A Practical Head

Happy Halloween. Since I seem to be revisiting old favourites this Halloween season, I watched 1977's Eraserhead last night. I still love this movie, David Lynch's first film, but sometimes I wish I could find old Lynch movies as disturbing as people who hate Lynch do. It's like how I stopped having nightmares once I learned to enjoy them. But, boy, what a masterpiece of nightmares Eraserhead is.

When we watch a movie, a work of fiction, we're always at some level aware of the artificiality. That's why art needs help to push it into the emotional registers to give it the required visceral impact. That can be as simple as having a good musical score. It can also mean having a woman give birth to a slimy little dinosaur worm wrapped in gauze.

That's a good way to capture the anxieties of parenthood. More comforting narratives try to tell you that these normal events in life follow reassuring patterns. Lynch isn't making a movie about or for such conventions. Life is weird as fuck, there are always gross, brutal, and absurd surprises. That's what he gives us in Eraserhead, a true transmutation of experience into cinematic form.

I love the shots of Henry (Jack Nance) in bed with Mary (Charlotte Stewart). When he looks across the sheets at her, it seems like an alien landscape.

And there's that terrific sequence where she's struggling with her sheets like a straitjacket. It all captures the strangeness of having another human being in bed with you, with all the weirdness and discomfort that might entail.

You could say the movie's called Eraserhead because of the dream Henry has where his head is ground into erasers for little pencils. Or maybe it's because his identity as father of the Gauze Baby seems to erase his old self, as we see in shots where his head is replaced by that of the baby.

Or maybe it's because, finally, all things compel Henry to erase them.

Eraserhead is available on The Criterion Channel.