Eraserhead1977

The David Lynch experience entry #1: Eraserhead, a genesis of a vision. to put it bluntly Eraserhead is the most Lynchian film of his career and the most spiritual as the man himself said, the word lynchian is tossed around at almost any surreal movie with unexplainable events, however my usage of this world is in regard to his filmography, in that Eraserhead literally encapsulates everything about him, a singing woman in a theater typically depicted in a place of in between, the theater scenes also feel like a mirror of the mind, a shifting point for the narrative logic, a crossroads dare I say, luminal spaces that that externalizes emotions words and narratives cannot explain. and Eraserhead doesn’t skip this, in fact it's probably the most obscure of all of his films. The Radiator and The Eraser head grotesque and almost sickening, a singing lady with a deformed face squashing sperm like creatures, a scene where nothing is said, just eerie feelings, she sings about heaven and how everything is fine, except that it's not. In a blur of dream and reality Henry is in the theatre, on stage, surrounded by things beyond his understanding and logic; a decapitation and blood, a crying monstrosity and figures that belong to nightmares. this is Henry's guilt, this is Henry's inner confrontation, trapped by curtains, his blood creates a passage between shame and existence his head used to making an eraser, an Eraserhead. While a lot of the movie (if you can even call this a movie) is just David's dreams, most of it just it's just his intuition, it's senseless stuff where the most important is to convey a feeling rather than a meaning, however, I'm not saying that it's a work devoid of meaning you just have to differentiate between where to dig and where to experience, and I believe that the eraser scene is a very important one that requires A deeper look, not an explanation, but a dive in and an interpretation. in a scene that’s followed by an inner confrontation, he falls into a factory that makes the eraser part of the crayon, not the crayon itself just the eraser, not the creation just the removal I see a few layers in this imagery, at first it's where the movie title takes its meaning, his mind and self has been reduced to an object used to erase, falling into a factory his mind is used to delete and not write, there's a certain irony in here as the mind is typically used to create things, here it is used to erase. Perhaps it reflects some of lynches’ state when he was making the movie, I remember in “the art of life” David mentioned the industrialization in Philadelphia happening around him, maybe a certain fear has emerged, that his art and creative energy would be used to just fuel the big machine, that as a creator it might all go to waste, that all that creativity and creation is undervalued in a sense everything that makes him special has been turned into raw material and a mere commodity in the corporate world, where everything is measured by function and purpose. also, the idea of your head and brain turning it into an eraser is something that exists between Horror and comedy, absurd, funny, and horrifying enough to leave you questioning everything around it and by consequence around us. Lynchesque Elements I did mention earlier how the movie is the genesis of Lynch's approach towards filmmaking, to elements that are unique to him, I talked about the theater but there are many more like repressed desires, flickering lights, electricity and static sounds, disappearing people, industrialism, dreams vs reality, the “bizarrification” of the mundane, and finally a protagonist that doesn't understand what's happening, almost like the watcher. all of these are reoccurring elements in his filmography, each of his later movie deal with some of these elements, but what’s interesting about Eraserhead is that it features all of them in one motion picture, which I find fascinating how he put his identity and self in his first feature length most likely unconsciously, but as he grew as both person and an artist he ultimately knew more about his art and subsequently about himself, with all said, there's still much more to uncover, mainly that damned baby The Airpods-Shaped Baby such a grotesque creation, I first saw it as the manifestation of Henry (or Lynch)’s fear of fatherhood, or maybe it is a symbol of vulnerability, a pain that we all have, but constantly push it away, it cries louder and we ignore it silently, However, my interpretation has something to do more with Henry, in a sense I see them both as a reflection of the same, at some point in the film, during the theatre scene, we even see Henry turn into his son, once again solidifying the importance of the theater scene and the meanings it keeps hiding. I think of Henry as not that much different from his own son, he's rejected, undesired, and left behind, he is al