Dish of the Day

Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Today’s “Dish of the Day” has a brief review of 1977’s Eraserhead, inspired by a post in one of the film related Facebook chat rooms. This includes the Cinema Cafe group (all readers are encouraged to join here).

Eraserhead (1977)

A wise friend once told me “We dream what we fear” and by the look of things in David Lynch’s first feature-length film Eraserhead, no truer words could apply. Watching this film is the cinematic equivalent of being sucked into a black hole: a universe so dark, strange, full of dread and despair, death would seem a comfort… and yet it’s a world that is hypnotically captivating at the same time. After a spell, a somewhat decipherable storyline takes place in a kind of weird wasteland. At no time, however, is there a singular identifiable tone. There’s absurdity without humour, serenity that’s unsettling, an intertwining of mundanity and horror that lulls its audience into a numbed, trance-like state where our intellect no longer matters if it functions at all.

One of the reasons Eraserhead is so creatively effective is because, unlike the same filmmaker’s later made The Elephant Man (1980) and Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch never deviates from his surrealistic approach. Some may be disturbed by the narrative uncertainty, its disconnected succession of grotesque imagery and distorted ambience, but this type of unreality is no more for them than Jean Cocteau's 1950 masterpiece Orpheus or Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's even less comprehensible dreamlike sensation, 1929’s Un Chien Andalou. Artists who delve into this abstract form of expressionism must communicate confidence above all else, making their hallucinatory imaginings so unequivocal, the viewer could never conceive of such sights and sounds, nor their progression, any other way. That, Lynch and his team have designed brilliantly: reaching into the dark recess of their main character’s subconscious, uncovering a nightmare of unique disquietude that increasingly gains in its persuasive power of entrancement. 

All responses are not only welcomed but encouraged in the comments section below.

Hope to see you tomorrow.

A.G.