ERASERHEAD AT THE NUART
Well I sure as shit am glad I finally got to see Eraserhead in a movie theatre… A few viewings on DVD (this after years of watching it on a worn out VHS bootleg I got when I was 14, with a ubiquitous white line scrolling up the screen every 30 seconds or so…) never did this movie justice, nor did a screening at a bar I went to a few years ago, where the sound was so shitty we gave up after about 15 minutes and went home. The Nuart screened a brand new print last night, and turned the sound UP - this after our host reminded us of the film’s epic soundscape, and asked politely that we all “shut the fuck up” during the movie.
With a few mild exceptions (all of which involved girls giggling incredulously at the bizarre goings-on), the audience obeyed, and was completely reverent and silent throughout the film. It was awesome. I don’t think I’d ever really gotten pulled in as much as I had last night - I’d grown jealous of friends who talk the film up as this great head trip, when as far as I could get was a slight detached repulsion and general bemusement at the proceedings (though always with a great sense of awe that my then-26-year-old hero dreamed up this nightmare, and found a gang of friends and supporters to spend the next five years bringing it to sick life). I certainly had never really seen The Baby - never quite like this. Slick and glossy and incredibly life-like, I was finally able to sympathize for this strange grotesque life - what had always seemed like a potroast puppet from hell, included here simply to add to the queasiness of it all, finally came to life for me. What an amazing achievement that baby was. It’s been suggested that it was created from an embalmed calf fetus, but only Lynch and some of the crew know for sure. Either way, it may be the most incredibly lifelike monster in film history, and its short journey finally sunk in for me last night.
Did I understand the film? I think so. A friend last night told me he’d never really tried to understand it - he just watches it. He fears if he ever tried, it might lose something. That makes sense. I didn’t try to grasp anything last night, but I think after watching Lynch’s other films so many times, some of his symbolic approaches and motifs start to reveal their repetition and simplicity - it still floors me, for example, that there are people who haven’t wrapped their heads around Mulholland Drive. Then again, would I have been able to if not for Lost Highway - of for that matter, Ambrose Bierce’s short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - before it? If not for Lynch’s characters’ various decents into dream state madness, would I not know what (or where) the radiator of this film is? I’d like to believe I’d have seen through to the narrative marrow of Eraserhead long before my other visits to Lynchville, but looking back I don’t think I ever did, or as Martin put it, never really tried. Eraserhead simply felt like a sick nightmare to the young boy who first saw it, long before he learned that nightmares have literal resonance, and the weirder and more grotesque and surreal they are, the darker and more specific and resonant its Truths.
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