Reviewed by Clayton Dillard
Given the plethora of books, articles, reviews, and even movies such as Lynch/Oz (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2022) providing close readings of the films of David Lynch over the past forty-odd years, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could contribute a unique, distinctive vantage point that doesn’t merely throw another textual analysis onto the existing pile. With the recently published BFI Film Classics edition on Eraserhead (1977), Lynch’s first feature, Claire Henry has accomplished precisely that feat. Henry’s short book is dense with information and conceptual rigor, charting the cult film’s history as it gradually became “the ultimate midnight movie” alongside a discussion of how Lynch’s practicing of Transcendental Meditation (TM) since 1973 serves as “perhaps a more useful framework for thinking about the processual and structural aspects of Eraserhead than for interpreting its narrative meaning” (64). Rather than claim to offer a definitive reading of Eraserhead, Henry asserts that any such interpretation proves elusive, even impossible, because of the film’s “complexity, multivalence and ambiguity,” and even calls into question whether viewers should approach Eraserhead as a narrative film at all (75). Henry’s insights are liberating for how they ask us to see Eraserhead as a spatial and processual work in pursuit of, in a phrase that Henry borrows from Umberto Eco to name the book’s second of five chapters, “a completely furnished world” (28).
In Chapter One, Henry examines how the figure of “the baby” in Eraserhead, alongside the early films of David Cronenberg, “birthed” the body horror subgenre (24). According to Henry, Lynch’s film hasn’t been adequately historicized as such because “the subgenre is not wedded to Lynch’s auteurism in the way it is to Cronenberg’s…and also because Eraserhead is an ambiguous and atypical film in terms of genre” (25-26). As film history and genre analysis, the claim is a dubious one, primarily because by 1977, films such as Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanksi, 1968), It’s Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) had thoroughly established the human body and its unsightly transformations as a locus for modern horror. While Henry makes a wholly convincing case for Eraserhead—and its “abject baby” in particular—as an “iconic” contribution to the subgenre, more historical work would be necessary to fully substantiate the claim of Eraserhead’s innovation in this regard (24).
More convincing within the same chapter, however, is Henry’s examination of the baby “as a symbol of Eraserhead’s compelling inscrutability” (18). By reviewing previous critical assessments of the baby’s significance, which have attributed it to fears of fatherhood and phallocentric anxieties (to name only a couple of angles), Henry demonstrates how the majority of approaches to Lynch’s film have aimed to situate it within theoretical frameworks for the purpose of achieving narrative meaning. These attempts are mistaken, Henry convincingly claims, because they perceive Eraserhead as being manageable through the conventional aims of hermeneutics and offer too narrow a critical examination of the film’s complexities. It’s puzzling, then, that Henry immediately offers such an account, proposing “an alternative reading of the [film’s] opening scene as a male birth myth,” adding “to push this provocation further, the entire film and its cult spectatorship could be understood as a cinematic couvade ritual (i.e. the male spectator simulating the act of giving birth)” (20). If, as Henry asserts, the film and the figure of the baby are inscrutable, it’s unclear how this interpretive angle is absolved from the critiques that Henry levels at others.
The book’s strongest chapter is arguably its second, titled “A Completely Furnished Lynchian World,” which makes a fascinating case for Eraserhead as a dwelling rather than as a narrative film; in short, Henry argues, Lynch creates “a world that is so immersive in its setting, mise en scène, cinematography and sound that one is drawn to repeatedly inhabit it” (56). Such inhabitance isn’t arbitrary, but indicative of Lynch’s own mode of film viewing and appreciation. In a book that is chock full of quotes from Lynch as evidence of his aesthetic aims, one of the most insightful concerns his infatuation with Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), particularly Norma Desmond’s decrepit mansion. Of the film, Lynch said, in a 1987 Vanity Fair interview: “I don’t care about the story or even knowing about it—I love to experience that place.” Accordingly, one can approach Eraserhead as an inhabitable space, albeit one that isn’t particularly warm or welcoming, especially in its cold exterior industrial spaces. In fact, Henry explains, Lynch drew on his time spent in Philadelphia during his early twenties as an artist—a place Lynch once characterized as a “hellhole”—for many of the film’s exterior shots, which present as “a Lynchian version [of Philadelphia] filtered by his fearful experiences and transformed into a fantastical ‘fringelands’ place” (34). Similarly, interiors obtain a labyrinthine quality, Henry explains, through systems of cavities and unstable boundaries. These meticulously engineered spaces are the result of Lynch’s painterly approach to the film’s compositions; cinematographer Frederick Elmes and camera assistant Catherine Coulson have commented on Lynch’s “one-frame-at-a-time process,” which also extends sonically, such that “the mix of sounds…typically does not have a clear source, and the blurring of boundaries between diegetic and non-diegetic sound…dissolves demarcations between interior/exterior, internal/external or dream/reality” (54). In sum, Henry argues, spatiality, construction, and furnishings are not residual effects of Lynch’s work: they are “the mechanism of Lynchian world-building” (56).
The book’s third chapter, nearly as invigorating as its second, arguably contains the book’s thesis, which reads as follows: “I propose that Eraserhead eludes narrative meaning and is best approached not as a narrative film but as a processual evocation, an experience that follows intuition rather than narratable meaning while rooted in creative processes of dreaming, meditation and art-making” (58, emphasis original). In terms of sequencing, this chapter may have been better suited as the first, given how the concept of “processual evocation” fully orients Henry’s reading of the film in a direction to that of other scholars and critics. Nevertheless, the concept of process relates less to dreaming, for Henry, than to TM and the personal and creative transformation it marked for Lynch. In fact, Henry thinks that “the dream analogy is limited in the insight it can offer” because it both “provides an easy explanation for the film’s surrealist syntax” and “is in keeping with both the ‘nightmarish’ and Freudian imagery” (61). These are striking claims for how they carve up tidy psychoanalytic readings of Lynch’s work, though given Lynch’s history of citing his own dreams as a source of inspiration (he claims the ending for Mulholland Dr. [2001] came to him in one), an oneiric framework may still hold some value in future examinations.
In the final two chapters, Henry turns toward situating Eraserhead within the late ’70s exhibition landscape of exploitation films and midnight movies. Despite its contemporary renown, Eraserhead was rejected by both Cannes and the New York Film Festival in 1976. When Ben Barenholtz of Libra Films International picked it up for distribution in 1977, citing “a gut feeling” that the film would find an audience, it took nearly a year for critics to even notice the film, aside from J. Hoberman for the Village Voice, who would later canonize it in the 1983 book Midnight Movies, co-authored with Jonathan Rosenbaum. In discussing the film’s cult appeal, Henry cites the dinner scene, the film’s absurdist humor, and its “transgressive violence, gore and perverse sexuality” as reasons for the film’s success, but Henry also perceptively notes how the film’s post-countercultural sensibilities, and its being both unique and out of step with its time, may have contributed to its increasing interest among midnight audiences (87).
In the final chapter, titled “Traces of Eraserhead,” Henry makes a case for the film’s significance as a classic, noting that Stanley Kubrick (who claimed at one point to have seen the film thirty times), William Friedkin, and John Waters were all early, positive contributors to the film’s reputation. Henry also points to future films ranging from Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamato, 1989) to Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, 2000) as owing a creative debt to Eraserhead, further making an irrefutable case that, despite the unappreciative reception that greeted the film’s debut, Lynch’s film is now, and has been for some time, an unimpeachable cinematic touchstone, capable of crossing genres and stylistic lines like few films can. Henry’s book not only provides a historical case study to support this but lands on fresh theoretical ground that should yank future thinkers and writers about Lynch through a wormhole of their own: away from close readings predicated on staking claims of narrative coherence and closure, and toward engaging with Lynch’s films as open-ended, varied evocations of potential spatial inhabitance.