Eraserhead

Director David Lynch died a couple of weeks back. I mentioned at the time that I had Eraserhead on my DVR, and that it would be airing in a couple weeks' time. That airing is coming up at the end of tonight's TCM primetime lineup, overnight tonight, or early Feb. 1 depending upon your point of view, at 4:15 AM.

Eraserhead is another of those movies that's very difficult to give a reasonable synopsis of, largely because it doesn't have much in the way of a plot. John Nance plays Henry Spencer, a man who seems to have weird dreams, although they might not be dreams considering what Lynch's version of the "real" world here is like. That real world has the feel of a post-apocalyptic cityscape. Henry had a job, but he's currently claiming to be on "vacation", one that seems permanent, and you wonder how anybody in this world supports themselves.

Henry seems interested in the woman who lives in the apartment across the hall, but he's not going to have the time to pursue her, in part because he spent time in the past pursuing another girl, Mary X, who is still living with her parents. They tell Henry that Mary got pregnant and gave birth, and since Henry is obviously the father, he's going to have to marry her. They go back to live in Henry's apartment, bringing the baby with them. Except that it's an inhuman baby, looking reminiscent of ET from the Steven Spielberg movie except without any wrinkles or light-up fingers. They don't know how to take care of the "baby", which cries all night as a result and drives Mary mad. She leaves Henry.

Henry starts to have more weird dreams, involving a deformed woman in his radiator who performs to Fats Waller organ music. There's another dream about a pencil factory, and Henry's head getting cut off so that his eraser-like hair can be used to make the pencil erasers. He also finds that the human woman across the hall has a human boyfriend. Henry tries to take care of the baby, but his attempt isn't particularly successful.

Eraserhead is another one of those movies that sharply divides opinion, which to me makes sense because it's a fairly surreal, plotless movie. It's easy to see why a lot of people would dislike it or think it pretentious. Indeed, as I said a few weeks ago, I had tried to watch it once before and gave up because of how I found it directionless. Giving it a second chance, I have to say that I still had a lot of difficulty warming up to Eraserhead. On the plus side, however, it's fairly clear that even at this young age Lynch knew how to compose striking shots and make something memorable. I found myself thinking that he probably could have benefited from some sort of co-auteur on his works balancing out his worst pretentious impulses.

I'm glad that I've finally seen Eraserhead, but I don't think it's a movie I'm really going to revisit.