Erase Your Head

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The first David Lynch film I saw, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, was The Elephant Man, back at JGK's place on Betamax, many years - no decades - ago. As I said, John was the first person I ever knew with a video player. This was a Big Deal at the time and I was severely impressed. Fast forward - pun intended - to the mid-eighties, when Betamax had all but withered on the vine of commercial viability, and a crappy VHS copy of Lynch’s Eraserhead, viewed on our old B&W portable TV in Gerlan. I was so disturbed by the experience that I didn’t revisit the film for another twenty-odd years.
We were talking about the film tonight over dinner - bubbled-up with Number-One-Son & husband Leo after weeks of lockdown isolation - the consensus being that the movie is possibly the closest approximation to the experience of a nightmare ever rendered to the conscious world, if such a thing actually exists - philosophy students please advise. My original reaction to the film still holds: nightmares are usually essentially mundane in narrative, but twisted sideways and jump-cut, juxtaposing mutually-exclusive mind-states and upsetting expectations of the narrative flow of life.
Our fears and anxieties after all are usually mundane and in the main hormonally derived - fight or flight dichotomies that in the realm of dreams never resolve, leaving only tension: the ‘baby’ scene in Eraserhead summing up this uncomfortable state in one quick cut and a sentence of dialogue. And that’s without attempting any filmic or textual analysis of what made the film so disturbing, although to be frank, as a piece of art, this thing needs no analysis - it stands as it is. A work of genius that plugs in to the human psyche in a way that I don’t think will be bettered. A unique film by a unique mind.

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