Eraserhead

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This article is about the movie Eraserhead. For the Filipino rock band, see The Eraserheads.
Eraserhead
Directed by David Lynch
Produced by David Lynch
Written by David Lynch
Starring Jack Nance
Charlotte Stewart
Jeanne Bates
Distributed by Libra Films
Release date(s) USA19 March 1977
Running time 89 min.
Country USA USA
Language English
Budget $10,000 (estimated)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Eraserhead (released in France as The Labyrinth Man) is a 1977 film written and directed by David Lynch. The film stars Jack Nance and Charlotte Stewart. Eraserhead initially polarized and baffled many critics and movie-goers, but over time the film has become a cult classic. Lynch has described his film as a "dream of dark and troubling things."[1]

In 2004, the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Contents

[edit] Interpreting the film

Eraserhead is considered a difficult film to understand and is open to various interpretations. For example, the review at DVD Verdict offers at least three interpretations.[2] The story does not have a strictly linear plot, it is punctuated with fantasy/dream sequences of differing lengths, and the boundary between these sequences and the primary narrative strand is often blurred. Lynch has said he has yet to read an interpretation of the film that is the same as his own.

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The setting of the film seems to be a sort of industrial wasteland. Electric lights continually flicker, sewer pipes constantly leak, and a mechanical humming sound is ubiquitous.

Henry Spencer (Nance) is a printer who is "on vacation". He gives off an air of nervousness, but makes few direct complaints about his life situation. 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, where he is told that Mary has given birth to a reptilian-looking 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 continually cries. A sleep-deprived Mary abandons Henry and the baby. 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).

Henry Spencer.
Henry Spencer.

Mysterious, sperm-like worms appear in many of the film's scenes.

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, is rendered speechless by the gruesome sight and 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 and determines that it is a servicable material for pencil erasers. The boy is then rewarded for bringing in Henry's head.

Shortly after waking from this dream, Henry seeks out the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, but he finds her at her apartment with another man. The baby then begins to laugh, and Henry 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, Henry stabs its heart 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 last scene features Henry being embraced by the Lady in the Radiator.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Filming

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Lynch and Nance on the set of Eraserhead
Lynch and Nance on the set of Eraserhead

Lynch calls Eraserhead his “Philadelphia Story,” emphasizing the fears and anxieties he experienced living in Philadelphia, attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Eraserhead developed from Gardenback, a script about adultery Lynch wrote during his first year at the Centre for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The script for Eraserhead was only 21 pages long. Because of the film's unusual plot and the inexperienced director (Lynch had made three short films at the time), no movie studio expressed interest in the project. Lynch won a $2,200 grant from the American Film Institute, and built most of the sets in the basement of the AFI conservatory.

A long-standing urban legend states that Lynch created the baby from an embalmed cow fetus. To this day, Lynch refuses to discuss how the baby was really made.

Although the baby's name is never given, it was nicknamed "Spike" by the cast and crew.

Aside from the AFI grant, the movie was financed by friends and family, including actress Sissy Spacek, who was married to Lynch’s childhood friend Jack Fisk (Fisk appears in Eraserhead as “The Man in the Planet”). Lynch claims he got a paper route to help finance it. Because of the lack of reliable funds, Eraserhead was filmed intermittently over the span of six years. Sets were disassembled and reassembled several times. The film was finally completed in 1977, premiering in March of that year.

[edit] Influence

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  • Thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, the film made its way to many repertory theaters and independent cinemas. It quickly became a cult classic and a standard at midnight movie showings for the next decade. Like many cult films, it was exceptionally popular on VHS given its limited box office gross.
  • Director Stanley Kubrick once stated in an interview with Michel Ciment that he would have liked to direct this film[3]. Before beginning production on The Shining, Kubrick screened Eraserhead for the cast to put them into the mood he wanted to convey. Other films that appear to have been influenced by Eraserhead: Tales from Gimli Hospital, The Institute Benjamenta, Barton Fink, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Begotten, and Pi.
  • Poet Charles Bukowski ranked Eraserhead among the few movies he deemed worthy of praise. 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."[4]
  • A number of rock bands take their name from the film: the 1980s rockabilly group Erazerhead; the Northern California band Eraserhead, and Eraserheads, a popular Filipino band.[5] 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 1980's London indie band, "Henry's Final Dream", also owe their name to this movie.
  • Brazilian-born electronic music composer Amon Tobin samples dialogue from the film on the track "Like Regular Chickens", from his 1998 album Permutation. The dialogue is an excerpt from a scene in which Henry Spencer is having dinner with Mary X and her parents. Mary's father, Mr. X, serves a course of "man-made" miniature chickens, which Henry is asked to carve. The sample is of Henry asking, "Do I just, uh... Do I just cut them up like regular chickens?” to which Mr. X replies, "Sure, just cut them up like regular chickens."
  • Norwegian EBM band Apoptygma Berzerk included the sample "Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse" on their song "Seven Signs", from their second single, "The Apopcalyptic Manifesto".

[edit] DVD availability in Region 1

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This movie was once notoriously difficult to acquire in Region 1 (North America) of the DVD region code. Until recently, the only way to acquire this 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.

Viewers who ordered the film from David Lynch's website received the disc packaged in a special presentation box. The DVD included deleted scenes and a 90-minute documentary about the making of the movie, which essentially consists of Lynch sitting before a microphone, 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 through retail stores (and Amazon.com) when the DVD was redistributed 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. Copies of both foreign DVD releases have turned up on eBay. It was released on DVD in Australia, but the DVD was discontinued in 2003, rumours have circulated that a new DVD may be released in mid to late 2007 (2007 being the film's thirtieth anniversary).

[edit] Trivia

  • The film's soundtrack LP carried a cryptic dedication: "To the Man in the Planet's sister." The actor who played the Man in the Planet was Jack Fisk, the brother of Mary Fisk, who at that time was David Lynch's wife. The soundtrack LP itself is something of an oddity; each side is one continuous track with no pauses.
  • When the film slowly began to gain popularity and started showing a profit, Lynch re-negotiated the contracts with the actors so they could share in the film's success.
  • Until his death, Jack Nance appeared in every David Lynch film after "Eraserhead" except "The Elephant Man". (Post-"Eraserhead" he was billed as Jack Nance.) Nance died of a subdural hematoma on December 30th, 1996. The hematoma is believed to have been the result of head injuries Nance received during a brawl outside a donut shop two days earlier.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/cinebg.html
  2. ^ http://www.dvdverdict.com/printer/eraserhead.php
  3. ^ Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. Faber & Faber, 2003. ISBN 0571211089
  4. ^ http://www.artdamage.com/buk/ginsoaked.htm
  5. ^ http://home.pacbell.net/mcrandy/index.html
  • Hoberman, James and Jonathan Rosenbaum (1983). Midnight Movies. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-015052-1. 

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
The work of David Lynch
Feature films: Eraserhead • The Elephant Man • Dune • Blue Velvet • Wild at Heart • Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me • Lost Highway • The Straight Story • Mulholland Dr. • Inland Empire
TV series: Twin Peaks • American Chronicles • On the Air • Hotel Room
Other work: Short films • Industrial Symphony No. 1 • Rabbits • Darkened Room • Dumb Land • The Angriest Dog in the World
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