 |
 There's not much write up other than some glowing quotes from British
publications no one has ever heard of. This DVD release has been "digitally
remixed in Dolby Stereo." They call this movie the "perfect nightmare" and
say that it is "David Lynch's extraordinary, seminal, horror
masterpiece." 1977, 85 minutes, Widescreen DVD
I remember the first time I saw Eraserhead- it was on a college campus and it was so long ago that I don't recall why I
went in the first place. I'm guessing that it was because the movie had a cool
name and also because this was around the whole Twin Peaks fad (probably explains why they were running it, huh?). Anyway, I get there
and the screening is in this pretty big auditorium, but what they're showing
this thing on is one of those portable screens that your uncle used to bust out
so
that he could show you slides of his trip to the Yucatan or where ever. The
student organizers had a whole bunch of folding chairs set up in rows and it
looked like they were anticipating about fifty to a hundred people for this
event. I got there, took my seat, looked around and counted about seven
people. That included me. That included the three dudes that were setting the
thing up and taking admission and that included the four other audience
members. This was on a campus of about 20,000 students, so if you ever want to
accuse these college punks of being posers, then they were off posing somewhere
else that night. I did note that I was the only person in the crowd not to
either be dressed in leather or have any piece of metal piercing some part of
my skin. The other thing I rapidly noticed was how dang uncomfortable those
chairs were when you had to sit through an hour and half of this unsettling,
confusing, sometimes entertaining, frequently boring, exercise in metaphorical
cinema from David Lynch. Once you see the movie begin with Henry's (Eraserhead
to his friends) head filling the screen sideways and eventually giving way to a
big rock (planet?) that contains an old deformed guy pulling a bunch of levers,
you know that you are watching art. This means that you will be subjected to a barrage of strange images that
make little sense, but since this is art, you will nod knowingly and pretend to
understand Lynch's message. Heck, I'll fill you in on the message, it's not
that impenetrable: getting your girlfriend preggers, being forced to marry her
and raise the little monster will drive you absolutely nucking futs as the
bumper stickers say.  Once the guy with the levers gets done putting the plot into first gear, we
more properly meet Henry Spence (instead of just seeing the side of his head
floating around). Henry is a regular Joe dressed in suit and tie and favoring
the hairstyle that either Kid or Play made famous in all those great House Partymovies of the early nineties. If you think that the movie is calledEraserhead because of his hair, you seriously underestimate this film. Lynch
has a little more up his sleeve than run-of-the-mill nicknames here. For now
though, all we get is Henry walking across the grounds of a factory and
stepping in a puddle. He gets home to his dingy apartment and encounters the
neighbor lady that lives across the hall. She's one of those heavily made-up
types that purses her lips and clutches her silk robe about her chest as she
informs Henry that there was a call for him on the pay phone. It was from a
girl named Mary and she wants him to go to her parents' house for dinner. This
girl is apparently some type of ex-girlfriend though in Lynch's skewed
universe, the relationship ended when she just stopped coming around Henry's
place. Henry doesn't seem too put out by that either way. He's soft-spoken,
when he says anything at all, and suffers all the bizarre happenings around him
by pretty much staring at things and not really reacting a whole lot. Henry
goes to her parents' house and meets the mother and father, presumably for the
first time. Strangeness is the order of the day at the X residence (the
credits list Mary's last name as X). The father informs Henry that he is a
plumber and starts babbling about pipes and we learn that Henry is on vacation
from some factory or other. At one point Mary has some kind of fit, but her
mother gets her back on track by brushing her hair (Henry is non-plussed at
this point). Then it's time for dinner. Father X says that they're having
little man-made chickens that are about the size of your fist, and by golly
when he takes them out of the oven, he wasn't kidding - they are little! He
tells Henry that he has some problem with his arm and it's numb and can't feel
pain, then hits it with his other hand to prove it (but he's been afraid to cut
it). Since he's got a bum arm he asks Henry to do the honors and cut the
chicken (at least he didn't ask him to choke the chicken or cut the cheese -
see, this movie isn't that strange!)  I know most of you are thinking that this big "chicken cutting" scene must be
some of the boring stuff going on, but it isn't. See, this dang chicken starts
moving around and bleeding and then Mrs. X has a fit and goes into some kind of
spasms! With dinner pretty much ruined, Mrs. X (recovered from her
re-animated chicken fit) asks to speak with Henry alone. She repeatedly asks
him if he and Mary have had sexual intercourse (yes, that's the phrase she uses
- I had to look it up - it's pretty much the same as bumping uglies, humping,
knocking boots, pumping, getting it on, and making whoopie). Henry is taken
aback by all this and then Mrs. X starts sniffing him or trying to make out
with him (I couldn't really tell which - whatever was happening, she was way
too close!). It turns out that Mary has had a baby, though the doctors aren't
even sure if it is a baby, so the Xs expect Henry to marry her and help raise
this thing that their unholy union led to. The next scene shows us that Henry
and Mary are living together in his apartment with their brand new, beautiful
baby! Is it a boy? Is it a girl? Who knows? It's cute little monster baby!
It looks like a little dinosaur or E.T. or something that you would expect to
rip its way out of the womb, instead of just being delivered, but it's Henry's
and Mary's and they love it, right? Not exactly. It's bottom part is all
wrapped in gauze and all we can see is its neck and smooth head. It's always
crying and squawking and Mary keeps yelling at it shut up because she can't
sleep (Henry has little interest in all this) and at one point she goes over to
it and yells at it to shut up right in it's little cute monster face. Boo to
Mary! Somebody hotline that skank to family services! Adopt that thing out to
a family that's on those waiting lists for baby monsters! Then she tells Henry
that she needs a good night's sleep so she takes off for her parents and leaves
Baby Huey in Henry's care. Henry, prodded by this thing's incessant whining
goes to check it out and takes its temperature and then looks back at the baby
and suddenly it looks a little peaked with all these big, nasty bumps and spots
on it and Henry says, "well you aresick!" You know how it is with kids and little monsters - one minute they're
fine, the next minute they've got the creeping crud.  Left alone with his baby, Henry sinks deeper into the morose craziness that
seems to define his entire existence. He has a succession of strange
experiences that defy any rational explanation (well, except that he is either
nuts, on drugs, or having a really long nightmare). Earlier he had received
something in the mail that looked like a seed or something. He put it in a
cabinet and then later we gets scenes of him staring at a radiator and somehow
there's this tiny woman with deformed cheeks dancing on a stage, singing some
terrible song about heaven and these things that can be only be called sperm
start dropping from the sky and she tries to dance around them, but eventually
starts stomping them (Ouch! I get the symbolism!). Henry even manages to take
time out of his busy schedule as "weirdo guy with fear of adult
responsibilities" to bang the hottie next door. Later, when his wife returns,
they're laying in bed and he starts pulling out all these giant sperm shaped
things from under the covers and chucking them against the wall of his
apartment (That's coming out of your security deposit, punk!). Then he watches
the radiator again and soon he finds himself on the stage all shrunk down!
There's some weird stuff that goes on here, but I think we'd have to say the
highlight is when Henry's head pops off his neck and is replaced by the head of
his little baby! This head of Henry's rolls away and ends up outside on the
ground, near the factory. A little boy picks up the head and brings into a
shop, where a dude takes it to a back room and gives it to a guy at a machine.
This guy takes a core sample of Henry's head and puts it in a slot of the
machine and proceeds to use it to make erasers for the pencils he runs through
the machine. Then he takes one of the pencils and tests the eraser and
pronounces it as being pretty sweet. When he blows off the eraser crumbs, we
go back to Henry who is in his apartment and back by himself with the baby.
It's squawking, so Henry picks up a pair of scissors and goes over and starts
to cut the gauze off the baby's body. The baby is obviously distressed by this
and starts to bleed. When Henry has the bandages off, he sees that the baby's
body is pretty much just an open wound and rotting, with something pulsating
and growing inside. He stabs at it and all this glop starts pouring out of the
kid's guts. Soon the electricity in the apartment is flickering and the baby's
neck is now about six feet long. Henry is sitting there staring at all this
and we get pulled back to the guy with the levers from the beginning of the
film and he puts this rig into park and the movie ends. Lynch is obviously trying to make some point about a guy being scared that his
life is going to be utterly ruined by growing up and having kids. Well, duh!
Like I need an art film to tell me that. The movie is stunning to behold in
spots, the black and white photography perfectly capturing the distorted
reality that make our nightmares so scary. The problem though is that so much
weird crap is going on, that the human element is gone (unless of course Lynch
was trying to show us how inhumane life is) and by that I mean that you get so
little of Henry as an actual human being that it's really hard to care a whole
lot about what he's going through (you end up feeling more sorry for the
monster baby for having such crap parents). Henry is so disassociated from
everything that you end up watching his trials and tribulations and rather than
empathizing with his fears and insecurities, you're saying, "Whoa! Can you
believe what just happened to that dude? It's funny and gross!" I liked a lot
of this movie and admired the fact that Lynch wasn't delivering us another
standard movie with completely linear story telling, but give me something to
latch onto here! The scenes where Henry was at Mary's parent's house were the
best, because Lynch was able to successfully capture the anxiety you feel when
you're
in that situation. Other people's families always appear strange to the
outsider and Lynch is able to nail that feeling dead on with the wild family
dinner the Xs were having. I would think most guys feel something similar to
the fear and wariness that Henry obviously felt, when meeting the girlfriend's
parents for the first time. You don't want to make a bad impression, but do
they have to be so damn strange? It is in moments like these where Lynch is
able to
anchor his esoteric imagery into an everyday situation that the movie lives up
to the hype. The problem is that the second half of the film becomes a parade
of bizarre images and any relation to reality is totally jettisoned. The
counter argument is that Henry is descending into madness because of everything
that he's confronting in life and that the movie is now taking us into Henry's
increasingly fractured mind. That's fine, but why do I even care if his mind
is fractured? The guy is a complete cipher, marked only by his crazy hair and
pinched ambivalence toward everything that transpires. That's not to say the
movie is a failure, it isn't and you should check it out if you get the chance;
it's genuinely unsettling, but if David could have laid off a little of the
whacky imagery or interspersed it with something approaching emotion, it would
have been even more effective.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
