Eraserhead
 (1976)
review by Red Velvet Kitchen

Where it all started. Five years in the making, Eraserhead could easily be seen as the subconscious workings of the mind that created Willem Defoe's self-decapitation in Wild At Heart, Frank Booth's oxygen-aided conquest in Blue Velvet, or any given moment of Lost Highway. It's impressive, at times trying, but ultimately has a shabby kind of logic too it, and rather surprisingly is intensely poignant and sometimes revelatory. Infamously referred to as 'A dream of dark and troubling things' by Lynch himself, Eraserhead adheres to the notion that a Lynch film has a plot, characters and a scenario only to treat a viewer to more abstract, insular pleasures.

Those appealing more to difficult to reach areas of the brain and heart. And of course, we have those Lynchian moments, most notably anything involving the horrible mutant baby, and the luminous and inspirational, yet strangely sinister Lady in the Radiator (incidentally, this song was later covered by many artists, most notably The Pixies). Eraserhead is shot in darkened black and white, and appears to be set in a sort of futuristic fusion of the industrial revolution, a Kafka novel and the recesses of a diseased human mind.

John Nance plays the lead, with permanently troubled eyes and sculptured hair, alien to everything and everyone that exists in this subterranean society. This is probably the closest to a genuinely dreamlike film I have ever seen. It's like Lynch cut open a Tarkovsky film (Stalker or Mirror will do) and discovered the rotten core that lay inside.

If you want to dream of dark and troubling things, I recommend Eraserhead heartily.