Eraserhead | Feeling Fear Shapes Perspective

“Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it… You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It’s a magical medium… it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before… I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.” - David Lynch

Henry Spencer treks as if in a fixed trance through the dilapidated terrain of his world, wandering through the frame of our perspective. He doesn’t have to say a word for us to feel his neurosis. Something is looming in the beyond, in the elevator, in the hallway, in the radiator. His routine experiences are preoccupied and governed by an impending doom. The prospect of becoming a new parent navigating a territory of unknowns can inflict the same terror as ambiguous abstractions of the grotesque– for Henry, they are intertwined.

Henry’s reality is dictated by how the “unknowns” make him feel, orchestrated into a high-contrast, monochromatic bleakness of factories and urban wastelands; of men on planets pulling levers behind broken windows; of worms in cupboards and chicken dinners gone wrong; of a vulnerable newborn disfigured to the extent of being otherworldly. The visual realm of Eraserhead is so compelling in its tangibility of textures and evocation of the burden of responsibility, it could be argued that it would be successful as a silent film, and yet Lynch employs sound with careful intention, painting another dimension of Henry’s perspective. What starts as a nonchalant wind, the base of the score, becomes something more, something you can never fully piece together. It’s eerie, dreadful, pervasive; it compels a stay within the nightmare. We are asked to feel every facet of Henry’s reality, and to contemplate our unease.

"Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition.”

- David Lynch

Fear manifests itself in endless forms. It can be difficult to compartementalize our fear as we go about daily life. Even when we think we’ve finally got a hold on our anxieties, they creep up in physical expressions of pain. Our perception of the world, in capacities big and small, are in part molded by the abstract feelings we harbor. We are terrified of not understanding a complete picture. In a seeming irony, we can become obsessed and transfixed. Often times the things that scare us the most are also the things that end up attracting us. Like Henry, we become entangled in a waking hypnosis. David Lynch is synonymous with these abstract intricacies of feeling. Long before– if ever– you understand what is going on in his work, you understand how you feel.

Eraserhead does not provide itself as a means for escape, though it is surely a release. It touches a primal nerve; it lingers long after it ends, taking on a new shape as it occupies our imaginations. It washes over us, not preaching or looking to sway minds, but to invite us inside a palpable perspective of feeling. All of us possess an innate desire to rationalise– Eraserhead attests to the power in the instincts of our senses. Some things are best left without complete conscious understanding. Some things are best left in the dark, where all we can do is feel.

-“Elaborate on that.”

-“No, I won’t.” 

Written by Isabel Nola | IG: @isabelnola