Eraserhead (1977)

There is something very intimidating about art, especially in the context of David Lynch. Eraserhead (1977) frustrates me. Its ambiguity makes the movie appear completely intangible and exists as the root of my agony; each viewing changes the film right before my eyes.

After watching it for the fourth, fifth, might have been the sixth time when I was 17, I felt obligated to "conquer" it. Blame it on my cinephilic ego, ill-placed ambition, or just plain naiveté of surrealist cinema. It feels strange to have acted that offensive towards the film, but I suppose it was my natural reaction. When a work is merely defined as entertainment we tend to let it go-we ignore anything beyond face value. The bomb explodes. The robot transforms. Art, however, tends to suggest analyses beyond a primary sense and, inevitably, intellectualism seems to be an implicit necessity.

This is where fear sets in. We harass ourselves to harness some sort of substance within the unknown and, as I had with Eraserhead, attempt to overpower the work itself. But this concept shackled my artistic fortitude and eventually left the work to rot. The film had left me a bitter spectator, forever preemptively cynical of any other movie I'd watch. In terms of coping with the unknown, I considered just embracing ambiguity. In the same way that we are drawn towards the light, should we just as assuredly flock towards darkness and find solace in its obscurity?

In the essay "The Cinema" (1926), Virginia Woolf's discussion of cinema is, in fact, motivated by the medium's mystery; the undefined terrain stirs Woolf's desire to both celebrate and examine the cinema. A medium with visual aspects from photography as well as literal elements of the written word. Woolf emphasizes the possibility of cinema finding a fundamental distinction against other arts, particularly through the idea of "abstraction". She illustrates this concept by dissecting a moment from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). An unintentional "tadpole" image has an extraordinary effect on her as it evoked thoughts and emotions without the crutch of words. Thus to Woolf, abstraction should use words or music as supplements, rather than principles. But she avoids specific advice on how to effectively translate this new medium because the cinema, having the aspects of literature, photography, and music, can say everything before it has anything to say.

The cinema itself pulses from the sort complex layers I find in Eraserhead. Like a medium that parasitically feeds off other forms of art, Lynch's film leeches to every level of comfort. To survive, I feverishly attach myself to something beyond the work-like a critic's essay or some anonymous IMDB user's allegorical explanation-so as to heal the discomfort with which I was left. In the beginning of my relationship with Eraserhead, it was a power struggle between art and man. Eventually it equaled nothing other than an entropic relationship enslaving my own sensibility. Eraserhead slowly drags me deeper and deeper toward its own wake. And I suppose it's only appropriate that I now delve further into its cinematic abyss.

I find myself in front of a screen watching, once again, Lynch's Eraserhead. It involves Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a meek "printer" who must marry his girlfriend and take care of his premature, amphibian child. The film delves into Henry's psyche to slowly melt the spectator's. Between a brief salacious affair with his neighbor (after his wife, Mary, leaves him) and dreams of a woman living in his radiator, these tortuously surreal events eventually lead Henry toward infanticide. It happens, and the film's characters react: A man living on a desolate planet has his face burnt and Henry embraces that woman from the radiator. Her swollen cheeks resemble that of a squirrel's.

And this film resembles that of, what? It has shown everything, but did it have anything to say?

So I think back to Woolf when she tells us we "see life as it is when we have no part in it". As she attempts to pinpoint the sort of reality displayed by cinema she comes to the conclusion that it is real in an alternate reality sense-perceptibly unfamiliar, but real nonetheless. By having no part in this reality, or "life", I'm able to look into Eraserhead's alternate reality with an omniscient objectiveness. Obviously because I'm merely watching, I cannot physically interact; yet there, maybe, is where its initial attraction exists: My inability to affect this alternate reality allows me to notice and appreciate moments I take for granted or perhaps never even see. I am the ghost of its universe-I'm not concerned about doing the right thing or skewing thoughts to strangle guilt. At the same time with cinema, I have the power to see these moments of guilt, lust, and murder-moments where, in my reality, the door is closed. So, in a way, this medium allows us to see reality. We see the human nature we fear. We see our mistakes. By taking part in the cinema we become both critics and pupils of our own lives.

Yet there are moments in Eraserhead where I see little resemblance to human nature. Its black and white template and stylized mise-en-scène sterilizes any relation to our own world and confuses the structure of its own; "People think pipes grow in their homes," Mary's father yells, and I almost side with the "people". Lynch's world seems to be a bastardization of the industrial and nature, a world where one would welcome miniature, man-made chickens for dinner. And I am burdened by its synthesis of fear and paranoia. My confusion thusly becomes its spawn.

Every character in the film bears an abnormality that deviates from any prospect of coherency. Even the old woman-on screen for less than a minute-emulates a decaying puppet as her daughter controls her every limb. As the daughter leaves the room, the old woman still sits. Motionless and rotting without anyone to foster her. Everything else moves, but she doesn't. Lynch has manifested a sort of dormant chaos horrific to look at, yet imprisoning in its aesthetic. Like her, I seemed to be in a stasis of oddity; the film, a constant stream of chaos, is a nightmare from which I cannot wake.