Last March Salon.com Art and Entertainment editor Andrew O'Hehir offered the possibly brilliant theory that "all arty, indie-type films made in the last 15 years or so in America and Western Europe fall into one of two categories: Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch.” Wes Anderson is Jarmusch. P.T. Anderson and Quentin Tarantino are Lynch. The Coen Brothers are sometimes one (The Big Lebowski is considered Lynchian) and sometimes the other (The Man Who Wasn't There is considered Jarmusch-ian). O'Hehir laments that "in perhaps four out of five cases (again, my methods are ruthlessly unscientific), this influence pans out as nothing more than atmosphere and mood, as a film that's vague and rootless (Jarmusch) or recklessly goofy (Lynch) to no clear purpose.”

I never really got too much into Jarmusch from what I've seen. I would probably agree with Roger Ebert that Stranger Than Paradise was his only really great film, but before I make that statement definitively I have to admit that I haven't seen Dead Man yet. But yeah, I do have a soft spot for the Jarmuschian by-products; in addition to Wes Anderson we would be forced to include Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World and probably Kevin Smith's Clerks. Oh, and Garden State which isn't quite a great movie but is certainly in the ballpark and very understandably the next big thing. I like these movies. I suppose that I relate to them. But you know, it may be a fair assumption that anybody who makes a movie has, at one point or another, lived a life void of direction. So is the existence of the creative types. It seems to me that making a movie about yourself and the people you know is simply the most obvious thing that you can do. Obviously it can be done well, but art typically consists of a subject and a perspective and these autobiographical films often aren't able to develop the sort of cognitive distance necessary to nurture a developed sense of perspective. I would argue that Zwigoff, Coppola, Wes Anderson and Jarmusch (sure) are successful at transforming experience and observation into art, but there is always the lingering possibility that they won't and all we will have left is that flat lukewarm experience of having their guts spilled out before us.

Go see my review of Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, I remember talking about this very thing there. The problem with non-art like Chasing Amy (which is not all that bad, or rather could have been worse) is that the filmmaker will never rise above his or her own experience. It forwards this idea that film is about communication. About storytelling and possibly even opening a dialogue. That a film, a painting, a novel, a piece of music all serve EXACTLY the same purpose.

David Lynch is different. Lynch trusts his instincts and stays true to his hunches. He believes in happy accidents and that inspiration is a gift from the Gods. You get the feeling that he doesn't exactly know what his movies are “about" either. And more importantly, he doesn't really want to know. Lynch guards his "intentions"; when you come up with an explanation of what is going on, he'll shake his head and say, "No, that's not it.” This suggests to me, actually, that he doesn't exactly have any intentions and that he has great contempt for those who insist in finding them. The cinema of David Lynch is personal, but it's spared from being autobiographical. Thank God.

Years ago, when I was in junior high school, Blockbuster Video had a promotion where if you brought in a report card and had a B average they would give you a free rental. Spurred on by a recommendation by Brandon Judell, the film critic for America Online (Judell was a great critic by the way and really loved the movies. When America Online stopped having a weekly film critic, he went to write for "Popcorn Q" where his writing was forced to be gay-themed and was generally pretty shitty) I rented Eraserhead. This film opened the doors of perceptions for me. I had been into movies before, but the stuff I liked was basically something like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Night of the Creeps or Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Eraserhead introduced possibilities for film that stood outside of camp. I felt like I had found a place where I belonged. Years later I made a short film for the USU Film Club. Afterwards I found myself amazed at how much it resembled Lynch's work. Especially Lost Highway which I didn't even like! (Did I underestimate it?) My new one is very much the same. Asked to make a movie about anything that I want, I find myself continually trying to work in strained family dynamics and superficially benign but obviously malevolent monsters of the id (i.e. Robert Blake in Lost Highway! Or Bob in Twin Peaks). The biggest reason that I have some sort of desire to make films is because nobody else is doing it right. The greatest compliment that I could give Lynch is that he does it right. There is little reason to invest the emotional, financial or temporal resources of filmmaking (and in all probability make something amateurish, embarrassing and possibly unwatchable) when Lynch does everything that needs to be done already.

In ranking the greatest of American filmmakers, Lynch would come second only to Kubrick, and that is only because Kubrick is more consistently great. Eraserhead itself is easily better than anything Kubrick has ever done. The two filmmakers don't seem to have very much in common. (They were mutual admirers of each other's work however. Kubrick was a very big fan of Eraserhead and screened the film for the cast of The Shining to put them in the mood. Lynch is a very big fan of Kubrick's Lolita, and refused to watch the remake. He thought the very idea was ridiculous.)

One of the great pleasures of a Kubrick film, and for our purposes Lynch's Eraserhead, is the perfectionism of the filmmakers. You know when you watch these movies that you are seeing something that has really been sweated over, that the filmmakers were fully conscious of every detail no matter how small. In order to preserve complete and utter control Kubrick decided very early on to become his own producer, to initiate his own projects and never work for somebody else. That didn't happen with Lynch. Mel Brooks was very impressed with Eraserhead and hired him to helm The Elephant Man which was a success but plays a good deal like Eraserhead in Oscar-bait drag. It's a little weaker than the real thing and much more sentimental. (The film earned several Academy Award nominations that year including Best Picture and Best Director.) After that it was the infamous Dune for Dino De Laurentiis, which I could only stand about fifteen minutes of. (I promise to sit through the whole damn thing one of these days, even if I don't review it.) And then it was Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and some dabbling in TV, especially with Twin Peaks. And by then Lynch was a major star and a well-respected artist.

In a documentary included as an extra for the Twin Peaks: Season 1 DVD set, Catherine E. Coulson (the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and assistant camera for Eraserhead) talks about how hard it was for Lynch to delegate responsibilities to other people later in his career. In Eraserhead he did everything himself. This aspect is probably the most responsible for Lynch's inability to recapture his former glory. It's not that his films are worse now as much as they aren't as great. I think that Lynch has picked up on this, and tried to make amends through his pay website which is the only place where you can purchase official copies of Eraserhead and Lynch's pre-Eraserhead short films. (I bought my copy off of eBay. It's a transfer from a Japanese laserdisc.) Interestingly though, the original content that he produces exclusively for the site (from what I have seen of it) better resembles his Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive than Eraserhead. Again, a good thing, but not as good as the alternative. You can sense that Los Angeles has finally metastasized into Lynch's bones; there is a consciousness of the movies and Lynch shows a desire to emulate (and to be fair possibly subvert) movie star glamour. Compare Ebert's pans of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. The first he criticizes for being inhumane and abusing the resources of the cinema. The latter he criticizes for being superficial and cold. (Ebert hated Blue Velvet much more because he was more affected by it.)

Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway may very well be personal films to Lynch. Like Eraserhead they are of course fairly non-narrative exercises. But certainly they are more commercial than Eraserhead, whereas in his earlier films he'd fixate on decay and thus challenge our notions toward film aesthetics. With his later works it seems like he is conforming to the status quo. It's interesting to note how Lynch's attitude toward sex has changed over the past twenty-five years. Kubrick's films were, of course, infamously clinical about sex and very unerotic. His films weren't populated by people, but by things and symbols. Turning women (especially) into things sounds terribly misogynistic but when you watch these films you see that they are too detatched for a signifier like that; they are so inhuman that they are about the idea of misogyny really.

Mulholland Drive-era Lynch is cold and abstract but he's not THAT cold or abstract. Mulholland Drive-era Lynch is still able to breathe and live. But through this style the sex has been very much aestheticized and is very attractive. But he's making neon-noir, fashion magazine photography and slick softcore pornography. It's erotic really, which is a good thing talking solely on those terms. Eraserhead-era Lynch, well, again he's obsessed with decay. Guts, gore, and cum; if Mulholland Drive is Playboy, then Eraserhead is Hustler. It's a dirty, nasty movie.

Henry (the protagonist of Eraserhead) is given three sexual options throughout the film: there is his very ordinary and unconfident girlfriend Mary X, a prostitute across the hall, and a mysterious ballerina that lives inside the furnace and has what look like giant infected lymph nodes that make her cheeks puff out. The prostitute is the most traditionally beautiful of the film (of course), and even she looks badly used (a la Dorothy in Blue Velvet). We seem to agree with Henry that it is difficult to effectively idealize her when we see the sort of people that she "socializes" with. Danny Peary, I think it was, describes the film as coming out of the mind of somebody who probably had a strict religious upbringing and regards sex mostly in terms of plumbing. (It reminds of Napoleon Dynamite really. It's frustrating that that film was read in the Jarmuschian terms of Wes Anderson as often as it was read in the Lynchian terms of Todd Solondz.) There is a sperm motif throughout the film. In one sequence, the ballerina stomps on several that are thrown onto her stage. We can sometimes sense that the heads are the same as those of Henry's premature baby. (Rumored to be a cow fetus, Lynch has refused to give any details about how it was made or how it was animated.) At the end, in a particularly gruesome sequence, the baby is dissected by Henry.

One critic at the time lamented that while many young filmmakers want to try to be the next Hitchcock or Kubrick, Lynch seems to want to be the next Herschell G. Lewis. That he would even think to make such a comment shows that as a critic he is very observant and very skilled, as well as very boring. Eraserhead is a splatter film, and like the best of the splatter films there is a distrust, perhaps even a hatred, of the human body. I remember telling a friend that Eraserhead is the best horror film ever made. He told me it wasn't a horror film, it was a comedy! It's both. We often talk about the association between horror and comedy as being one purely of manipulation. The Grudge was essentially a piece of shit, but it manipulated us into jumping and screaming and then we laughed at the sensation of being manipulated into jumping and screaming. With a gore film, it works on a somewhat deeper level. Both comedy and horror, in a gore film especially, play upon our biological insecurities. Why do some people cover their eyes when they see intestines and entrails? Why do we dislike violence anyway, why is this even a moral issue?

About a week ago I wrote a letter to the campus newspaper harshly deriding the way liberals sanitize pulp ideology and value intellectual truths over emotional ones. About how the moral responsibility to eliminate racism and sexism extends to our lexicon, our culture and our minds. The suppression of emotional truth leads to the weakening of intellectual truth besides. For example, we're commonly told that rape is not about sex but it is about power, as if sex and power were mutually exclusive. They aren't! Political correctness is possibly the single most destructive byproduct of the late twentieth century, inhibiting true edification in the name of civility. I wrote in the letter that "you can't be a true humanist until you accept the icky bits also.” Eraserhead is a truly humanist film because it accepts and even fetishizes the icky bits. The heart and soul of Eraserhead and their absence in the only fitfully awesome Mulholland Drive can perhaps be traced to the former's ugliness.

Lynch has been quoted as saying, "I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it." I am not going to try and fit a narrative onto it. That somehow seems counterproductive. There is probably more nobility to write nothing about Eraserhead and to just watch it, and that would probably be Lynch's preference. But to attempt to find a narrative in Eraserhead is worse than interpretative, it's falsely interpretative. The implication again is that the narrative is the endpoint. Such thinking is symptomatic to bad, boring art. With that said however, I am going to go ahead and give you a reading toward Eraserhead.

It's generally accepted, even by Lynch himself, that Eraserhead is about his experiences in Philadelphia. Charles Drazin, in his Bloomsbury Movie Guide to Blue Velvet, sees Lynch as the other side of Norman Rockwell. While Rockwell came to the country from the city and then idealized "the simple life,” Lynch came from the country into the city, leading him to demonize the city. In what country, what city, what point in time, reality or universe do the events in Eraserhead take place? Many reviewers observe that it seems post-apocalyptic. At the very least it looks post-industrial, like the factory that employed most of the citizens has long since used up the resources of the area and left, leaving the people in poverty and wading in their own filth. Everything in this environment, from the people on downwards, is very overused. One of the more disgusting moments in Eraserhead comes when Henry is called upon to carve a "man-made chicken" which moves in stop-motion animation and oozes black blood from between the drumsticks. Man-made chicken? Even the flesh that they eat has been corrupted and made unnatural. (The film's disgust with food, again, echoes that of the greatly overrated Napoleon Dynamite. Come to think of it, Napoleon has the same Eraserhead hairdo as Henry. It’s a totally Lynchian film, isn’t it?)

The entire dinner sequence seems to be a conscious satire of ‘50s family life and by extension an embodiment of the dark side of affluence and progress. For every TV and refrigerator that's purchased up in the suburbs there are thousands of Morlocks toiling away in the shadows of the metropolis to produce it. You sense that there are good times in Eraserhead but they exist either far before or far away from what we see on screen. (Such observations really sink in upon your third or fourth viewing of Blue Velvet when you realize that the real horror isn't that people like Frank exist. It's that nobody knows or cares that there are.) And by the way, what exactly is up with that baby? Henry's girlfriend casually complains that they aren't even sure that it’s a baby. Well, then what could it be ??????? Something in the water? If the film has a message it may be a strictly anti-capitalist and anti-industrial one, suggesting that the humans are uncomfortable with not understanding things like sex (or even chickens) and so they corrupt it through industrialization in order to make sense of it.

This reading should be thought to be a start, but not the endpoint. Eraserhead is simply too good to be restricted to political terms. It ain't Ibsen, and it ain't Thoreau. Lynch doesn't seem to be suggesting that we simply go out in the boonies and grow some beans. Thank God.

The title Eraserhead seems to be suggested by a scene where Henry's head is popped off of his neck, is found by a street urchin, and is sold to a bearded industrialist to make up the erasers on pencils. While this image is amusing in the sense that we can imagine red schoolhouses full of Dicks and Janes correcting their arithmetic with Henry's noggin, it articulates something essential about his personality. Henry is hardly a hero and he isn't particularly sympathetic. He's the last person you would think to make a movie about; he is utterly passive and thoroughly non-intellectual. A good part of the reason that we never find out what is happening in the film is because Henry doesn't have enough curiosity to ask the needed questions. He's a cog of the system and doesn't really have the will to free himself from it. Bill Gibron of DVD Verdict actually provides a useful interpretatation of the narrative: it's basically about nothing more and nothing less but the masturbation fantasies of our creepy protagonist. The film is Terry Gilliam's Brazil actualized and Y Tu Mama Tambien distilled; he's so busy trying to get laid that he neglects to acknowledge that the sky is falling.

And yet, it's funny but Lynch doesn't condemn him for it. Eraserhead sometimes sounds like it may be a surreal film, but it's not. It's possibly a cousin of surrealism. Surrealism seems to acknowledge an audience, constructed associations and a social context. It sets out to disrupt them, but it acknowledges their existence and this leads to an external perspective toward the subject matter and thus one of morality and politicism. Too much, well arguably all, of Eraserhead exists within Henry's head and so there is no room for us to bring any such external perspective. The film is not disassociative or provocative; it is merely unthinkingly and casually perverse, our world through a dark pane of glass. Relative to Eraserhead there is something coated and sanitary about Salvador Dali's stuff, to say nothing of Bunuel's.

The film is so abstract and one-of-a-kind that there is a strong affirmative tide sweeping through the harshly sarcastic pessimism. A nightmare is still a dream, a hell is still some sort of life after; it is still a spirituality separated from secular reality. I have previously argued that experiential cinema is divorced from the humanist cinema (Kill Bill Vol. 1 vs. Kill Bill Vol. 2). I did not take into account the subjective nature of Eraserhead. I’m not sure that there is really a yardstick to measure it against really; it’s all internalized perspective and is entirely acritical. Lynch spills his guts in a rather literal way, worming himself into the divide between humanist and experiential cinema. It’s both but neither really, a position that seems utterly beyond reproach. In a sense, Eraserhead may be the perfect movie. The ultimate cult movie really, finally something that we can genuinely attach ourselves onto and call our own.