Part
1: The Preamble – Where Your Nightmares End |
"All
the nightmares came today, and it looks as though
they're here to stay." |
David
Bowie – Oh! You Pretty Things |
For
every film fan, every would-be film-maker, there are cinematic
experiences that are genuinely life-changing. They tend
to come early on in our love-affair with film, when we
get our first glimpses of what lies beyond the fare offered
by the local cinemas or TV. Of course,
I'm talking about a time when we did not have access to
films on video, DVD or specialist satellite movie channels,
when to see a non-mainstream movie usually meant travelling
to the nearest big city and hunting out the film clubs and independent
cinemas.
I
was at film school when I first began to really expand
my experience of the true possibilities offered by cinema.
I was lucky in this respect – the school itself screened
a variety of films as part of a once-a-week evening class
that only four of us ever attended, which ranged from works by acknowledged masters like Josef von Sternberg
to the extremes of experimental cinema. In addition, there was
an Art Centre cinema just a short train ride away, at which
splendid double-bills would regularly play, and in the holidays
I worked in London just ten minutes walk from the National
Film Theatre, enabling me to pop in after work and catch
whatever was playing. Cinematically speaking, these were amazing times.
But
my favourite London film hangout was always The Scala cinema,
and that's back in the days when it was in Tottenham Street,
before it was relocated to Kings Cross after their building
was taken over by the newly launched Channel 4. The Scala
ran different double-bills every day, GREAT double-bills,
with the emphasis on cult cinema from the present and
past. Just occasionally, they would put the double features
on hold to run a single film for a several days in a row,
or in exceptional cases for a few weeks. Which brings us nicely
to Eraserhead.
I
have to admit was intrigued from the moment I heard that title. I mean,
Taxi Driver at least gave you a clue what to expect,
but what the hell did Eraserhead mean?
Words started appearing in reviews, words like 'surreal'
and 'nightmare' and 'original'. And then there were the
images, black-and-white promotional stills
that looked like no other I'd ever laid eyes on. Discussions
were taking place about the notorious 'baby', about the woman
who sang from inside a radiator, about the lead character's
electric shock hairdo. But for a film that clearly leaned
towards the experimental, it was prompting some unexpected
responses. The populist Films Illustrated, for
example, really liked it. The more highbrow Films
& Filming, however, did not. It was only the following
month, when the same Film a& Filming reviewer was laying into Phantasm (another favourite of mine),
that he confessed that his hostility towards Eraserhead
was due in no small part to his discomfort at the idea
of someone digging around in his nightmares and throwing
them up on screen. Now I was really hooked.
The
following weekend, I went off to London and bought my ticket
and descended into the darkness. The Scala was like that
in those golden days – the cinema was in the basement
and at its rear was a corridor that led to a café-bar,
a corridor with a window on its wall that allowed you to
catch a glimpse of the film that was playing before you
went in to watch it. Catching even a few frames of Eraserhead
would stop you in your tracks, but still not prepare you
for what was to follow.
You
have to remember that back when it was first shown there
was little to prepare the viewer for what they
were about to experience. Those coming to the film from
a modern perspective have Lynch's subsequent work to train
themselves up on (start at The Elephant Man
and it's sinister dream sequences, trip through Twin
Peaks, immerse yourself in Blue
Velvet and try to get your head round Lost
Highway and you'll be about ready). Back in 1979,
when the film hit the UK, we had only the back-catalogues
of Luis Buñuel and Lindsay Anderson to work from,
and both directors were by then in their twilight years
– Buñuel had already made his final film, Cet
obscur objet du désir, and Anderson was
just three years away from his last major flirt with social surrealism
in Britainnia Hospital. To really get
yourself in the mood you had to go right back to 1928
and Buñuel and Dali's seminal surrealist short, Un
Chien Andalou. I was very familiar with that
film, but I was still thoroughly caught out by Eraserhead.
I
remember emerging from the Scala basement in a daze and
being disproportionately relieved to discover that the real world was still bathed in daylight. But even before I reached the
front door I'd done an about-face and was back at the
box office to ask how much longer the film was screening
for. I knew I couldn't wait a week, so skipped some classes
and made my way back to London a few days later, and again
a few days after that. It was all I could talk about,
to the extent that the very mention of the word 'Eraserhead'
would prompt instant groans from even my closest and most
tolerant friends.
 |
I
eventually convinced the manager of the local Arts Centre
cinema that he should run it for a week and cajoled everyone I knew into going to see it. This is the fatal flaw
of any obsession – so caught up was I in the film's dark spell that
I had utterly failed to realise what later seemed obvious,
that a film such as this was always going to divide opinion and might even prompt genuinely hostile reactions.
I was to learn that lesson repeatedly in the week
the film had its local screening, during which I was called
several names, had angry judgements
made about my taste in film, plus a few sincere enquiries
about my mental health. One of my fellow
students felt physically ill after the screening, only
to open his fridge when he got home to find that his flatmate
had laid out the ingredients for a rabbit stew.
You'd be amazed how much a skinned rabbit looks like the Eraserhead baby. It was three days before
he ate another meal. One of my lecturers told me that
he didn't know if it was the best film he had ever seen
or the worst. It was, he freely acknowledged, a brilliantly
made work, but he did not believe any film should have such
a bleak view of the world. Remember
that comment, I'll be coming back to it. Perhaps most
painful for someone so positively affected by the film
were the two screenings I attended that prompted outraged
vocal reactions from the audience – I mean, some people hated it, and with a passion that genuinely rattled
me. One particularly pissed-off woman emerged from the
cinema to be greeted by her children, who had found other
things to do while mummy went to see a film that was accurately
but unhelpfully described on the poster as 'the most original
horror movie in years'. "Was it good?" they
asked. "No!" she spat back, "It was AWFUL!"
But
here and there I began encountering people who, when you
mentioned the title, would widen their eyes, let their
jaw drop a little and lean forward to kick off a discussion
that could go on for hours. This is the very essence of
cult cinema, a film that develops a passionate following
in spite of box-office performance or the disdain of the
many. A few years later I took a friend who had been bowled
over by Lynch's most unexpected second feature, The
Elephant Man, to see it.* At the film's conclusion
he fell of his seat, stared wildly at the ceiling and
screamed, "Has it gone away yet??" That very
afternoon he was sitting at home with a wooden board and a large
lump of clay, making a model of the Eraserhead
baby. The cult had grown again, just a bit. Over time
it would continue to do so and turn up in the most unexpected
places, as a lyric on a song by The Clash, as an insult from a
cop in House Party, on a t-shirt in a music video by Cabaret Voltaire, and so on. It has found fans both
expected and surprising, with John Waters actively promoting
it on its release and Stanley Kubrick once inviting some
representatives from Lucas Films back to his house to watch it, describing
it at the time as his favourite film.
It remains as divisive a movie as it ever was, but also,
I would submit, as original and exciting as when it first
screened, in part because no other bugger has ever tried
to emulate it. Even Lynch himself has never again gone
this deep into the avant garde, at least in feature form,
although Lost Highway certainly swims
in similar waters and his one-minute contribution to
the 1996 Lumière and Company is
even more abstract and every bit as artistically thrilling.
But
what's that? You haven't seen Eraserhead?
You've never heard of it? Well in either case, it's time
you were introduced to the dark, bizarre world of Henry
Spencer...
