t is probably safe to say that there has never been and never again will be a film quite like David Lynch’s first feature, Eraserhead, shot over a five-year period mostly at the Los Angeles estate (I’m presuming the Greystone Mansion) occupied at the time by the American Film Institute, where the young filmmaker was not only a fellow but an unofficial resident. Described by Lynch as “a dream of dark and troubling things,” Eraserhead actually has the more convoluted feel of the nightmare of a dreamer watching his own dream. The dreamer in this case is one Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a young man dressed in your basic engineer-geek tie and jacket (complete with plastic pen-holder) and sporting an improbable, foot-high coiffure that looks like, well, an eraser topping a rather pudgy pencil. As is typical for Lynch, the “dark and troubling things” of this dream are actually the stuff all-American normalcy is made of, which is to say marriage and parenthood. But the initiatory journey through which Henry wanders in his slightly irritated, slightly mystified deadpan way includes such things as tiny fowl, served by his golly-gee-whiz future father-in-law (Allen Joseph), that twitch and ooze an unspeakable goo when cut, and a grotesque “baby” that looks like a sperm gestated in its own image. (Lynch has steadfastly refused to reveal just how he created this monster-child; but there may be a clue in the dead-cat discussion included on this DVD in a long, black-and-white documentary featuring the director in a fascinating near-monologue about the making of Eraserhead.)
      Remarkably, almost everything in the somewhat more conventional (for Lynch) films to follow turns up in one form or another in Eraserhead: the railroad-yard/dockside/industrial-slum settings that provide not only the exteriors but also an ongoing soundscape that suggests everything from cosmic rumble to boat whistles and run-down machinery (Elephant Man); the sexual initiate caught between a frumpy blonde (Charlotte Stewart) on the side of family values and an exotic and very sensual woman (Judith Anna Roberts) from the darker side of things (Blue Velvet); the worm with the gaping maw (Dune); the retrieved body part (Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet); the run-down theatrical stage that may be the site of the dream’s very creation (Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive); the dingy hotel rooms with art-deco lamps that sometimes crackle and explode into whiteouts (numerous); the hero coming out the other side of his own death (Lost Highway); the petite, bleach-blonde chanteuse who may have descended from heaven (Twin Peaks; Industrial Symphony No. 1); the camera plunging into a black abyss (numerous), etc. The scrawny plant growing in a mound of earth provides a reference back to Lynch’s earlier short The Grandmother (also available from the Lynch Web site) from 1970.
      But where Lynch’s later films offer at least a semblance (and sometimes more) of conventional narrative structure, Eraserhead comes across as a series of episodes and images, both visual and auditory, from the darkest and ugliest reaches of the unconscious, mirrored in the dilapidated interiors and desolate exteriors, that sabotage at almost every moment the apparent ordinariness of the basic situation. More often than not the characters barely interact with one another, and when they do, in the film’s sparse dialogue, it is often to the tune of a stilted fifties-speak that is standard coin in Lynch’s world: “Did you have sexual intercourse with Mary?” the mother (Jeanne Bates) asks Henry twice before she proceeds to come on to him. Eraserhead can also be seen as a massive exercise in humor so black that we want to laugh hysterically and barf our guts out simultaneously. At one moment, for instance, the mother plunks a bowl of salad into the lap of a comatose grandmother (Jean Lange), then stands behind her and manipulates her arms to toss the salad. At several points the film turns in upon itself like a Möbius strip, most particularly when Henry, sitting in a box over the stage, loses his head, which is replaced by the foetal monster-baby’s head, turning our hero into his own son (or daughter?). Recovered by a young boy, Henry’s head ultimately provides the raw material for erasers placed on pencils by a rickety-rackety machine, with Henry ultimately reincarnated from the eraser dust. And when the petite chanteuse (Laurel Near) with the disformed cheeks intones, “In Heaven, everything is fine,” are we, in light of Eraserhead’s gruesomely organic climax, supposed to believe that Lynch is proposing a sugary alternative to the film’s hellhole, or are we supposed to cackle out of control at the irony of it all? We’ll never know.
      I have to say that, having seen nothing but various bad prints and videos of Eraserhead over the years, I was not prepared for the stunningly rich, beautifully cleaned-up visuals and sound on this DVD, painstakingly prepared over the last year or so, by Lynch himself, and available via his own Web site. An absolute must.

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