Eraserhead
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| Eraserhead | |
 Theatrical release poster. |
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| Directed by | David Lynch |
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| Produced by | David Lynch |
| Written by | David Lynch |
| Starring | Jack Nance Charlotte Stewart Jeanne Bates |
| Music by | David Lynch |
| Cinematography | Herbert Cardwell Frederick Elmes |
| Editing by | David Lynch |
| Distributed by | Libra Films |
| Release date(s) | March 19, 1977 (Filmex)[1] |
| Running time | 89 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $20,000[2] |
| Gross revenue | $7,000,000 |
Eraserhead is a surrealist-horror film written and directed by David Lynch, and released in 1977. In 1971, Lynch moved to Los Angeles to study for an MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) degree at the AFI Conservatory. At the Conservatory, Lynch began working on his first feature-length film, Eraserhead, using a $10,000 ($33,849.74 today due to inflation) grant from the AFI. The grant did not provide enough money to complete the film and, due to lack of a sufficient budget, Eraserhead was filmed intermittently until its release in 1977. Lynch used money from friends and family, including boyhood friend Jack Fisk, a production designer and the husband of actress Sissy Spacek, and even took a paper route to finish it.
The film stars Jack Nance and Charlotte Stewart. Eraserhead polarized and baffled many critics and movie-goers, but has become a cult classic.[3]
In 2004, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Lynch has called it a "dream of dark and troubling things"[4] and his "most spiritual movie."[5]
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[edit] Synopsis
The film is set in a slum in the heart of an industrial center. It is rife with urban decay, rundown factories, and a soundtrack composed almost exclusively of the noises of machinery. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a printer who is "on vacation." At the start of the film, Henry, who has not heard from his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) for a while, mistakenly believes that she has ended their relationship. He is invited to have dinner with Mary and her parents at their house. Briefly we see Mary's catatonic grandmother in the kitchen. Mrs. X mixes the salad with the grandmother's hands. At the dinner table the conversation is obviously strained and awkward. They are having artificial chicken for dinner, which promptly starts to twitch and emit a large amount of blood through its rear end when Henry attempts to carve it up. They stare at it in shock, then the two women burst into tears and leave the room. After the failed meal Henry learns that Mary has just had a baby after an abnormally short pregnancy. Henry is then obliged to marry her.
Mary and the baby move into Henry's one-room apartment. The baby is hideously deformed and has a reptilian appearance: a large snout-nose with slit nostrils, a pencil-thin neck, eyes on the sides of its head, no ears, and a limbless body covered in bandages. It continually whines throughout the night.
A sleep-deprived Mary abandons Henry and the baby (who also turns out to be sick). After Mary leaves, Henry must care for the baby by himself, and he becomes involved in a series of strange events. These include bizarre encounters with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), a woman with grotesquely distended cheeks who lives in his radiator (she sings the iconic song "In Heaven"); visions of the ominous Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk); and a sexual liaison with his neighbor, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts).
The film's title comes from a dream sequence occurring during the last half hour of the film. In it, Henry’s head detaches from his body, sinks into a growing pool of blood on a tile floor, falls from the sky, and, finally, lands on an empty street and cracks open. A young boy (Thomas Coulson) finds Henry's broken head and takes it to a pencil factory, where Paul (Darwin Joston), the desk clerk, summons his ill-tempered boss (Neil Moran) to the front desk by repeatedly pushing a buzzer. The boss, angered by the summons, yells at Paul, but regains his composure when he sees what the little boy has brought. The boss and the boy carry the head to a back room where the Pencil Machine Operator (Hal Landon, Jr.) takes a core sample of Henry's brain, assays it, and determines that it is a serviceable material for pencil erasers. The boy is then paid for bringing in Henry's head. The Pencil Machine Operator then sweeps the eraser shavings off of the desk and sends them billowing into the air.
After waking from this dream, Henry looks out his window and sees two men fighting in the street. He then seeks out the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, but discovers that she is not home. The baby begins to cackle mockingly, and, shortly thereafter, Henry opens his door and sees the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall bringing another man back to her apartment. She looks at Henry, momentarily sees Henry's head transform into that of the baby, and appears frightened by her vision. Henry goes back into his apartment, takes a pair of scissors, and cuts open the baby's bandages, which turn out to be part of its flesh (or simply what is holding all of its organs together). By cutting the bandages, Henry splits open the baby's body and exposes its vital organs. As the baby screams in pain, Henry stabs its lung with the scissors. This causes the apartment’s electricity to overload, and as the lights flicker on and off, an apparition of the baby's head, grown to an enormous size, materializes in the apartment. The planet explodes, and through the hole in it we see the Man in the Planet struggling with his machines. Henry is then seen with eraser shavings billowing around behind his head. The last scene features Henry being embraced by the Lady in the Radiator. They are bathed in white light, and white noise builds to a crescendo, then stops as the screen goes black, and the credits begin to roll.
[edit] Cast
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[edit] Pre-production
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Eraserhead developed from Gardenback, a script about adultery that Lynch wrote during his first year at the Centre for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles.[6] The script for Eraserhead was only 21 pages long. Because of the film's unusual plot and Lynch's minimal directorial experience, no movie studio backed the project. Lynch eventually won a grant from AFI, and filmed most of it at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, which was at the time the headquarters of the American Film Institute.[7]
Aside from the AFI grant, the movie was financed by friends and family, including actress Sissy Spacek, wife of Lynch's childhood friend Jack Fisk. Because of the lack of reliable funds, Eraserhead was filmed intermittently from 1971 to 1976[7], with sets disassembled and reassembled several times.
[edit] Release
Ben Barenholtz, the founder of Libra Films, watched the film a few weeks after its Filmex opening, and before the film was at its midway point, had decided it was a "film of the future".[1] By that summer (1977), Lynch and his wife had arrived in New York and were staying at Barenholtz's apartment; Lynch then spent two months working with a lab to get a print of the film ready for its New York opening.[1] The film opened in fall 1977 at the Cinema Village for a midnight show,[1] and eventually "became a hit on on the horror circuit in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London."[7]
[edit] Reception
A January 1977 review of Eraserhead by Variety called it a "sickening bad-taste exercise" which "pulls out all gory stops in the unwatchable climax....the mind boggles to learn that Lynch labored on this pic for five years."[1][8]
In a December 2007 review of a new 35mm print, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it an "amazing, still mysterious work" which "brings together many of the now-familiar Lynchian visual themes and narrative figures, including the naïve man, the slatternly woman, the shabby period furniture, the contorted flesh and forms, the yawning orifices and oozing, leaking fluids."[9]
Entertainment Weekly ranked the film #14 on their list of "The Top 50 Cult Films".[10]
[edit] Reactions from other directors
After seeing the film, Mel Brooks hired Lynch to direct The Elephant Man (1980).[11]
Director Stanley Kubrick once stated in an interview with Michel Ciment that he would have liked to direct this film, as it was one of his favorites.[12] Before beginning production on The Shining, Kubrick screened Eraserhead for the cast to put them into the atmosphere he wanted to convey.
George Lucas was a fan of the film and, after seeing it, wanted to hire Lynch to direct Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Lynch declined, fearing it would be more of his own vision rather than Lucas'.[13]
[edit] Lynch's comments
Lynch has said its protagonist is "living under the influence of those things that existed for me in Philadelphia":[14]
- "There was a sense of dread pretty much everywhere I went. I didn't live in any good parts of Philadelphia, and so dread was my general feeling. I hated it. And, also, I loved it.".
Lynch also wrote a short chapter about the film in his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish. In that book, he wrote "Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is."[5] He went on to write about the difficulties he was having making sense of the way the film was "growing" and didn't know "the thing that just pulled it all together." He then reveals it was the Bible that provided the solution:
- So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.
Lynch states in the book that he doesn't think he will ever reveal what the vision-fulfilling Biblical verse is.
[edit] DVD availability
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Until recently, the only way to acquire Eraserhead as a Region 1 (North America) DVD was to purchase it (at $39) through davidlynch.com. The version of the film on the official Region 1 DVDs was remastered for the medium by Lynch himself.
Customers who ordered the film from Lynch's website received the disc packaged in a special presentation box.[citation needed] The DVD included a deleted scene and a 90-minute documentary about the making of the movie, which consists of Lynch sitting before a microphone, smoking cigarettes, and talking about his memories of making the movie (almost like a director's commentary track, but with video). During the piece he also calls Catherine Coulson and they reminisce together about the making of the film.
On January 10, 2006, Eraserhead was made commercially available by Subversive Cinema. This re-release had normal DVD packaging instead of the large boxset from David Lynch's website, but the content on the disc itself was the same. The UK DVD release is Region-free, as is the Korean DVD release.[15]
In August 2008 it was announced that the film will be re-released in Region 2 in the UK on October 20, alongside a Region 2 release of The Short Films of David Lynch. [16]
[edit] Influence
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2008) |
Poet Charles Bukowski referenced the film when interviewed on the subject of cable television, Bukowski said, "We got cable TV here, and the first thing we switched on happened to be Eraserhead. I said, 'What’s this?' I didn’t know what it was. It was so great. I said, 'Oh, this cable TV has opened up a whole new world. We’re gonna be sitting in front of this thing for centuries. What next?' So starting with Eraserhead we sit here, click, click, click — nothing."[17]
A number of rock bands take their name from the film: the 1980s rockabilly group Erazerhead; the Northern California band Eraserhead, and The Eraserheads, a rock band from the Philippines.[18] The band Henry Spencer take their name from the main character. Apartment 26 are named after Henry's address and they feature a sample from the Lady in the Radiator's "In Heaven" at the end of their song, "Heaven." The 1980s London indie rock band Henry's Final Dream also owe their name to this movie.
The hardcore punk band Dead Kennedys refers to this movie in their song "Too Drunk To Fuck" with the line "You bawl like the baby in Eraserhead."
"In Heaven", the song sung by the Lady in the Radiator, has been covered by Bauhaus, Devo, Norma Loy, WC3 (à trois dans les WC), Haus Arafna, Miranda Sex Garden, Annie Christian, Pankow, Pixies, The Sherrysa-Whore, Desolation Yes, Bang Gang, Helios, Donny Who Loved Bowling, and Tuxedomoon. Indie rockers Modest Mouse borrowed lines from "In Heaven" for "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'", as did the anarcho-punk band Rubella Ballet for their song "Slant and Slide". Scottish 1980s band Win! covered the Lady in the Radiator's song as a B-side on their 1986 hit single "You've Got the Power".
Eraserhead, along with five other low-budget 1970s films (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos, El Topo, The Harder They Come and Night of the Living Dead), was the subject of a 2005 documentary by Stuart Samuels called Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream.[19] Lynch was interviewed for the documentary.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e Hoberman, J.; Jonathan Rosenbaum (1991). "Chapter 8". Midnight Movies. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306804336. http://books.google.com/books?id=yiRH-NdN_cAC&pg=PA214&lpg=PA214&dq=Hoberman+eraserhead&ots=pC3t7HRTgE&sig=C00ugBtRX3QxvHw5-V0AtL_jO1E.
- ^ The Fantasy Film as Final Exam, a December 1984 review of Dune from Time
- ^ Peary, Danny. Cult Movies, Delta Books, 1981. ISBN 0-517-20185-2
- ^ Cinefantastique Barry Gifford Interview from lynchnet.com
- ^ a b Lynch, David (2006). Catching the Big Fish. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin Group. ISBN 1585425400.
- ^ http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/2093/ehabout.html
- ^ a b c "A Dark Lens on America". The New York Times. 1990-01-14. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D6113FF937A25752C0A966958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print.
- ^ Review of Eraserhead from [[Variety (magazine)}Variety]]
- ^ Distorted, Distorting and All-Too Human, a December 2007 review from The New York Times
- ^ "The Top 50 Cult Films". [[1]]. May 23, 2003.
- ^ "The Late Late Show, Feb. 26, 1997 - Interview with David Lynch". http://listing-index.ebay.com/movies/Entertainment_Weekly%27s_%22Top_50_Cult_Films_of_All-Time%22.html.
- ^ Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. Faber & Faber, 2003. ISBN 0571211089
- ^ David Lynch interview 1985
- ^ "A Fish in the Percolator". Philadelphia Weekly. 2001-03-14. http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/articles/2740.
- ^ http://www.hkflix.com/xq/asp/filmID.527937/qx/details.htm
- ^ DVD Times - Eraserhead & David Lynch Short Films (R2) in October from dvdtimes.co.uk
- ^ http://www.artdamage.com/buk/ginsoaked.htm
- ^ Eraserhead "Alternative Rock-N-Roll"
- ^ Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream at the Internet Movie Database
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Eraserhead |
- Eraserhead at Allmovie
- Eraserhead at the Internet Movie Database
- Eraserhead at Allmovie
- Eraserhead at Rotten Tomatoes
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