Eraserhead

Although the end results may prove to be too alienating for some viewers, they are nevertheless astonishing to behold in terms of their formal beauty and are even more so when one considers that the film was shot piecemeal over the course of a couple of years, first with funding provided by the American Film Institute and, when that ran out, with funds supplied from such sources as production designer (and Lynch friend) Jack Fisk, Fisk’s wife Sissy Spacek and money Lynch earned from a paper route. (In one of the DVD supplements, Lynch points out a moment where Henry opens a door to note that the scene of him entering the room itself was shot more than a year later.) Despite the gaps in its production, the film as a whole creates a singular mood and sustains it from the first frames to the last.

That mood has lasted from the time of its premiere until today and much of that is due to the fact that, unlike virtually every other classic film, “Eraserhead” is a work that resolutely defied all attempts to explain either what it means or even the mechanics of how it was produced. The script is a brilliant mixture of narrative and experimental structure that provides just enough storytelling points to give viewers something to hang on to, at least in the early going, before completely subsuming them with its more avant-garde moments later on. The result is a film in which all of the elements may not necessarily add up but which nevertheless maintains a logical consistency throughout that is too often lacking in a lot of experimental cinema—even if you don’t quite get what you are seeing, you never get the sense that Lynch is just making stuff up as he goes along in order to score an immediate visceral impact to the detriment of everything else.

When “Eraserhead” premiered in 1977, it received largely poor reviews and minuscule returns at the box office and might have drifted off into obscurity were it not for the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, whose championing of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “El Topo” a few years earlier made it a cult sensation through regular screenings on the then-developing midnight movie circuit. Based on little more than a gut feeling, Barenholtz took the film on, and, even after its initial playdates met with little success, he continued to have faith in it and convinced a theater owner in New York to keep it on until it eventually developed a loyal fan base that kept it playing for the next few years and made it one of the most (in)famous of all cult movies. (Much like the image of Harold Lloyd dangling from the clock, even people who haven’t seen the film certainly recognize the iconic image of Henry and his inimitable hairdo.)

Today, this would be all but unheard of—even if the midnight movie scene existed as it once did, a film of this sort would almost certainly be relegated to a couple of underground festivals and even if a distributor were to take a chance on booking it commercially, it is unlikely they would have the patience to give it a chance to attract viewers before yanking it in order to play something with a better chance of attracting audiences. As a result, watching “Eraserhead” today can be a somewhat melancholic experience in this regard for those who once experienced it in its after-hours glory and realize that the time when something like this could thrive has long since passed. (This is ironic considering that the film is one of the few midnight movies that actually plays well at home—provided that your home system is set up properly (and the Blu-ray offers up a calibration test to help with that)—as it is arguably only one that does not exactly lend itself to the collective moviegoing experience in the manner of such contemporaries as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” or “Pink Flamingoes.”)

David Lynch would, of course, go on to become one of the most controversial and acclaimed filmmakers of our time and his idiosyncratic visions would even strike chords with mainstream audience, as evidenced by the commercial success of such projects as “The Elephant Man” (which he was hired for largely due to producer Mel Brooks’s fascination with “Eraserhead”), “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” and “Mullholland Drive.” As excellent as his subsequent films would prove to be, “Eraserhead” remains Lynch’s purest work of art. Granted, the film may not be for everyone, but for those who manage to find themselves on its admittedly peculiar wavelength, “Eraserhead” continues to be a stunning work that quite simply redefines what a feature film can do both to and for audiences willing to take the journey.