Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The Surreal Poetry of Eraserhead

    Wandering, Chaplin-esque through mentally-projected wreckage, white-socked and tall-haired, Henry Spencer is you and he is me.  David Lynch's confessional masterpiece Eraserhead is stitched together with dream-like associative reasoning, ever imagistic and disturbing. I would like to say that there are days when we all feel so alienated, but I'm not sure that this would be accurate.  No, but those others stumbling through the wondermart along with me may find simple tasks frightening, the aisles twisted as if pulled from Caligari's Cabinet. The paint on the face of the woman opposite you on the bus may make her seem some screaming portrait by Bacon, ads seem blatant as wartime propaganda, and most concerning is the apparent apathy of most forced through the system. And yet we all retreat from this absurdity into films and books and video games that offer more stable, if not friendlier alternative realities. Maybe we choose Pride and Prejudice or Portal or a Lady in the Radiator or Lady Gaga, but we flee from the everyday, like Henry.


The claustrophobic inside spaces--architectural expressions of Henry's (and Lynch's) feelings towards marriage--give way to the spaciousness of fantasy, the sweeping proscenium arch and the Lady on the stage. And the so-called "baby," the subject of much debate is the greatest horror of the film, not because it is entirely strange but because it is uncanny, close-but-not-quite: not quite human, not quite beast (lamb? calf?), neither puppet nor fetus, sympathetic nor repulsive.

Indeed, the film itself feels repulsive, awkward, and alienating, but not without purpose.  We are made to feel exactly the same unease as Henry, as he struggles to cope with everyday challenges and relationships. Lynch's world does not possess the same colour and sensuality as the "magic realist" mode associated with Marquez, Borges, del Toro and other South- and Central-American artists, but Eraserhead truly  renders the average strange, and the strange average.

Sound design obviously helps create this bleak world, though it is easy to ignore this element in such a quiet film. Industrial sounds, wind and impressionistic synths make up most of Eraserhead's sonic world, but it is only with the commencement of the song "In Heaven" that we realize just how quiet the film has been. Directly preceded by the muffled sound of wind, "In Heaven" presents the only possibilities for transcendence: imagination and death. Thus the Lady sings of heaven, in Henry's imagined world, for a two-fold poignancy. We see Laurel Near performing the song (albeit with what seem to be papier-mache cheeks) and hear the voice of Peter Ivers, just another level of audio-visual incongruence.


In the end it doesn't matter whether Henry Spencer's world is real or imagined: if it is "real" it is still a secret allegory for Lynch, if it is "imagined" it may as well be real since it is the viewer's only frame of reference. Lynch has admitted that the film is was inspired by "what happened in Philidelphia," which seems to be some great anxiety at the conventions of marriage, family life and expectations of society, and one need not be more specific than this. To reduce it is to lose the--dare I say--magic to a semiotic code, empty in its direct translations. We must let the film be strange and wonderful, disturbing and deeply moving. And for those of us who feel like Henry,  we must remember that there is a way out, whether we believe in heaven or not.



In Imagination, Everything is Fine.