In 1977, American cinema rehearsed the Hyperjump and ventured into a new galaxy for the first time. With “Star Wars” by George Lucas, after Georges Méliès “Journey to the Moon” and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 – A Space Odyssey”, space was finally conquered for the big screen – and turned up to the explosion field with lightsaber power and star cruisers.
But in this remarkable year for cinema, another director also dared to venture onto a strange planet and, with nightmarish, expressionistic images, described a fantastic journey into an (inner) world that is possibly even more unexplored than some star clusters light years away.
Fixed star of the midnight cinema
Eraserhead, David Lynch’s surrealist debut film, hatched over five years of excessive, painstaking work and a marginal budget, remains the universal artist’s most chilling and unapproachable work to date. Alongside “El Topo”, “Pink Flamingo” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” a fixed star of midnight cinema, it quickly became a cult film and was discussed far more frequently than anxious viewers had ever seen.
As an art school student at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Lynch tried to establish a visual language inspired by Luis Bunuel, Francis Bacon and Man Ray with a few grotesque short films (“The Alphabet, “The Grandmother”) that crossed psychoanalytically charged symbols with brute physical staging . Heavily influenced by Gogol and Kafka’s stories (Lynch later secured the film rights to The Metamorphosis), Eraserhead envisioned the story of a disabled man, startled by his own fearlessness in the face of it to have fathered an unfinished being that he has to take care of and that becomes a terrible burden for him. A project that ultimately brought the young artist to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion.
Jack Nance, one of Lynch’s best friends and featured in many of his films, took on the role of Henry Spencer, a shy, naïve printer who lives in a sort of post-apocalyptic metropolis where industry has supplanted everything that was green and vibrant could.
This landscape is inspired, as Lynch has emphasized several times in the past, from his lifetime in Philadelphia, where crime and neglect were the order of the day. Henry’s hair, shaken upright as if by a violent electric shock, may never get out of the viewer’s mind once he has seen it – just like his cramped apartment somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Inside, the radiators roar furiously and the neighbor willingly offers to have sex.
Grotesque silent film with creepy noises
Not an option for Henry, who is currently stuck in vacation mode. But when he is invited to a family dinner by his girlfriend (whose name is revealed in the credits as Mary X; names don’t matter much in this gray checkered world) he is in for a storm. Rightly so: In a rather unconventional way, he is told that he will soon be a father and that he has to get married because of it. Talking is difficult for everyone involved here, because as in his short films, language critic Lynch shows a world in which gestures and sounds express much more than words.
The family evening then has more of an absurd comedy with a Jacques Tati touch. A strangely lively fried chicken has the most beautiful appearance. “Eraserhead” is just a grotesque silent film with scary noises. They were produced by the genius sound engineer Alan Splet, whom Lynch met at the film institute. You can hear puppies sucking milk, smacking wildly. You can see a mummy as a grandmother who was simply forgotten in the kitchen at some point.
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Only a little later Henry Spencer has his own family. His now married Mary moves into his flat and without ever knowing that she was pregnant (perhaps she never was, Henry seems more like the archetype of an asexual bachelor) the two take care of him a strange something from an infant who still clearly bears features of an embryo. The little creature is the linchpin in “Eraserhead”, his big, undying secret. Why does it look the way it looks? Why is it making such pathetic croaks? What does it mean?
The not yet born human
The film critic Georg Seeßlen once wrote about “human beings who are not yet born”, symbolically brought to life by David Lynch – and later returning as a motif in the most varied of forms in his works. The director didn’t even begin to comment on the background to what he claims to be the most spiritual film. Rumors kept circulating that the baby could have been the fetus of a goat or a cow. Lynch will probably take the secret to his grave at some point. On the set, he even made sure that everyone who was near the small, terrifying “work of art” had to turn a blind eye.
Things aren’t going well between mother and father. The young woman, tormented by the daily sight of the miscarriage and its nerve-wracking yelling, gives up quite early and leaves Henry. He reluctantly tries to come to terms with his “child” and is completely taken over by him. Of course, it is obvious that the American filmmaker dealt intensively with his own situation as a young father.
After all, he first had to establish himself as an artist with little money and complicated ideas and still be there for the family. The budget for his debut was exhausted after months, Lynch even slept on the set to finish faster and because he could hardly afford the rent for his apartment. Autobiographical trackers have also tended to point to the clubfoot disorder that his daughter Jennifer was born with as a motivation for Eraserhead’s portrayal of the mysterious being.
Despite all of these possible interpretations, the numerous birth metaphors and shock sequences of destructive or completely failed sexuality naturally remain. The film already begins with the “man on the planet”, who has long since become a myth and who, with sweaty exertion, apparently ensures that something or someone sees the light of day.
Is it Henry, whose slanted perspective on life is aesthetically reflected in the film with almost no distance? Or is it the embryo that is pressed into the world with great force? Even more striking is the nightmare that Henry has one night after his Mary left him. Here he finds himself lying next to her in bed again and pulls out of her body several threads resembling sperm, which he, slightly disgusted, smacks against the wall.
“In Heaven Everything Is Fine”
It’s good that there’s a woman in the heater! She becomes the angel of death for Henry, who has gone mad, as she sings on her small stage in her heating realm: “In Heaven Everything Is Fine”. (By the way, a song the Pixies performed live every now and then). An invitation to suicide or a narcissistic retreat into another parallel zone freed from the constraints of ordinary life?
Inspired by his chubby, fetus-squeezing muse, the father takes action and first cuts open the bandage in which his little one was wrapped, then cuts it with scissors to make the end. Organs protrude, flashbulbs flash – everything starts to falter. Eraserhead is a thoroughly introspective horror film in which every atom that moves reacts to the main character.
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What follows is probably the most surrealistic sequence in the work of the last great surrealist in American cinema, which ultimately gave the film its quirky name: the blonde from the heater disappears onto her small stage in a pool of blood that runs out of a tree, Henry’s head separates from the body and falls onto a path in the street. There he is picked up by a boy who then takes him purposefully to a factory. Here the lifeless turnip is finally processed into an eraser.
Lynch’s film career was about to end
Eraserhead remains David Lynch’s most experimental feature-length film to date (aside from “Inland Empire,” which more than once seems like an instinctive art installation). With only 21 pages of script, 40 minutes without dialogue and a mere 25 viewers at the premiere, the film could have quickly stalled the career of this most demanding creator of eerie dream visions.
The fact that this didn’t happen was also due to the compelling images obsessed with their own ambiguity, which combine to form a thoroughly hypnotic trip into another dimension. Stanley Kubrick showed Eraserhead to his cast before pitting them against each other in The Shining. Mel Brooks was thrilled and finally knew who the ideal cast was to film the script for his “Elephant Man”. And George Lucas actually almost had Lynch direct Return of the Jedi. The extroverted space opera would certainly have been different afterwards.
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