And therein lies its power and its uniqueness. Although part of a larger movement in 1970s American film culture that embraced the concept of “the midnight movie,” turning riotous amateur works like John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), bizarre foreign art films like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1971), and off-beat studio experiments like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) into must-see-multiple-times late-night phenomena, Eraserhead still stands apart, a fitting tribute to its indelible, yet fascinating and unforgettable weirdness. Not surprisingly, the film was not an immediate success, and mainstream critics attacked it when it premiered at the Film Expo in Los Angeles (the critic for Variety wrote it off as “a sickening bad-taste exercise” with “little substance or subtlety”). It was initially distributed by Ben Barenholz, an exhibitor-turned-distributor who had effectively invented the concept of the midnight movie with his distribution strategy for El Topo six years earlier. Barenholz released Eraserhead slowly on the midnight circuit, where it gained traction with audiences seeking something different and eventually became a fixture of late-night screenings for the next half-decade.

Shot in beautifully expressive black and white by cinematographers Herbert Cardwell (who died two years into the production) and Frederick Elmes (who would go on to shoot films for Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and Todd Solondz), Eraserhead takes place almost entirely inside dark, cramped interiors, including the tortured headspace of its nebbish protagonist, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), whose appearance is both nerdish (his white socks showing beneath his high-water pants, his pocket protector stuffed with pens) and bizarre (his towering shock of frizzy hair, reminiscent of the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein). Henry lives a solitary life in a small, one-room apartment in a post-industrial world of decaying factories and empty streets. Early in the film he is summoned to dinner with the family of his ex-girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart), whose creepy parents (Allen Joseph and Jeanne Bates) inform him that he has fathered a premature baby and that he and Mary must be wed and raise it.

The baby, which was purposefully withheld from all advertising material for years at Lynch’s insistence, is the film’s unsettling centerpiece of both gross-out discomfort and oddly moving pathos. There is never any explanation, but the child is a physically deformed monstrosity whose waxy, elongated face resembles an embryonic horse and whose body lacks arms and legs. It is constantly lying on its back, usually wailing in a skin-crawling whine; its fundamental humanity is denied by its alien appearance, which is why both Henry and Mary react to it with a mixture of disgust, frustration, and outright bafflement.

When Mary finally loses it and goes back to her parents’ house in a fit of sleep-deprived exasperation, Henry is left alone with the child, which sends him into a tailspin dreamscape that may or may not be fully separable from his ostensible life. The fact that Henry’s inner and outer worlds are not clearly defined marks Eraserhead as an obvious experiment in subjective storytelling, although any attempt to make absolute sense of its various plot turns and surrealist detours are dead ends. There is certainly meaning to be found, both social and psychological, and for all its weirdness, the film is actually quite engaging on an emotional level. We feel for poor Henry, whose inarticulateness and social awkwardness have ensured his marginalization. At the same time, though, the film is replete with moments of pitch black humor and bizarro sight gags, particularly in the dinner sequence, which plays as a grotesque parody of family values at their most twisted (Lynch also touches on the destruction of nature, which is nowhere to be found aside from a dead plant on Henry’s bedside table).

However, as much as it can be viewed as social satire, the film is best understood as a series of images and ideas, mostly driven by fear, paranoia, and revulsion, all of which is heightened by the film’s discordant soundtrack, which literally assaults the viewer with a rattling sonic mixture of industrial noise and ambient hiss. This is perhaps why initial critics were so turned off to it—they were disgusted by the effectiveness with which Lynch elicited their disgust.

Yet, there is a clear sense of humanity cutting through the film’s off-putting surface, especially (ironically) in the deformed child. To this day Lynch has refused to divulge how he and his crew created the illusion of the creature, whose visual realism is such that it is hard to imagine that organic matter was not somehow involved (many have speculated that it is essentially a puppet inside an embalmed cafe fetus). The creature’s rolling eyes and lolling tongue make it repulsive, yet its constant crying and vulnerability make it impossible to reject outright. As much as we may want to distance ourselves from it, its pathetic attempts to get attention and care are nothing if not heart-rending, adding a depth of feeling to a film that is too often written off as an effective, but ultimately shallow display of visual weirdness. As he would prove in his first studio feature, The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch was not so much interested in the surface of the freak show, but rather in what lies beneath.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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