Eraserhead (1978)
Cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewert, Jeanne Bates
Director: David Lynch
Synopsis: Along with Badlands the most stunning debut film ever!
Reviewed by: Zeeshan Mahmud

“A dream of dark and troubling things.” – David Lynch

Without a moment’s doubt Eraserhead is the most original work in cinema ever. Jack Nance stars as Henry, a troubled man living a hellish nightmare (possibly post-apocalyptic) conceived by Lynch. The world of EH is set in a terrifying, dreadfully bleak hell that borders on incredible surrealism and the most terrifying depths of ideaspace. EH is, if you don’t consider the apocalyptic narrative or the disorienting direction, a film about the fears of fatherhood and the inability to handle the responsibility that accompanies them.

Always agreeable, Henry doesn’t say more than yes after his girlfriend informs him of her pregnancy and requests a marriage. The marriage totters towards disintegration when the baby is born. It’s nearly impossible to describe but try to imagine what an enormous torso of a skinned degenerated lamb would look like. The baby is so hideous and shocking that even twenty years later there isn’t a film that has created a monster more menacing, threatening and unsettling than Lynch has. The baby hardly ever stops it’s intensely upsetting wails and not only is the viewer driven to the edge by the baby’s incessant cries, so is Henry.

Descending slowly into intolerance and apathy, all of Henry’s nightmares are waking but his dreams are of a heaven where a woman sings in a bizarrely emotive voice, “In Heaven, Everything is fine.” Lynch shows us that real horror isn’t a man in a hockey mask or an undead beast. Real horror is doors slightly ajar, pregnant with terrifying possibility, wails that would make any Banshee sound nearly as agreeable as pop music and the dread emitted by common objects like radiators. Lynch taps into an unknown so alien that it is impossible not to feel an unknowing anxiety and unease. The film does not just follow lonely elements of terror but in a few sequences, astounds with Lynch’s cosmic imagination.

EH is deeply atmospheric, intensely worrying and sometimes alarmingly beautiful. Lynch never has and apparently never will reproduce the tour de force he accomplished with EH. Art students should especially watch Eraserhead for inspiration and personal study. The lighting alone gives the film enormous depth with Lynch constantly at play with the foregrounds and backgrounds. When the lights turn back on and the final phantasmagorical scene has passed, you will probably be confused as to what the film meant. But it isn’t more important to solve the intricate riddle of Eraserhead (interpretations vary and the director himself has declined to share his interpretation with anyone) than to watch a gifted artist at work.