Part
3: What's it all about? – "Well Henry, What do you know?" |
For
some years I was happy not to even try and deconstruct or
interpret Eraserhead. It didn't seem to
matter what was going on underneath the surface – Eraserhead
was about the experience of watching and listening to
the film, not the story or the subtext or the reasoning behind it.
Like a much loved painting or sculpture, it was enough
to every now and again revisit the gallery and let the work
just wash over me. It is this very element, I would argue,
that gives the film its multi-play longevity. But sooner
or later, as with any work of art, you grow accustomed enough
with its structure and fine detail to feel the need to dig deeper,
to speculate on what the various elements actually mean. Surely such a meticulously constructed film cannot be as random as it initially seems? Certainly
there is a sense of being pointed in a very specific direction
by the central narrative and this has been read by many
as autobiographical on Lynch's part, a reflection of feelings
and fears over his own domestic situation.
1967
was a big year for the young David Lynch. A student at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he married
his girlfriend and fellow student Peggy Reavey after she
became pregnant with his child. Peggy herself admits that
he was a reluctant father ("but a very loving one"*),
and Lynch's art at the time took a noticeably darker turn,
with his painting The Bride featuring the abstracted
figure of woman aborting her own child. Jennifer was born
the following spring, and that same year Lynch made his
first short film, The Alphabet, an unsettling
play on the sounds and images of childhood and featuring
the distorted cries of his own, new born baby.
Work
on Eraserhead began just three years after
daughter Jennifer's birth, but Lynch admits that he has
no recollection of just when the idea first came to him
or even when he first wrote the script. About to invest
considerable time and effort into a project that may never
help to pay a single bill or even launch him on a career
that would enable him to do so in the future, the young Lynch
was facing the prospect of raising a family that he might
struggle to both support and be able to devote the appropriate
amount of time to. Even Jennifer Lynch herself, when questioned
on the film, has suggested that the baby may have been inspired
by her, and acknowledged that a popular reading of the film
was a reflection of her father's fear of parenthood.
Think
about if for a minute. Henry is living in virtual squalor,
clearly unable to afford anywhere decent to live but making
enough to provide the bare essentials. Then his girlfriend
gives birth and he has to support two extra mouths on the
same meagre wage that had previously proved barely adequate for his
own humble needs. The baby, when it arrives, is a monster. It spits
out food, it cries all night, it gets sudden and inexplicable
diseases and it begins to destroy Henry's relationship with
his wife, who now twitches with revulsion if he even
lays a hand on her. When Mary runs off to her mother's,
the baby effectively nails Henry to the apartment, preventing
him from escaping its walls and even laughing mockingly at
his predicament. This is a vivid realisation of fatherhood
and family life at its most wretched.
One
night, as Mary thrashes about in an agitated sleep state
and almost ejects Henry from the bed, we glimpse a woman
who bears little resemblance to the one Henry married, her
face worn and her mouth and eyes the source of peculiar
noises. To his horror, Henry discovers that she is also
producing, from somewhere in her lower body, a string of
the embryonic creatures identical to the one in the film's opening sequence.
What were previously symbols of Henry's own ability to
unexpectedly procreate (there is an unmistakeable sperm-like
aspect to their shape) become a chilling reminder of Mary's ability
to do likewise, repeatedly if necessary, producing yet more
horrible creatures to lie screaming on the table. No wonder,
then, that Henry's first fantasy involving The Lady in the
Radiator has her gleefully crushing the life out of the
creatures with the heel of her shoe.
The
scene in which Henry visits Mary for dinner is a nightmare
version of an often horrible moment in many a young man's
life when you first meet the girlfriend's family, and are judged
by people you have never previously met using mysterious criteria on alien territory.
The awkward embarrassment of this situation is captured
perfectly here, not least in Henry's spectacularly uncomfortable posture when seated, but the whole thing moves
into the genuinely surreal at meal time, when Lynch plays
with images of birth, sex, menstruation and the adolescent
fantasy/fear of a come-on from the future mother-in-law.
When their relationship later falters, Henry is tempted into infidelity
by The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, a liaison that is
again almost disrupted by the wailing, life-changing child.
As the two descend slowly into a milky-white pool of sexual
bliss, light once again gives way to darkness as Henry finds
himself in the company of the Lady in the Radiator,
whom he is unable to physically touch. Instead he becomes
victim to his own personal terrors, which concludes with his decapitation
and the transportation of his head to a pencil factory,
where it becomes the raw material for pencil-top erasers.
You see, there is a reason for that title. I'm not going
to even try to deconstruct this sequence, but will note that
it features a rare screen appearance by actor Darwin Joston, so memorable
as Napoleon Wilson in John Carpenter's Assault
on Precinct 13.
Back
in Henry's version of the real world, our hero clings to
the hope of a further encounter with his attractive neighbour and sits in his apartment, dressed in his best clothes and listening
for the elevator that will announce her return. When the moment finally
comes, Henry opens his door to be greeted by the woman
and her latest companion, a virtual caricature of salacious,
middle-aged sleaze. If she'll sleep with this guy, she'll
sleep with anyone, the final nail in the coffin of Henry's
self-esteem. As her apartment door closes both on Henry's prying
eye and all hope he had of a future with her, the baby laughs mockingly
at him. This is the crucial moment for Henry. He has lost
his wife, his independence and his sense of self, and all because
of the arrival of this malformed creature, which becomes
the focus for all of Henry's resentment, his failure and
fear, and leads to a notorious finale that is without question the
film's most subtextually disturbing scene, as well as its
most graphically horrific. Driven
by a mixture of cat-killing curiosity and pent-up frustration,
Henry attempts to cut off the swathe of bandages that envelop
the creature's lower body, only to discover to his horror
that the bandages are its lower body. As the baby's body opens like a blooming flower and blood
spurts from its mouth, Henry thrusts the scissors
into the exposed organs, an act of instinctive
revulsion as much as a half-hearted attempt to finish what
he inadvertently started. It's a story pulled straight from
the headlines, that of a father who overreacts to the cries
of his child and strikes it and in the process does far more damage than
he could ever have intended. But Lynch takes this one horrific
stage further – Henry hasn't hit his child, he has mutilated
it.
As
the baby's head grows to gigantic proportions and looms
in the darkness over the cowering figure of Henry like a physical
representation of his anxiety and guilt, the Man in the Planet loses
control of his machinery and in turn the man who is under his power. The planet
itself begins to disintegrate. Finally, in a blaze of white,
Henry is united with the Lady in the Radiator and the two
embrace. Is this fantasy or reality or the afterlife? Have
Henry's actions driven him mad or to suicide? Who's to say.
But as the Lady in the Radiator so memorably and musically
assures us earlier, "In Heaven, everything is fine."
Of
course absolutely every word of the above could be complete
hogwash. This is just one possible reading of a text that
is open to impossibly wide interpretation, and this only
covers a fraction of its dense layering. Are the mounds
of earth and bracken that sit in Henry's apartment (and,
if you look closely, Mary's house) just a reflection of
Lynch's love of the organic or do they have a deeper meaning?
What of the small, grub-like creature that is left in Henry's
mailbox and crawls in and out of the holes in the wall,
expanding in size as it does so? And just why is Henry's
head turned into pencil erasers? Like so much else in the film, it's
left for you to decide. It's one of the most endearing
qualities of Eraserhead that even when
you don't know what's going on, it makes a sort of perverse
sense. And that, surely, is the very essence of dreams.
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