Thursday, September 4, 2008

Great Horror Films : Eraserhead


Eraserhead is a 1977 surrealist-horror film written and directed by David Lynch. The film stars Jack Nance and Charlotte Stewart. Eraserhead polarized and baffled many critics and movie-goers, but has become a cult classic.[1]

In 2004, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Lynch has described his film as a "dream of dark and troubling things."[2]


Synopsis

The setting of the film is a slum in the heart of an industrial center. It is rife with urban decay, rundown factories, and a soundtrack composed almost exclusively of the noises of machinery. Henry Spencer (Nance) is a printer who is "on vacation." At the start of the film, Henry, who has not heard from his girlfriend, Mary X (Stewart) for a while, mistakenly believes that she has ended their relationship. He is invited to have dinner with Mary and her parents at their house. During dinner, Henry learns that Mary has just had a baby after an abnormally short pregnancy. Henry is then obliged to marry her.

Mary and the baby move into Henry's one-room apartment. The baby is hideously deformed and has a reptilian appearance: a large snout-nose with slit nostrils, a pencil-thin neck, eyes on the sides of its head, no ears, and a limbless body covered in bandages. It continually whines throughout the night.

A sleep-deprived Mary abandons Henry and the baby. After Mary leaves, Henry must care for the baby by himself, and he becomes involved in a series of strange events. These include bizarre encounters with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), a woman with grotesquely distended cheeks who lives in his radiator (she sings the iconic song "In Heaven"); visions of the ominous Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk); and a sexual liaison with his neighbor, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts).

The film's title comes from a dream sequence occurring during the last half hour of the film. In it, Henry’s head detaches from his body, sinks into a growing pool of blood on a tile floor, falls from the sky, and, finally, lands on an empty street and cracks open. A young boy (Thomas Coulson) finds Henry's broken head and takes it to a pencil factory, where Paul (Darwin Joston), the desk clerk, summons his ill-tempered boss (Neil Moran) to the front desk by repeatedly pushing a buzzer. The boss, angered by the summons, yells at Paul, but regains his composure when he sees what the little boy has brought. The boss and the boy carry the head to a back room where the Pencil Machine Operator (Hal Landon, Jr.) takes a core sample of Henry's brain, assays it, and determines that it is a serviceable material for pencil erasers. The boy is then paid for bringing in Henry's head. The Pencil Machine Operator then sweeps the eraser shavings off of the desk and sends them billowing into the air.

After waking from this dream, Henry looks out his window and sees two men fighting in the street. He then seeks out the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, but discovers that she is not home. The baby begins to laugh mockingly, and, shortly thereafter, Henry opens his door and sees the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall bringing another man back to her apartment. The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall looks at Henry, momentarily sees Henry's head transform into that of the baby, and appears frightened by her vision. Henry goes back into his apartment, takes a pair of scissors, and cuts open the baby's bandages, which turn out to be part of its flesh (or simply what is holding all of its organs together). By cutting the bandages, Henry splits open the baby's body and exposes its vital organs. As the baby screams in pain, Henry stabs its lung with the scissors. This causes the apartment’s electricity to overload, and as the lights flicker on and off, an apparition of the baby's head, grown to an enormous size, materializes in the apartment. Henry is then seen with eraser shavings billowing around behind his head. The last scene features Henry being embraced by the Lady in the Radiator. They are bathed in white light, and white noise builds to a crescendo, then stops as the screen goes black, and the credits begin to roll.


Lynch calls Eraserhead his "Philadelphia Story," emphasizing the fears and anxieties he experienced living in Philadelphia, attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.[3] While Lynch's experiences in Philadelphia inspired Eraserhead, contrary to popular belief, the film wasn't shot in Philadelphia, but rather Los Angeles.

Eraserhead developed from Gardenback, a script about adultery that Lynch wrote during his first year at the Centre for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The script for Eraserhead was only 21 pages long. Because of the film's unusual plot and the inexperienced director (Lynch had made three short films at the time), no movie studio expressed interest in the project. Lynch eventually won a grant from the American Film Institute, and built most of the sets in the basement of the AFI conservatory.[4]

A long-standing urban legend states that Lynch created the baby from an embalmed cow fetus. To this day, Lynch refuses to discuss how the baby was really made.

Although the baby's name is never given, it was nicknamed "Spike" by the cast and crew.

Aside from the AFI grant, the movie was financed by friends and family, including actress Sissy Spacek, who was married to Lynch's childhood friend Jack Fisk (he appears in Eraserhead as "The Man in the Planet"). Lynch claims he got a paper route to help finance it. Because of the lack of reliable funds, Eraserhead was filmed intermittently over the span of six years. Sets were disassembled and reassembled several times. The film was finally completed in 1977, premiering in March of that year.


Eraserhead focuses much more on imagery and mood than any kind of coherent plot. As such it is considered a difficult film to understand and is open to various interpretations. For example, the review at DVD Verdict offers at least three interpretations.[5] The story does not have a strictly linear plot, it is punctuated with fantasy/dream sequences of differing lengths, and the boundary between these sequences and the primary narrative strand is often blurred. Many have interpreted it as a visual-sound experience rather than a narrative or story, a film that is more about conveying a very specific and powerful mood and atmosphere. In an interview on the cleaned and remastered edition of the film (2006), Lynch said he has yet to read an interpretation of the film that is the same as his own.

As is the case with most unconventional artwork which has no explanation from the artist, there are many who believe the film to be highly over analyzed, and maintain that aside from the small basic script, Lynch filled the film with random and shocking elements simply to create a mood, leaving the difficult task of interpretation to critics and viewers.

With that in mind, a consistent pattern still emerges. The interpretations from DVD Verdictparasitic to the world (consistent with interpretation #3). He acts solely from a will to powerlessness: his only aim is neutralizing his self-expression (consistent with #2). He implicitly re-fuses mutualism and commensalism. Thereby, his world-view is severed from time (consistent with #1), and causality is experienced singularly as symbiosis. present us with, albeit most likely without intent, a buried strand that weaves in and out of all three. Henry suspects his own life is

Henry only experiences the movement and joining of symbols: a phenomenon systematically expounded by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. Lynch's move is to progressively demarcate Henry's biological reality, his survival instinct, out of the film entirely. Schopenhauer says about such a situation, "it would inevitably pass by us like an empty dream, or a ghostly vision..."[6] Henry works in printing—his only expression is reproduction and copies: impressions. Even still, he's on a hiatus from that! His life is void of living.

Nietzsche — drawing from Schopenhaeur — identifies music as this world's bridge to The Will. In this vein, Nietzsche claims, "Life without music would be a mistake."[7] The film's soundtrack consists of nothing but cold mechanistic collisions, except the muses from the The Lady in the Radiator about a place decidedly separate from life. Lynch completes Henry's character by bonding him with a representation of mere potential energy and non-existence. Henry completes his transformation into a symbiotic prop.

It has been noted that (consistent with #3) David Lynch's wife was pregnant with their first child when he started making the film, indicating it may be significant to the interpretation of the film.[8]


  • the character of the Log Lady was originally supposed to be a character in Eraserhead, but the idea was never put into the film; it was instead used in Lynch's television series Twin Peaks.
  • As a result of efforts by distributor Ben Barenholtz, the film made its way to many repertory theaters and independent cinemas.[9] It quickly became a cult classic and a standard at midnight movie showings for the next decade. Like many cult films, it was exceptionally popular on VHS given its limited box office gross.
  • Director Stanley Kubrick once stated in an interview with Michel Ciment that he would have liked to direct this film, as it was one of his favorite films.[11] Before beginning production on The Shining, Kubrick screened Eraserhead for the cast to put them into the atmosphere he wanted to convey. Other films that appear to have been influenced by Eraserhead: Tales from Gimli Hospital, The Institute Benjamenta, Barton Fink, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Begotten, and π.
  • Director George Lucas was a fan of the film and after seeing it, wanted to hire David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi. Lynch declined, fearing it would be more of his own vision rather than Lucas'.
  • Poet Charles Bukowski ranked Eraserhead among the few movies he deemed worthy of praise. Interviewed on the subject of cable television, Bukowski said, "We got cable TV here, and the first thing we switched on happened to be Eraserhead. I said, 'What’s this?' I didn’t know what it was. It was so great. I said, 'Oh, this cable TV has opened up a whole new world. We’re gonna be sitting in front of this thing for centuries. What next?' So starting with Eraserhead we sit here, click, click, click — nothing."[12]
  • A number of rock bands take their name from the film: the 1980s rockabilly group Erazerhead; the Northern California band Eraserhead, and Eraserheads, a popular Filipino band.[13] The band Henry Spencer take their name from the main character. Apartment 26 are named after Henry's address and they feature a sample from the Lady in the Radiator's "In Heaven" at the end of their song, "Heaven." The 1980s London indie band "Henry's Final Dream" also owe their name to this movie.
  • Bruce McCulloch, of Kids in the Hall fame, recorded a spoken word song in the character of a man who, once a year, goes on a weeklong drinking binge and watches Eraserhead the entire time. The song was included on his album Shame-Based Man, and a video was filmed and shown on Saturday Night Live in 1995. McCulloch was also in a sketch in Kids in the Hall that bore a resemblance to the surrealism of Eraserhead, where he plays a worker in a sausage factory who has similar hair to Jack Nance's character.
  • Brazilian-born electronic composer Amon Tobin samples dialogue from the film on the track "Like Regular Chickens", from his 1998 album Permutation. The dialogue is an excerpt from a scene in which Henry Spencer is having dinner with Mary X and her parents. Mary's father, Mr. X, serves a course of "man-made" miniature chickens, which Henry is asked to carve. The sample is of Henry asking, "Do I just, uh... Do I just cut them up like regular chickens?” to which Mr. X replies, "Sure, just cut them up like regular chickens."
  • Norwegian EBM band Apoptygma Berzerk included the sample "Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse" on their song "Seven Signs", from their second single, "The Apopcalyptic Manifesto".
  • The Indietronic band gAMERON!, is most known for their track "Up Like Regular", which was inspired by the film.
  • In issue eight of Spawn, the phrase "In Heaven Everything Is Fine" is featured prominently.
  • New Jersey band Alex and the Horribles have two song titles which are influenced by characters from Eraserhead, "Girl Across the Hall" and "Mary X".

[edit] DVD Availability

This movie was once notoriously difficult to acquire in Region 1 (North America) of the DVD region code. Until recently, the only way to acquire this DVD was to purchase it (at $39) through davidlynch.com. The version of the film on the official Region 1 DVDs was remastered for the medium by Lynch himself.

Viewers who ordered the film from David Lynch's website received the disc packaged in a special presentation box. The DVD included a deleted scene and a 90-minute documentary about the making of the movie, which essentially consists of Lynch sitting before a microphone, smoking cigarettes, and talking about his memories of making the movie (almost like a director's commentary track, but with video). During the piece he also calls Catherine Coulson and they reminisce together about the making of the film.

On January 10, 2006, Eraserhead was made commercially available through retail stores, most DVD rental stores, and Amazon.com when it was redistributed by Subversive Cinema. This re-release had normal DVD packaging instead of the large boxset from David Lynch's website, but the content on the disc itself was the same. The UK DVD release is Region-free, as is the Korean DVD release, but it has been out of print for several years. Copies of both foreign DVD releases have turned up on eBay. It was released on DVD in Australia, but the DVD was discontinued around 2003-04. There has been no information of a re-release.

It has recently been announced that the film will be re-released in Region 2 in the UK on October 20, 2008 alongside a Region 2 release of The Short Films of David Lynch. [14]








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