trajectory, it is punctuated with fantasy/dream sequences of differing lengths, and the boundary between these fantasy/dream sequences and the primary narrative strand is often blurred. Lynch has said he has yet to read an interpretation of the film that is his.

The setting of the film seems to be a sort of industrial wasteland. Electric lights continually flicker, sewer pipes constantly leak and a mechanical humming sound is ubiquitous.

Henry Spencer (Nance) is a printer (although, for the length of the film, he is "on vacation") who gives off an air of nervousness but makes few direct qualms about his life situation.

At the beginning of the film, Henry, who has not heard from his girlfriend Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) for a while, mistakenly believes that she has ended their relationship. He is then unexpectedly invited to have dinner with Mary and her parents at their house, where he is told that Mary has given birth to a strange, reptilian baby after an abnormally short pregnancy. Henry is then obligated to marry her. Mary and the baby move into Henry's one-room apartment, but the baby continually cries, which deprives Mary of sleep. This pushes her to the breaking point, and she abandons both Henry and the baby. After Mary leaves, Henry has to take care of the baby by himself, and he becomes involved in a series of strange events. These include bizarre encounters with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), a woman with grotesquely distended cheeks who lives in his radiator (she sings the iconic song "In Heaven"), visions of the ominous Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk), and a sexual liaison with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts).

Mysterious worms appear in many of the film's scenes and are often seen as a metaphor for sin, although other interpretations are possible. In this particular interpretation (i.e., the worms as a metaphor for sin), their resemblance to sperm cells indicates that the premarital sex that lead to the baby was Henry’s first and most troubling sin.

The film's title comes from a relatively long fantasy/dream sequence (occurring during the last half-hour of the film) in which Henry’s head detaches from his body, sinks into a growing pool of blood on a tile floor, falls from the sky, and, finally, lands on an empty street and cracks open. A young boy (Thomas Coulson) finds Henry's broken head and takes it to a pencil-factory, where Paul (Darwin Joston), the desk clerk, is rendered speechless by the gruesome sight and summons his ill-tempered boss (Neil Moran) to the front desk by repeatedly pushing a buzzer. The boss, angered by the summons, yells at Paul, but regains his composure when he sees what the little boy has brought. The boss and the boy carry the head to a back room, where the Pencil Machine Operator (Hal Landon Jr.) takes a core sample of Henry's brain and determines that it is perfect material for pencil erasers. The boy is then rewarded for bringing in Henry's head.

Eventually, Henry grows frustrated with his life and cuts the baby’s bandages (this can be interpreted as an attempt to kill it or merely to see what was under the bandages). The cutting of the bandages (which turn out to be part of the baby's flesh) splits open the baby's body. As the baby screams, Henry stabs its exposed heart with the scissors he used to cut the bandages. This causes the apartment’s electricity to overload, and, as the lights flicker on and off, an apparition of the baby's head, grown to an enormous size, materializes in the apartment. The last scene features Henry being embraced by the Lady in the Radiator, which suggests that, after killing the baby, he may have committed suicide and is now dead.

Filming

Lynch calls Eraserhead his “Philadelphia Story,” emphasizing the fears and anxieties he experienced living in Philadelphia, attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Like most U.S. cities, Philadelphia was in the midst of major urban decay at the time, which may explain the vast landscape of abandoned factories in Eraserhead.

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Movies - Eraserhead

Synopsis

Filming

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