Eraserhead (1977)

There’s always noise in the world of Eraserhead. Gas hissing, wind howling, machinery churning, rain clattering, distant horns. A low roar accompanies every scene, filling concrete courtyards and run-down apartment buildings with a constant sense of brewing unease and discomfort. These noises are the soundtrack to David Lynch’s first feature-length film: a horrific vision of urban living, young parenthood and catastrophic anxiety. Eraserhead is known for its surreal imagery, but it tells a relatable and sympathetic story that can be followed on an emotional level if not a literal one. When I watched this film as a fifteen-year-old I was engaged but puzzled. As a twenty-five-year-old who’s spent time trudging across a chilly city to get back to a mouldy flat, Eraserhead makes perfect sense.

Styled with a shock of hair that looks like the product of static electricity, a young man named Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) lives in an unnamed industrial city. He passes through derelict ground, abandoned factories and ancient railway tracks on his way to a grubby one-room apartment. Henry is an anxious young man, carefully avoiding eye contact with his neighbours and hugging a bag of groceries close to his chest. He has a day job at a local factory and a girlfriend that he hasn’t seen in some time. After an awkward dinner at her house, Henry learns that he’s a father. Inexplicably, his girlfriend has given birth to a poorly baby that resembles a kind of mutated foetus. Cocooned in tight bandages, the malformed infant takes up residence on top of Henry’s chest of drawers as he and his girlfriend struggle to deal with their new lives as parents.

This film is a nightmare vision of young male adulthood. Henry has no prospects and no friends. His girlfriend can’t bear his touch, his child is an ill mutant, his surroundings are bleaker than bleak and he spends all of days struggling in the dirt of his scruffy room. After a grim and sleepless night, his girlfriend leaves him for good, making Henry the sole carer of their inexplicable child. Now Henry has immense responsibilities, no help and no joy. He lives alone and he knows no love. This emotional core is crucial to the film’s meaning, as all of its surreal imagery seems to be drawn from patterns of catastrophic thinking. Henry suffers every nightmare that his anxiety could possibly manifest. Instead of a normal baby, he has a mutant. Instead of a slightly awkward dinner with a girlfriend’s parents, Henry suffers through a fever dream of sexual harassment, twitching mini-chickens and bubbles of blood.

Consider Eraserhead a confession of David Lynch’s darkest intrusive thoughts. Henry is Lynch’s avatar: a young man with an expressive haircut who inhabits a bizarre world populated by hissing pipes and curious apparitions. There’s guilt and shame in Henry’s mind. He’s attracted to his next door neighbour, he’s annoyed at his girlfriend’s obvious disdain for him, he bitterly regrets his sudden fatherhood and he wants to put his sick baby out of its misery. Beneath the oppressive noise and beyond the bizarre images, these are the depressive fantasies and secret emotions of a lonely young man. I‘ve never wanted to euthanise a baby, but I can relate to awkward crushes and debilitating loneliness in a frozen city. Many people can. Eraserhead quickly developed a reputation as a sick and trashy midnight movie, but its staying power was generated by its odd relatability. There’s a catharsis in it, an expressive outpouring of guilty male grievances.

It’s worth noting that Jennifer Lynch, David’s daughter, was born three years before Eraserhead went into production, and suffered from clubbed feet: a birth defect that required corrective surgery. Jennifer has been vocal about her role in Eraserhead’s development, claiming that her birth and health issues inspired her father’s story. This feels true to me. In a film so full of discomfiting birth imagery and repressed sexuality, the writer/director’s personal touch is unmistakable. This is Lynch’s story, an adaptation of his own thoughts and worries. The film begins with a space-age abstract vision of conception, as Henry floats through the stars and allows a sperm-shaped creature to escape from his mouth. On a pock-marked planet below, a mottled and shadowy figure responds by pulling a lever, setting some great unseen machine into work. I see this as a representation of the female reproductive system, preparing itself for the arrival of sperm by starting up its gears. The mysteries of outer space meet the mechanics of Earth, producing a baby between the two of them.

Lynch’s films have always looked to the stars and been fascinated by the sights and sounds of the factory. Here, the two are mother and father, the necessary components in procreation. Sex is depicted as a bizarre and creepy out of body experience, full of mystery and foreboding. There’s no pleasure, just the conception of a future problem. Alongside its curious depiction of conception, one of Eraserhead’s most cryptic images is the bizarre lady in the radiator, a ghostly pale figure with extraordinarily swollen cheeks and a habit for stage performance. When Henry stares into his radiator (yet another rumbling machine), he sees her shuffle across a chequered floor, sing about heaven and crush creatures that resemble his mutated sperm. I love the design of the radiator lady. She’s simultaneously sweet and terrifying, a kind of deformed angel who earnestly clutches her hands and seems to want the best for Henry. Is her sperm-crushing a form of contraception? Perhaps she’s Henry’s fantasy woman, a lady who’d do anything to keep him child-free.

Lynch’s next film (The Elephant Man) was shot in black and white, as were elements of future projects such as Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return, but Eraserhead is his ultimate monochrome feature. Whether the film’s colour was the result of a budget limitation or not, I couldn’t imagine Eraserhead looking any other way. The black and white photography gives the networks of pipes and jagged industrial structures an imposing, stark and shadowy German Expressionist quality, fitting the film’s mood perfectly. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes, who would go on to lens Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, does a terrific job at making the $100,000 budget look more substantial. With a few well-chosen real-life locations, he creates an infinite universe of metal and concrete wasteland. Elmes’ work with interiors is just as superb, shrouding the pretty neighbour’s face in total darkness before slowly bringing it into the light. Jack Nance’s hapless features are always prominent and sympathetic, a constant reminder of the late actor’s warm presence across Lynch’s filmography.

As his career progressed, David Lynch slowly moved away from the industrial. By the time that he released Blue Velvet, his focus had decisively settled on sunny suburbia, which provided the setting for almost all of his following movies. However, small elements of the factory would always remain. Think of the sawmill in Twin Peaks, the towering metal gas tanks in The Straight Story and Frank Booth’s warehouse hideout in Blue Velvet. To Lynch, the industrial was always sinister, menacing, gargantuan and indecipherable. Eraserhead is the only one of his movies that focuses overwhelmingly on the metallic and the mechanic, the film where he compares the mysteries of the human body to the obscure functions of gigantic machines. On this re-watch, I was struck by the sheer weight of Eraserhead’s influence, how blatantly foundational it’s been to artists as diverse as Tim Burton, Jim Jarmusch and H.R. Giger. Though it may seem obscure to many, Lynch’s coldly flamboyant story of male anxiety, hopelessness and deprivation will always touch a nerve. To understand it, you just have to feel it.