Please Erase This Memory
Posted on August 14, 2007
Filed Under RELEVANT Editors |
I feel bad having two asinine posts in a row, but I absolutely must get this off my chest. Some time ago, Jesse Carrey and I had the misfortune of stumbling upon a film called Eraserhead. Eraserhead is noteworthy, in that it is the first feature-length movie made by writer/director David Lynch, best known for Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mullholland Drive and standing on street corners shouting inappropriate slogans at passersby (probably). There are essentially two schools of thought on Lynch. The first holds that he masterfully weaves together Noir and Surrealism, creating a dreamlike tapestry of quasi-horror. I hold to the second school, which believes him to be a lunatic. A lunatic, might I add, whom someone mistook for a movie director and entrusted with millions of dollars and valuable film equipment. Don’t believe me? Well then, I’ll give you a brief rundown of the sorrow that is Eraserhead. I would issue a spoiler alert, but it is my conviction that a movie must have a plot before it can be spoiled. Eraserhead does not have one as such, but is rather a random series of seemingly unconnected images, followed by (if you’re anything like me) a lot of quiet weeping. So, without further ado, I present Eraserhead.
Henry is a printer (?) who is on vacation (?). He lives in an austere, post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland (?!). In the first scene of the film, we see Henry (who, it should be noted, looks like the bizarre progeny of Bill Murray and Seinfeld’s Kramer) walking home with groceries. This takes up the first ten minutes of the movie. Not content to merely imply that Henry walks home, Lynch takes his audience by the hand and shows us every step of the journey, complete with no dialogue, no music and a humming noise that makes you think you have tinnitus. When he finally reaches his apartment, he is met by his neighbor, a beautiful (or so we are told) woman who lives across the hall. Here, we are introduced to the stilted, unnatural dialogue that has become Lynch’s bread and butter.
Neighbor: Are you Henry?
Pause. Pause. Pause. Pause. Pause.
Henry: Yes.
Pause. Pause. Pause. Keep pausing. Pause.
Neighbor: A message came for you. From Mary. She’s expecting you for dinner at her parents’ this evening.
Pause. Pause. Interminable Pause. Pause. Check to see if the audio cords have become disconnected from the DVD player. Pause. Pause.
Henry: Oh.
Henry goes to Mary’s (his girlfriend) house, where he has dinner with her comatose grandmother, and her parents who are frighteningly insane. They eat tiny Cornish game hens, which start moving and spout what looks like chocolate pudding from their orifices. All of this is treated as normal, and should not be questioned. Henry is told that Mary has had a child, and that they must wed. He reacts to this news with a vast spectrum of emotion, ranging from muted nervousness to understated nervousness.
Now, if a viewer has made it this far without blasting their own eyes with a stream of pepper spray in order to blissfully swell them shut, they are introduced to the main focus (I guess) of the film, Henry and Mary’s baby. It is not a baby in the conventional sense, but rather a crude dinosaur puppet swaddled in bandages. No kidding. This thing wouldn’t have even met the high standards of The Muppet Show. No attempt is ever made to explain how two humans produced a dinosaur-headed worm baby, which is just as well, because I cannot imagine an explanation that would have been satisfactory. The baby cries constantly, and Mary is finally driven away, unable to handle the stress. I found it unfair that I could not go with her.
At this point, things really start to get weird. Henry becomes obsessed with the radiator (why not?) which apparently houses a tiny stage. On the stage is a platinum-blonde girl with grotesque prosthetic cheeks (!!!). She dances—or rather shuffles—about as dinosaur-headed worm babies fall from the sky. As each dinosaur baby falls, she shuffles over to it and crushes its skull, I guess putting it out of its misery. I envied every single one of them. What’s most disturbing is that she coyly giggles each time she crushes a dinosaur baby. I cannot explain why, but I loathe this woman to the very core of my being.
At any rate, Henry’s dinosaur baby, mercifully spared from the murderous heel of Suzy Big Cheeks, gets sick. Then, the wheels really come off this film. Henry sinks into a pool of milk in the center of his own bed, and is transported to the stage in the radiator. As he watches the cheeky girl dance, his head falls off and falls through the floor. In the next scene, a young boy playing outdoors finds Henry’s head and takes it to a factory, where it is made into—wait for it—erasers.
Now, I feel I must pause at this point to admit that I never attended film school. I have no formal training in the art of crafting motion pictures. However, I have to believe that one of the most elementary lessons of filmmaking, perhaps even the first lecture of the first day of film school, is that when your main character’s head falls off, your movie is over. Evidently, Lynch missed this day of class, because Eraserhead keeps going for another twenty minutes!!!! I will try to succinctly summarize for you what were the longest twenty minutes of my adult life. Henry suddenly has his head back, the baby starts crying uncontrollably, and Henry tries to cut away its bandages only to find that the bandages were holding the baby together. All the lights in Henry’s apartment blow out and the baby’s head grows to gargantuan proportions. Roll credits.
At this point, you’re probably cowering in a corner gently sobbing. I understand. The experience of Eraserhead is not unlike having a dwarf with lycanthrope leap from behind a corner and smack you between the eyes with a hammer. You’re shocked, confused and more than a little hurt. The alarming thing about this movie is that it was made over a span of six years! That means Lynch was able to find a cast and crew that were willing to see this thing through to the end! Had I been on the set, the Cornish game hen scene alone would have made my doubts about the project—and Lynch’s sanity—insurmountable. I have to think that at least a few crewmembers wondered if this was leading anywhere. I can imagine the thought process: “Wait, he’s back in the movie? His head fell off! I don’t think this Lynch guy is entirely stable. I wonder if there’s even film in that camera. Hold on a second! That isn’t even a camera; it’s a shoebox with a paper towel tube taped to the end! OK, I’m outta here!”
After the movie, for some reason Jesse and I saw fit to watch the special features. It included an interview with the man himself. Lynch, his white hair askew in the fashion of a cartoon mad scientist, sat in a soundproof booth while smoke billowed around him from an indeterminate source, and talked about the circumstances surrounding the film. I say the circumstances surrounding it because he avoided talking about the actual movie with the deft precision of a one-legged tightrope walker. Instead, he went on and on about the insignificant minutiae of his life at the time he made the movie without once addressing the movie itself!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!
I should also add that the interview was something like eight hours long. Anyway, please accept mine as a cautionary tale. I know your hubris tempts you to watch this movie, believing you can make more sense of it than I. But I assure you, after Eraserhead you will yearn for the lucidity of a malaria-induced fever dream. However, if you still choose not to heed my warning, I will say this: It’s better than Norbit.
I apoligize once again for this post. It was more a cathartic exercise for me than anything else. Also, I do not have the energy for a new Rambo plot after that. I’ll send a new one your way before the end of the week.
Comments
30 Responses to “Please Erase This Memory”
Leave a Reply
please, PLEASE continue with these type of posts! i enjoy them IMMENSELY.
I feel sick all of a sudden. What a waste of film and time and (albeit clearly limited) funding.
Rambo should have shown up at the end. That would have salvaged it.
wha? that was a real movie with special features footage? why? i must research….
I’m suprised that didn’t get an Oscar!
This is one of the best things I’ve read in a while. Thank you! *laughs*
P.S.
Sounds like one of those films where, if you really understand true art, you’ll get it. So you feel guilty for not getting it because it means you’re a philistine. And then you sob quietly for not being cool.
The most interesting about this movie, is that it got a Nomination for Best Movie in the International Fantasy Film Festival in 1982. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0074486/awards).
Also just by reading the “plot” makes me sick.
What a waste of resources!!!
P.P.S.
The “you” in the P.S. was intended in the general sense of “one.” In other words, I should have said “I” instead. Would have been more honest.
At least he was making sense by the time he did “Mulholland Drive.” Well, except for the shape-shifting homicidal old people.
Oh my…
The only reason I was able to make it through the plot of Eraserhead was the hope of a new Rambo…but I was sadly disappointed.
…Oh my
you should watch “Schizopolis”. It will redeem your faith in movies.
I would say that I’ve seen the movie “Eraserhead” 10 times in my lifetime. Please understand, this is not because I enjoyed the film, but because I NEVER understood what was happening. I wish you would have posted this blog in the early 1990s (lol), you would have saved me much hardship. I was the only one in my group of “artsy” friends that did not seem to get this movie and I thought I was intellectually-challenged for it.
That’s so upsetting, I love Twin Peaks and have been looking forward to seeing some of Lynch’s other stuff. I can tell you however that as awful as that movie sounds I was subjected to even worse in my Art as Interface class two semesters ago at UCF. If you want to watch a movie that will give you a seizure rent “Dreams” from director Akira Kurosawa…
I love you’re blog posts. And let me just tell you, my imagination just saw that whole movie in claymation. Talk about irrational fears.
you’re*!! my editing is WAY off! [I did intend for the pronoun your]
the real problem is that now i want to watch the movie and experience the horror for myself.
I couldn’t help but research this movie after reading this:
First: supposedly the baby was made from the embalmed fetus of a calf. I kid you not. Go to imdb.com and see for yourself.
Second: the cinematographer died after nine months of shooting this. No cause of death was ever determined. Insanity maybe?
Third: my evidence that Stanley Kubrick was crazy. This was one of his fav movies.
Okay, I have to take issue with “Breezy”’s post above. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is a masterpiece, and far far far far (many more “far”s) more coherent than Eraserhead. I mean, they are surreal, but they’re all on the theme of environmentalism, and…geez, I don’t know how to put it in words, except to say that Eraserhead is bizarre nonsense and Dreams is…not.
This was how I felt watching Shopgirl…you keep hoping it’ll redeem itself, and keep hoping, until you get to the end and just want to die a quiet, small death.
Thank you soooooooooo much from saving me from that misery
Lynch is really into transcendental meditation. He has come to Iowa City a few times to speak at the Maharishi Enlightenment Center. All the film students from the university usually go and he ends up talking about everything but film. I have this morbid curiosity to go listen sometime.
Soooooo much fun to read. I am afraid that if you keep this up then you will be required to destroy a movie with criticism AT LEAST once a week. Maybe mix in some music that shouldn’t even be called so. I like it…..
I have seen a few David Lynch films while I WAS in film school, and I hated them. I completely agree with you. I had a professor tell me how genius he was, and all I thought was no, I’m pretty sure he is just crazy. Thanks for helping me not feel alone in my despise for this man’s films.
My girlfriend and I watched Mulholland Dr. one quiet new year’s eve. We we’re so confused and disturbed that we couldn’t talk about it without drifting into existential crisis. I HATE that movie, and Eraserhead sounds just as stupid. I love art-films and can withstand a high level of visual abuse, but this David Lynch guy needs to have his camera equipment taken away. If you make art only you understand you’re a bad artist.
So if you thought that was great, check out the Creamaster Cycle.
It’s by Bjork’s man-partner Matthew Barney and is at least 90 times trippier that Lynch’s stuff. Hard to believe, I know, but so very true.
I mean Cremaster (without the ‘a’ in there)
oh man… it took me days to overcome the psychological damage “The Cremaster Cycle” caused me. Thank you Josh for digging that up again. Oh and “John”… no doubt “Dreams” may have a solid underlying theme whereas “Eraserhead” may or may not - that doesn’t take away from the fact that I, personally, thought the film was sheer torture. I’m amazed anyone thinks differently.
Eraserhead is a classic. The beauty of David Lynch’s films are the juxtuposition of the supernatural and the mundane in an abstract, non-linear fashion, with some universal themes woven in. And he seems like the coolest guy in the world to hang out with because he doesn’t realize he’s as weird as he really is. Those people are the best.
Now, Eraser starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is an ant farm of a different sort… As is “Head” by the Monkees.
I have to say…this post is hilarious, as is most of Adam’s witty commentary about whatever. I’ve seen Eraserhead and have it on VHS (somewhere). I admit that I don’t necessarily understand David Lynch, of course. Eraserhead, in particular, is bizarre and deeply disturbing. However, it’s also fascinating, trying to figure it out (which you never really can, I believe). I’ve read some websites that claim to have it all figured out; one was really good (can’t remember what it was; maybe google it). The bottom line is that David Lynch’s stuff is very insane-like. It’s dream imagery, really. If you examine your own dreams, people would say you’re insane, too. Dreams don’t make any sense, but have some sort of puzzling symbolism. Hardly ever is there any resolution or overarching “meaning.” It’s just fascinating imagery with a strong feeling attached.
I also know that Eraserhead is a working-out of Lynch’s own fears of becoming a father. I feel really bad for his oldest kid, because that’s your Dad’s first feelings toward you.
Anyway, if we admit it in our alone time, our own fears and dreams have some bizarre, crazy features. David Lynch just puts it up on screen for the world to see. It must be his therapy.
i first saw this film when i was eleven and didnt’t understand it on asking the older person watched it with i was told his head was made into erasers.Anyway when i was twenty five and had mostly forgotten it apsrt i decided maybe at eleven the idea of sorrealism was lost on me and as an adult i would understand it better well i was correct the first time i still dont know whats going on personally i think lynch and the whole crew were on asix year trip