A creepy, crawling, and slimy world of night visions, body horror, and psychosis, Eraserhead was the first feature-length film of the American surrealist David Lynch. It is dreamlike, immersive, and lucid even as it remains illogical and murky, willing to dive into its own darkness with pleased, decadent abandon.
Like a pudgier version of a young Emil Cioran, Jack Nance plays Henry Spencer as a reclusive, paranoid introvert with serious romantic problems. The seductress-next-door, played by Judith Roberts, informs him one evening that his girlfriend, Mary X, has invited him to dinner with her family. The ensuing dinner is one of the most repulsive, unsettling family dinners imaginable, culminating with the burbling bloodbath of a small chicken, and the query of Mary’s mother, played by Jeanne Bates: “Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse?” How intrusive.
After learning of a child (or a humanoid) to which Mary has given birth, Henry Spencer returns to his apartment where he and Mary are to nurture the alien-baby, which looks like a variant of the crawling, falling-from-the-sky spermatozoa that are the decorative motifs of the film. This apartment, surrounded by brick and an ambient soundscape that is nightmarish, claustrophobic, caving in, is to be the setting of the whirlwind departure from reality. Hysteria and hallucination ensue, the alien-baby becomes sick and covered with larvae, and Henry experiences the vision of the “Lady in the Radiator,” a disfigured woman that chirpily sings while stepping on the falling spermatozoa.
The set pieces of Eraserhead—the opening sequence of the “Man in the Planet”, the pseudo-beheading of Henry, the manufacture of pencils using his head, the eerie, addictive ditty of the Lady in the Radiator—these are unforgettable and haunting, and they make Eraserhead what it is: a stunning, trancelike, lucid plunge into the psychoses of self-disgust, parenthood phobias, and even a kind of repulsed misanthropy underlying the unease of dealing with the bodily functions and excretions. As repulsive and abject as it is luminous, human activity has never looked so despairing—and self-obsessed.
