Eraserhead: Welcome to David Lynch’s Dreamland

Eraserhead is a 1977 black & white experimental film made by David Lynch, one of the most insane & talented artists in film history. It is both a dream & a nightmare in which nothing makes any sense. Some people call it the strangest film they’ve ever seen. A lot of things happen in the movie but, at the same time, it seems as if nothing ever exists in this confusing world that is full of odd characters living their very odd lives.

To me, Eraserhead isn’t that weird. It’s simply a David Lynch movie.

Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), the protagonist in Eraserhead

Eraserhead is the most important feature film in David Lynch’s career, which marked the turning point in Lynch’s art life. He studied painting in college & his first movie, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), started with the idea of creating a moving painting. Lynch continued his experiments in The Alphabet (1968) & the Grandmother (1970).

David Lynch’s early short films: Six Men Getting Sick (1967), the Alphabet (1968) & the Grandmother (1970)

David Lynch hates generalizations. In Eraserhead, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) doesn’t represent any particular man in our society & the city doesn’t resemble any specific city on earth. They purely belong to David Lynch’s dreamland that reflects his personal life at that time, as he said in his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, & Creativity

We all reflect the world we live in. Even if you make a period film, it will reflect your time.

Lynch admits that he isn’t good with words & cinema gives him the power to tell stories that can hold abstractions. Eraserhead as well as other David Lynch movies is something that we must experience ourselves to enter Lynch’s subconscious dreamworld where things can go far beyond our imaginations & expectations.

Welcome to Eraserhead

There are several enigmatic objects in the film that aren’t given any particular meaning; which makes some people think Lynch’s films are nonsense & all messed up. They hate the film because they think the director himself doesn’t even know the answer for his own work. People want an explanation for what they’re watching. I believe Lynch knew really well what he was doing. His films were intuitively put together rather than randomly mixed up. They arouse more questions as we watch the film instead of promising its audience some explanation at the end. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the great Russian playwright, once said that

The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

A cute little animated worm

We can’t simplify art in one single interpretation. We, the audience, are given the power to create actions using our feelings & imaginations. A film that is full of unanswered questions can trigger more emotional & psychological responses than the one with a well-explained ending. Lynch strongly believes that the audience already understands the movie the way it is, even though they say they don’t get it. He values his audience’s intuition more than any interpretation. That’s why he doesn’t do director’s commentary tracks on his DVD releases. He wants the audience to feel the film by themselves rather than give them instructions on how they should interpret it.

There are so many ways to enjoy a movie. We tend to confine ourselves to the same old ideas that make us comfortable. The artist’s job is to get the audience out of their comfort zone to see the more beautiful sides of life. I believe a good film should be able to evoke our long-lost emotions & give its audience the freedom to experience their own unknown dreamland.

Anyone knows how to carve a man-made chicken?

In an interview in 1979, when asked about the making of Eraserhead, 33-year-old David Lynch said he’d think more about the audience next time he made a movie. It took him five years to finish Eraserhead due to financial problems. He thought the film would never be distributed, which is one of the reasons why it turned out to be so disturbing to some people. Lynch made Eraserhead for himself, not for the audience.

However, in his recent MasterClass, 73-year-old David Lynch shared that he always tries to stick with his initial ideas when making a movie instead of doing it for the audience. It normally takes a year to make a film & in that one year, the audience will change. The movie he intended for that particular group would no longer please its audience when it’s finished. The best thing we can do as creators is to rely on our intuition when creating something. Though the young David Lynch didn’t have much experience in filmmaking at the time, he trusted his instinct, which led to the creation of Eraserhead, one of the most significant movies in film history.

Inside Henry’s apartment building

In this intentional black & white movie, the audience is overwhelmed by its darkness. It reflects Lynch’s fear of fatherhood for his daughter who was born with severe birth defects. The gloomy atmosphere of Eraserhead is also affected by his time living in Philadelphia which was full of ‘violence, hate & filth’. Lynch has such an intriguing way to turn his personal darkness into something far beyond the melancholy in this world. Lights & shadows are juxtaposed into a hauntingly beautiful moving painting of a dreamlike world where David Lynch’s mythical creatures live.

The mysterious man on the planet

David Lynch loves painting & wanted to become a painter. This reflects in the way he worked with different types of textures in Eraserhead. Lynch picked a particular wallpaper not because he couldn’t afford to do it differently. He used a specific material so it would cast the type of shadow that he intended. Lynch also loves the texture of rotted bodies. Henry’s baby in Eraserhead may appear disgusting to some people but we can’t deny the fact that it has such a unique texture. It’s so bizarre but, at the same time, so fascinating as if it’s a living creature that was born to haunt the audience with its disfigured existence.

In the Grandmother (1970), Lynch already experimented with combining natural & artificial elements. He loves the way nature adds to man’s work. Henry’s bedroom in Eraserhead also has that kind of organic atmosphere in a man-made world with random piles of mud & hay in the corners of the room. In the middle of an abandoned industrial landscape, we can feel the presence of nature & its magnificent work in aging the planet. It gives us a sense of time passing by & changing everything into a masterpiece of mother nature.

David Lynch is not only a painter-filmmaker but also a musician. He has a really unique sense of music. He believes that the music needs to marry to the scene itself. In Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, & Creativity, he said

Sound is so important to the feel of a film. To get the right presence for a room, the right feel from the outside, or the right-sounding dialogue is like playing a musical instrument.

In Eraserhead, so many different layers of noises & ambience sounds are masterfully arranged, composing an eerie piece of music that creeps into our mind & makes us question the sanity of the whole world.

The singing lady inside the radiator

Eraserhead is a low-budget movie that was created through so many challenges & restrictions. At some point, David Lynch thought he had to forget about the project & go back to his ordinary life. But eventually, the movie turned out to be the beginning of a new chapter in his life & a whole new era of Hollywood surrealist cinema. Every artist always yearns for the freedom to express their creativity but only the great ones value constraints & see them as a thrust that pushes their works to the next level. Because they know so well that infinite freedom is expensive & can ruin a potentially great work of art.

Eraserhead & the making of it is so inspiring to contemporary young filmmakers who have been fighting the same battle in making art. Sometimes along the way, we start to question our own sanity in this insane world of humanity. I do believe there is no right or wrong in art. The greatest piece of art is the one that is truest to its creator.