The 1970s is the greatest decade in American film, not just because the movies started taking more chances, but more so due to the effect the Vietnam War had on the country. Our whole mindset changed; gone were the days of innocence and the urge for a white picket fence and a shiny new Buick. Gone were the days of Flower Power and America as a land of endless opportunity. People started to question things, like gender roles, race relations, and the necessity to get married and have children. It was like a new world, this homeland of ours, and a crop of budding filmmakers were ready to tackle the shifting tide like never before. All genres got involved, none quite as subversively though, as the horror movie. Since they often play without rules, it gave the filmmakers more room to let their imaginations run amok.
Arguably the first horror picture to really challenge us with societal issues was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. From there, a hefty crop of movies followed suit, each one dialing its extremities up to 11. Just look at The Exorcist, which was supposedly responsible for causing pregnant women to miscarry! Or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with its documentary style that makes us feel as if the demented family at its center could be living right next door. Scary stuff, to be sure, and even if these movies were not direct influences, they helped pave the way for David Lynch's first feature, Eraserhead.
Having just given Eraserhead a fresh look, I don't think it would be out of place on a double bill with Texas Chain Saw. Both movies, in their own way, are savage critiques of the American family unit, post-Vietnam. But while Tobe Hooper's movie focuses more on the ritual side (every one playing their role, family meals), Lynch's is about the terror of realizing that you have a family and are stuck with them. You might as well even say that the title character, named Henry (Jack Nance), has just returned from war. An early scene shows him walking home with a grocery bag, the landscape around him desolate and ugly (often the visual style used to project moral deadness). Once he arrives back at his tiny apartment, a neighbor tells him that a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart) has invited him to dinner. When Henry gets to Mary's house, he complains that she hasn't come around in a while (they've been apart, much like when a soldier has been overseas).
What follows is the terrifying moment where Henry is forced to meet his future in-laws, complete with a chicken dinner that has to be seen to be believed (like Texas Chain Saw, there could be a strong anti-meat message going on here). Not long after, Henry learns that Mary's had a baby (prematurely) and that he must marry her. Before he can blink, Henry's one room apartment just got a little smaller thanks to his new wife and baby. The pressures of responsibility and duty (you're a grown man, so it's time for you to get married and have a family of your own!) has invaded Henry's life, not to mention his vacation from work. We see the irritation that grows from sharing a bed with someone when you're used to sleeping alone, plus the intrusion on sleep thanks to a constantly crying baby. Henry is obviously ill equipped to take care of his child (which looks like a sick animal). He takes its temperature, and after coming to the realization something really is wrong, he has no idea how to handle it.
When you describe the set up of Eraserhead, it sounds like elements of a bad romantic comedy. What sets it apart, of course, is the fact it was made by David Lynch, whose movies excel at peeling the nightmarish layers off of American life. He presents his subjects with a mixture of heightened melodrama, bizarre comedy, and mind blowing (and occasionally numbing) visuals. The sights in Eraserhead are some of his most disturbing and mystifying. Look, for instance, at the recurring sexual imagery, all of which is displayed in the least erotic or appealing way. Most of it resembles sperm, and varies in size (the seeds get bigger as the movie progresses, almost as if they might eventually ingest Henry). Lynch tries to make anything sexual in the movie look as grotesque as possible, beginning with a strange shot of what can be presumed as the pregnancy occurring (set in motion by a man pulling a lever...God?) and later in a dream sequence that could be interpreted as Henry performing an abortion on Mary.
Henry is almost constantly in what appears to be a dream state. His greatest escape from responsibility involves a puffy cheeked woman who dances in his heater and at one point, violently stomps on sperm that have fallen from the sky (Is she a guardian angel? There are other hints that suggest the answer could be yes). Most of Henry's fantasies contain destruction of sperm and worse, the image of his head replaced with that of his deformed child. It's a literal removal, with his severed head being stolen and used as a tool to delete an act of creation. Scenes like this show Eraserhead to be a deeply personal movie, the work of a man who used art as a way to grapple with his own inner demons.
It's the personal nature of Lynch's images that often make them so difficult to decipher. This is not a weakness; if anything, it proves Lynch to be one of our most gifted filmmakers, since he is able to so vividly let us run loose inside of his head, even if it means we may not like or understand what we see. I believe there is a meaning to it all, even if I can't always figure out what is and he won't tell me. Like an actual dream, sometimes you're freaked out and you don't know why, and that's makes it all the scarier. Eraserhead is one of Lynch's best movies, stunningly made from a technical standpoint (the lighting design is almost a character by itself) and constantly absorbing to the eyes. Like any great horror movie, it thrives on deep human fears (marriage, parenting, infidelity), and does so as we had not seen then, and rarely do now. It's refreshingly unapologetic and existentially terrifying.
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(c )Hell and Beyond, 2004
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