There are movies that are difficult to explain, and then there is Eraserhead. I’ve watched some strange movies over the years, but David Lynch was playing in a different league here. I could tell you exactly what happens in this movie, and I’m not sure it would help you understand it. It would probably confuse you more. I’m not completely sure Lynch wanted us to understand it.
Eraserhead was David Lynch’s first feature film. He worked on it for years during the 1970s, largely at the American Film Institute, with a very small crew. It was completed in 1976 and appeared at Filmex in 1977 before eventually finding its audience as a midnight movie. That seems appropriate. I’m not sure Eraserhead was ever meant for a Saturday afternoon showing between Smokey and the Bandit and Star Wars.
Jack Nance plays Henry Spencer, a quiet and nervous man living in a bleak industrial world that looks like it hasn’t seen sunlight in years. Henry learns that his girlfriend Mary, played by Charlotte Stewart, has given birth to a baby. Calling it a baby is probably the easiest description, although anyone who has seen the movie knows that doesn’t quite cover it.
From there, I’m going to be careful. There is a story in Eraserhead, but the story isn’t really the experience. Henry tries to deal with Mary, the baby, his strange surroundings, and what may or may not be happening inside his own head. There is also a woman who lives inside a radiator.
Yes. I just typed that.
The movie is in black and white, and that is a huge part of why it works. Lynch makes Henry’s world look dirty, lonely, and almost mechanical. Pipes hiss. Machinery rumbles. You hear industrial sounds in the background even when very little is happening. The sound may be as important as anything we see. Lynch worked closely with Alan Splet on it, and the result makes you uncomfortable before you even know why. Criterion credits Splet and Lynch with the film’s sound work and Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell with its striking black-and-white photography.
Then there is the Lady in the Radiator, played by Laurel Near. She performs “In Heaven,” written by Peter Ivers. In practically any other movie, a woman singing inside a radiator would be the strangest thing in the movie.
Not here.
I’m not going to tell you what Eraserhead means because I don’t know that there is one answer. You can see fear of parenthood in it. You can see isolation, sex, responsibility, anxiety, and someone trapped in a life he doesn’t understand. You can also watch it and say, “Max, what in the hell did you just tell me to watch?”
Both reactions seem perfectly reasonable.
What amazes me is how much of David Lynch is already here. This was his first feature, but the strange humor, dreams, uncomfortable silences, disturbing images and ordinary people surrounded by things that don’t make sense are already present. You can draw a line from Eraserhead to things Lynch would do later. Criterion describes it as his 1977 debut feature and notes that Lynch himself wrote, produced, directed and edited it.
This isn’t a movie I would recommend to everyone. If you need a conventional plot with everything explained before the credits roll…run. Run fast, don’t walk. But I do admire it. Lynch created his own world with very little money, spent years getting it finished, and made something that nearly fifty years later still doesn’t look or feel quite like anything else.