RETRO REVIEW: Eraserhead (1977)

Written & Directed by David Lynch.

Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jack Fisk, Judith Anna Roberts, Jeanne Bates and Laurel Near.

1977, Unrated, 89 minutes.

The film begins with ominous ambient noise, and it doesn’t let up for almost ninety minutes. The first thing we see is space. A man with his hair strangely coiffed floats sideways amongst the abyss (image below). He doesn’t say a word as the shot lingers on his concerned face, moving up and down independently of any actual movement on  his part. The man disappears and we track through space towards a rocky planet until we reach its surface and through a hole in the roof of a lone building. Inside this building is a man with skin that appears as though it might be plagued with leprosy. He stares out a window, seemingly into nothingness.

This is roughly the first four minutes of David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead, and if you’re not on board by this point, then you probably won’t ever be. Not to sound elitist by saying this, but Eraserhead is just one of those movies that you either love or you hate. This reviewer sides with the former sentiment.

Jack Nance, who would go on to have smaller roles in almost all of David Lynch’s films to follow, stars as the irrepressibly shy Henry Spencer, the man with the aforementioned hairdo, as he discovers his melodramatically awkward girlfriend, Mary (Charlotte Stewart), is pregnant. She gives birth to a deformed, reptilian baby and he struggles to take care of it once she walks out on them both.

Set in an industrial wasteland and filmed in black and white, Eraserhead is a surrealist nightmare where everything seems a little off and nothing is spelled out for you with absolute certainty. There is by no means a traditional narrative structure at work here. In fact, the film goes on for long stretches without any dialogue (I think we are eleven minutes into the movie before someone says a single word), and when it does come, it’s sparse. In the absence of the spoken word, our ears are filled with what David Lynch refers to as “room tones.”

It’s very much a “calling card” film for its director, inciting the basic themes and filmic stylings to be found in subsequent works. The use of room tones to give off a mood is near the top of the list, and it is perhaps the most fantastic example of using the background noise as the score for a majority of the film’s running time. The acting feels so awkward and off-kilter as well, but it is all done by design, as though everything the major characters say and do doesn’t make sense even to them, kind of like how it would in a dream.

Despite its dour nature, Eraserhead comes from a very passionate place for the director. It took him and his crew five long years to make this movie, with lack of funding stalling the production at several points. If you buy the new Blu-ray Criterion release, you get in-depth interviews and featurettes on everything that went into the making of this film. It’s all very fascinating.

Analysis of the film can go many ways, and the filmmakers are tight-lipped about which interpretation is correct. This is partly what makes it so fascinating beyond its distinct atmosphere and eccentric personality. It can support many claims as to what it’s all about. I have my own theories but I’ll let you decide for yourself, leaving you with the conclusion that Eraserhead is a fantastic film and an intriguing debut for filmmaker David Lynch, who would go on to create equally fascinating and enigmatic works such as Blue Velvet, the television show Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive. I highly recommend giving it a shot.

If you enjoyed N. Demmy’s piece, you can find his latest work right HERE and his earlier articles and reviews over HERE.

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