Movie Review: Eraserhead

I watched the 1977 David Lynch film, Eraserhead, last night. If you have seen the movie, that first sentence alone should be enough to bring back nightmarish memories of the baby, the chicken dinner, the woman in the radiator, and the titular scene where Henry has a dream that he is decapitated and a core of his head is used to make pencil erasers. (If you haven’t seen it, I recommend reading the plot summary on the wikipedia entry to get some context.)

Eraserhead is the type of movie that is not enjoyable to watch. It doesn't make sense, in the traditional sense of the word sense; the images are claustrophobic or grotesgue; there is barely any dialogue; the special effects are rudimentary; and it is difficult to identify with any of the neurotic characters. And yet, the movie is brilliant precisely because it gives you so much to think about without steering you towards right answers. It’s unsettling—but it is by being unsettled that we are provoked to think. It is a movie that perhaps reveals more about the viewer than the creator of the film.

On the surface, it was Kafkaesque. It also reminded me of Little Otik as a movie about the fear of parenthood, the fear of having a child that ruins your life. It could also be compared to such recent films as Knocked Up and Juno as exploring the effects of an unwanted pregnancy on the dysfunctional couple involved. Maybe it is the male version of The Yellow Wallpaper: in Eraserhead the woman walks out and leaves the man to be slowly driven mad by the mutant baby's cries. Maybe it is a pro-abortion film, suggesting that fetal termination would have been a far better option than having the sickly mutant child later murdered by its deranged father.

Or maybe it is a treatise on the futility of enforcing the societal mold of the nuclear family in a post-nuclear age. The meet-the-parents scene in this movie is even more absurd and awkward than in the more recent movie Meet the Parents. The mother confronts Henry about having "sexual intercourse" with her daughter and insists that since an offspring has been produced, they must now get married. This, despite their dysfunctional relationship (perhaps literally embodied by the mutant baby?) and despite the parents’ lack of marital bliss. Babies and marriage must go together despite the fact that the marriage would be dysfunctional and the baby is not even a human baby.

Maybe Eraserhead is a comment on the perception of free will. Is the man in the moon pulling the levers just a man-behind-the-curtain that really has no power, or is he the embodiment of fate, really controlling the lives below? Henry and Mary certainly seem to be submitting to their fate--except when Mary has had enough of the mutant baby's cries and leaves. Although she seems crazier than Henry, maybe it is like in Catch-22 where going insane is actually the sane response to living in a dreary one-room apartment in a bleak, post-apocalyptic industrial town with a mutant baby that cries all night and a husband that is little more than flesh and frizzy hair. She is driven insane by her situation and gets out of it. Why does Henry stay? Even his tepid murder of the baby seems accidental--not like a conscious decision. Does he believe the man controlling the levers is really in control and he is just along for the ride?

This movie was also unique in that it was filled with sperm imagery. We are all used to phallic imagery, but how often do authors or directors go to the source and focus on those little spermies? An argument can be made (one must use passive voice when discussing these things) that the film is highlighting the disparity between the sex drive--that primordial urge--with it's evolutionary purpose--procreation. Who is actually thinking of cute cherubic babies (the epitome of sweet innocence) while doing the nasty (many sexual euphemisms actually reveal the societal view that sex is somehow "dirty"). This movie takes this contradiction and shows what would happen if society wasn't capable of doublethink. The "cherubic baby" is a horrific mutant--it is what the result of "doing the nasty" should look like. The societal attitudes towards sex have been manifested physically in the baby.

Then there is the fascinating relationship Henry has with the seductive girl-next-door. It is she who begins the limited dialogue of the movie by informing Henry that he got a phone call and is supposed to go to Mary's house for supper. So immediately we see him trapped between the sexy woman who clearly lusts for him, and his duty to his more homely girlfriend. He goes to the girlfriend’s, eats an awkward dinner, learns she had a baby prematurely and they must get married, they get married, she moves in, mutant baby cries, wife leaves and then--much time has passed since the initial encounter--the sexy neighbor shows up on the premise that she locked herself out of her apartment.

They make out for a while and presumably have sex, even although the sexy neighbor is clearly distracted by the crying mutant baby. The implication is clear: having a baby is a major impediment to hot sex. But, our recent viewing of sperm imagery must not let us forget that baby and sex are intricately linked. When the hot neighbor looks at the crying baby, is she wondering if she'll end up with something like that as a result of this encounter? She must--because she doesn't seem as interested in kissing Henry anymore, once reminded of the ultimate consequence. Henry, however, is in some sort of denial of the relationship between the baby and sex, or, he has compartmentalized it to where the freak baby is only a result of his sex with his deranged girlfriend, and this woman, being sexier, would not give him a child. Thus he has drawn distinctions, perhaps, between different types of sex. Madonna-whore complex, perhaps.

This was the only party of the movie where it seemed that Henry was being assertive and controlling his fate--he turns her face back towards him and continues to emphatically kiss her--clearly controlling her will and thwarting her urge to leave. It can be inferred that Henry’s sex drive is the only thing that can override his apathetic approach to life and his submission to his fate.

Later, Henry sees the sexy neighbor woman entering her apartment while making out with an older, ickier man. You can see Henry's disgust: of course he had somehow imagined he was special, not that she was a whore. Now he views her as a whore, but in doing so, he is now shown with a head that resembles the sperm imagery--but it also kind of resembles the head of the mutant baby. This blurring of images--sperm and baby--shows the biological relationship between the two entities. Furthermore, by replacing the protagonist’s head with this blurred image, we realize that he is really just a sperm-baby himself, while at the same time, he is viewed by the woman as being a sperm-baby. Babies are pure Id, and so is he, in that moment of hatred, jealousy, and disgust.

But hasn't he been Id all along? Doesn't society, with all its rules, just help us to hide (or repress, Freud would remind us) our Id among all our social conventions, particularly marriage. And isn’t marriage really just a way to legitimize--while at the same time separating--the connection between sperm and baby. When married couples have a baby, they're having a family. It's normal, natural, expected. In our minds, we think: they're married, they had a baby. We don't have to think about the fact that they had sex to have the baby. When an unmarried woman has a baby, we are forced to think about the fact that she had sex (since we don't have the word "married" to stand in) which makes us uncomfortable, and therefore she must wear the scarlett letter so that she too feels uncomfortable.

Now, what about the title and his dream where his head is used for erasers? On the one hand, I think it just means his head was soft, rubbery, not much in there. We hardly see any evidence of a personality or intellect throughout the whole movie. But there’s got to be something to the fact that it is being used for erasers, not just rubber bouncing balls or pillow stuffing. Is his head turned into an eraser because that is what we do with out superior intellect—use it to erase things, to choose what to block out and forget—such as the connection between sex and babies?