When Philadelphia art student David Lynch submitted a short film to the American Film Institute asking for funding to continue his career in cinema, the committee that decided these things sorted all the applicants into different piles. Lynch’s short (“The Alphabet”) wound up by itself, in a pile of one. We gotta give this guy a grant, the committee decided.
So began the association with the AFI that, nearly a decade later, would ultimately yield “Eraserhead,” the midnight-movie Freudian freakout by which all other art-school cult films would forever be judged. It turned out to be the launching pad for a career that would include “Twin Peaks,” “Blue Velvet,” “The Elephant Man” and “Mulholland Drive” and yield a new word for the filmmaker’s characteristic mix of the abstract, the macabre and the droll: the adjective “Lynchian.” Now Lynch’s first feature is being rediscovered thanks to a Criterion Collection edition (Sept. 16).
“Eraserhead” (and the rest of Lynch’s work) might never have happened if it hadn’t been for Sissy Spacek, Lynch’s deformed child, the desolation of 1970s Philadelphia and the misleading nature of the film’s script.
On paper, the film was so short (21 pages) that the backers thought they were merely providing enough money for a low-budget 21-minute film, not a micro-budget feature shot downstairs from the AFI’s Beverly Hills headquarters, at night, with a hodgepodge of homemade $30 sets. Even with Lynch nimbly threading everything together — his star’s wife cooked meals for the crew, then helped out on the set — the film still took more than four years to shoot as Lynch struggled for funding and equipment.
The black-and-white surrealist film is, to put it mildly, hard to explain: Lynch refuses all entreaties to decode it, insisting that applying meaning would harm its ability to plug directly into the subconscious. He kept his own crew in the dark about what it all added up to while he was mapping out his vision on the set. As for analyzing it, “We’ll leave that to the smart guys back East,” lead actor Jack Nance once said.
But let’s just say “Eraserhead” could be shown along with “The Shining” as part of a Satan’s Father’s Day double bill.
The title character, Henry, is a glum, passive man who learns that he has not only gotten his seizure-prone girlfriend “Mary X” pregnant but that the baby has already been born. It looks like a slimy alien, it makes pathetic whining noises all night long, it breaks out in pustules, it won’t let anyone sleep or leave the room and it laughs evilly at its success at turning Henry’s life into a waking nightmare in which his fantasies of escape are intermingled with horror images of snaky fetuses pursuing him everywhere.
In the climax, Henry carefully clips away the reptile-baby’s swaddling bandages to reveal its even more hideous internal organs, but the act of killing the little monster seems to free Henry and release him to a heaven where he is awaited by a singing circus freak in a pouffy dress who lives in a radiator.
“Basically your boy meets girl story,” Nance later told told journalist Kenneth George Godwin for a definitive 1981 making-of story that ran in Cinefantastique.
Lynch’s ode to fever dreams, isolation and paranoia evidently sprang in part from his experience living in fear amid 1960s-70s Philadelphia squalor, an urban-industrial wasteland utterly at odds with his idyllic picket-fence childhood in Missoula, Montana. “One time I was walking around at night with a stick with nails driven through it,” Lynch told Godwin, “and a squad car pulls up alongside of me, and [the cop] says, ‘What’ve you got there?’ And I showed him this stick with nails driven through it. He said, ‘Good for you, bud,’ and took off.”
Another obvious inspiration was Lynch’s daughter Jennifer, who was born in 1968 with two severely clubbed feet. She spent part of infancy in a cast not unlike the wrapping around Eraserhead’s monster child. (Lynch has never revealed the secret of how he made such a fantastic little homunculus on a tiny budget. Few people know other than Lynch, who used to insist that the projectionist wear a blindfold while running dailies from the film so he wouldn’t be able to guess the secret.)
Oh, and though Lynch was married to Peggy Lentz at the time he was making “Eraserhead,” he would go on to twice wed women named (like the film’s female lead) Mary.
Lynch repeatedly ran out of money and equipment as production started and stopped. In 1974 he split with Lentz and actually lived, illegally, on the set — specifically, Henry’s room in the movie. To make money he relied on loans from friends such as his old high school classmate Jack Fisk (who plays the godlike Man in the Planet controlling Henry in “Eraserhead”) and Fisk’s wife, Sissy Spacek.
While directing, Lynch had to take a paper route delivering the Wall Street Journal for $48.50 a week. That was a problem, because he had to do that job after midnight, which was also the only time they could shoot the movie. (During the day, the set couldn’t be insulated from the traffic and delivery sounds in the neighborhood.) Lynch would return to the set before dawn and do some of his best work then. Maybe that accounts for the film’s eerie, bleary, dead-of-night stillness.
Lynch couldn’t afford to pay his crew, but that was OK: Instead, he promised everyone a piece of the profits everyone assumed would never materialize. Made for less than $100,000, it became a hit on the ’70s midnight-movie circuit patronized by stoners, students, and avant-gardists, reportedly earning some $7 million over the years. Today everyone is still getting a nice little check every quarter.