Scrawls On Cinema

Dreams have long been the focus of art. Whether in the word’s meaning as an aspiration, or in the sorting of psychic detritus that occurs in the deepest of R.E.M. sleep, creators of art have been fascinated by dreaming as a concept, and the cinema is arguably the closest that our art approximates dreaming. Sound, image, and a relative sense of spectatorship in the viewer all work in concert in dreaming as in film, but with the production of both of these phenomena, real-world catalysts can be the driving force behind the images and narratives that unfold in these realms. Few directors have been as devoted to this parallel between somnambulism and cinema as David Lynch. His most influential films feature surrealistic imagery, narratives bound by dream logic, and a formal sensibility that has garnered him his own adjective: “Lynchian.” While a psychoanalyst would sit down with Lynch and consult with him about his dreams and events of his life that are being resolved through them, a film historian can look to one of his films and interrogate the different formal and social conventions that gave rise to it. ​Eraserhead​, Lynch’s first feature film from 1977, is a perfect candidate for this kind of analysis. The specific environment that surrounds the film and Lynch’s experience making it points to a few specific catalysts that give rise to the film’s overall construction. David Lynch’s ​Eraserhead​ is catalyzed by the formal conventions of film noir and the social phenomena of deindustrialization and suburbanization, with surrealism acting as the solvent that allows those elements to interact with each other.

Eraserhead​ follows Henry Spencer, a factory worker on vacation, who, after eating dinner with his girlfriend, Mary X, and her family, discovers that he is now the father of a grotesque infant with a bulbous, alien-like head. He and Mary house the baby at Henry’s tiny apartment, surrounded by crime and industry, until Mary gets fed up with the child and returns to her parents. The baby then gets sick, and Henry begins seeing the Lady in the Radiator, a woman who does song and dance numbers on a stage inside his radiator while squashing spermatozoa that fall from above her. He then sleeps with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, envisions his head popping off of his body on the stage inside the radiator, falling through a pool of blood on the ground, then falling through the sky and landing on the street for a young child to take to a factory, which turns his head into pencil erasers. After finding the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall in the arms of an unsavory man, the baby begins to laugh mockingly at Henry, and he kills it with scissors before seeing its head grow large and fill up the entire room until the Lady in the Radiator comes to him in a blinding white light.

While the eye-catching practical effects and ambient droning of the film’s soundtrack might overpower them on an initial viewing, the film’s aesthetic qualities are indebted to film noir. The use of black-and-white film stock, especially at a time of more readily available color stock, recalls older filmmaking, and the use of location shooting and low-key lighting clarifies this recollection as one of film noir. The nighttime shots that populate the latter portion of the film, as well as the ambient rain on the richly textured soundtrack recall the respective mise-en-scène and sound design of archetypical noir: “A common setting for a film noir would be a big city, especially at night; shiny, rain-slicked pavements, dark alleyways, and sleazy bars are the typical milieux” (Bordwell 209). Additionally, the rundown industrial wasteland that makes up the exterior shots of the film, as well as the dingy apartment complex where Henry lives is a more domestic interpretation of the more specific settings of film noir, specifically “locales such as seedy bars, cheap hotels, roadside diners, and ritzy nightclubs” (Brookes 35). More than these specific individual qualities, ​Eraserhead​ blends the textured sets of the mise-en-scène and layered sound design’s ominous and sourceless clanging, droning and whistles with deep space, deep focus compositions and a general sense of spatial continuity in order to flesh out a dark and atmospheric diegesis, falling in line with the more qualitative and nebulous attitudes of defining film noir: “the specific ambience of film noir, a world of darkness and violence, with a central figure . . . whose world is filled with fear . . . here is a world where it is always night, always foggy or wet, filled with gunshots or sobs . . . and above all, shadow upon shadow upon shadow” (Higham and Greenberg 19-21). It is in this self-contained diegetic world, made real by the mise-en-scène and sound design, that sees ​Eraserhead​ embody the ​gestalt​ of film noir’s worldbuilding in its use of film style.

A cold reading of the story beats of ​Eraserhead​ do not recall any of the specific setups of archetypical noir. No dangerous dames ask Henry to kill their husbands, no double crossings and scheming see the undoing of those two characters. Rather, the film takes the, for lack of a better word, genre convention of film noir and sees them mutate like Henry’s child, becoming something more complex. ​Eraserhead’​ s narrative takes the archetypical understanding of film noir characters, those being an alienated male protagonist caught between a good or domestic woman and a femme-fatale; he always chooses the femme-fatale and meets his downfall from such an interaction. Henry Spencer is the film’s main character, and his alienation is not one of ideology or demeanor, like the hardboiled heroes of the original noir cycle, “characterized by a cynical, wisecracking wit . . . beholden to nobody” (Brookes 63), but like the hardboiled hero, he is similarly “‘tarnished’ by his environment but also ​of​ it” (Brookes 63). This kind of environmental conditioning of the hero, reinforced stylistically in film noir by its roots in German Expressionism (Schrader 10), is evident in ​Eraserhead​, as Henry’s first moment on screen sees him look fearfully at the camera, then walk toward a Brutalist building and navigate the desolate environment around him, stepping in a puddle along the way. What further strengthens the idea that Henry’s environment bleeds into him is his ever-present sense of fear, embodied in the hunched shoulders and unsteady speech that characterize Jack Nance’s portrayal, as early as his first glance at the camera. More stylistically, the constant droning of industry on the soundtrack, mixed at a volume that is typically used to convey diegetic sound yet with no distinguishable diegetic source, serves as an intermediary between character and setting. Henry embodies the present fear in noir settings; it radiates into him with the same intensity as the atom bomb explosion photographed beside his bed, and his passivity works as a modified response to every noir protagonist’s fatalism (Damico 103).

The main women in the film, Mary X, The Lady in the Radiator, and the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall all find themselves either complicating or embodying the archetypal roles for women in film noir. These archetypes are the good or domestic woman, a sweet and relatively boring (in the mind of the noir protagonist) female character, and the femme-fatale, her foil, “the predatory, treacherous, and duplicitous figure of the sexual temptress” (Brookes 67). The Woman in the Radiator most closely embodies the good woman, with her more conventionally domestic attire, performance for Henry’s benefit, lyrics of reassurance and fulfillment, and the violent sexlessness of her stomping of spermatozoa, she represents an idealized femininity that is social prescribed, leads to a nuclear family, and is ultimately bogged in domesticity to the point of Freudian castration. The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, on the other hand, is clearly the film’s femme-fatale, in her sexual allure, temptation of Henry, and ultimate precipitation of his downfall. This archetypal binary is enforced by the mise-en-scène, as The Lady in the Radiator is clothed in light colors, blonde, lit in high key with spotlights from her stage, and cloaked in the all-encompassing light that ends the film. The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall is lit in extremely low-key lighting, clad in dark clothes and with dark hair, and descends into a pool of dark liquid with Henry. These characters are even so archetypal that their names are simple descriptors of their roles and their spatial location, nearly Brechtian in their flatness.

With the far ends of the spectrum outlined, this leaves Mary X situated somewhere in the middle. While her motherhood and family life squarely mark her as a good woman, her sexuality, which sets into motion the plot and is the more overarching source of Henry’s unhappiness, sees her embody certain aspects of the femme-fatale. Mary’s more realistic complication of the archetypes formally prescribed by film noir sets up a new dichotomy between realized and idealized femininity, the former abdicated by Henry in favor of the choices offered at the end of the film. The difficulties of realized femininity, of domesticity and childrearing and in-laws and a nuclear family are too much for Henry to bear, and so he escapes into a more simple binary world of outright lust or the divine feminine. Henry, impotent and ineffectual throughout much of the film, gets to experience both of these idealized forms by the end of the film, descending into the pool of liquid with the femme-fatale and then ascending into a heavenly light with the good woman. Where the original film noir stokes anxieties about a movement away from domesticity, ​Eraserhead​ shows a noir hero who chooses the good woman for once, follows the prescribed social order, and gets much more than he bargained for, reverting back to the idealized archetypes perpetuated in film noir.

It is with this understanding of domesticity that the geographic concerns present in ​Eraserhead come into play. ​Eraserhead​ is a film entirely preoccupied with geography, a concept that is almost synonymous with setting for this film. There are general trends with geography in the middle 20th Century that inform ​Eraserhead​, and there are more specific experiences that Lynch has mentioned directly that clarify the geographic phenomena likely to have shaped the film. Following World War II, the time that Schrader categorizes as the second and third phases of film noir (Schrader 12), saw the concurrent development of suburban sprawl out of the inner city and the Interstate Highway System under Eisenhower. Sprawl occurred in the postwar period after the groundwork was laid by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. His office created the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which gave sought to provide loans to those who already owned homes and faced an economic burden from the Depression. Later, the Federal Housing Administration incentivized private lending with government-backed guarantees, and with veterans returning home, the large market for home ownership shook up cities: “the spatial form of cities changed dramatically because built-in biases of the system favored newly built housing in suburban areas” (Kaplan et al. 216). These newly built suburban developments were epitomized by Levittown, a kind of housing development style that created the modern suburbs by using prefabricated units, inspired by the Ford assembly process, that varied in color and style only slightly (Kaplan et al. 222). These were bolstered by the Interstate, which was authorized in 1956 and was used to link the urban centers with employees living within the sprawl (Kaplan et al. 82). This process canonized American domesticity, solidifying the bonds of the nuclear family that characterized the 1950s and had previously been destabilized by film noir’s questioning of gender politics.

Subsequently, cities saw an increasing amount of deindustrialization, where previously high-paying and economically essential forms of labor that changed the built environment of the urban landscape were suddenly lost and relocated. Kaplan et al. temporalize this shift, saying that “[d]uring the 1950s and 1960s . . . industrial activities began to move away from the historic inner city, at first to suburban and nonmetropolitan locations, and later to sites in other countries” (Kaplan et al. 251). The flow of capital that moved so rapidly into industrialized cities, and brought with it impoverished people looking for jobs, just as rapidly left the urban environment, yet the built environment that was shaped by it remained despite this inactivity.

David Lynch has been on record as being deeply affected by both suburban sprawl and deindustrialized cities. In his autobiography ​Room to Dream​, he recalls his early suburban life in Boise, Idaho: “That fifties small-town thing, it’s different, and to catch that mood is important. It’s dreamy, that’s what it is” (Lynch and McKenna 25). His later years painting in Philadelphia saw a movement from the suburban to the urban, and the increasingly destitute conditions there: “‘We lived in a really bad area of Philadelphia. All of Philadelphia is a bad area, really . . . There was violence and hate and filth . . . It wasn’t those things that did it, though. It was what they did when they sank inside of me. ​Eraserhead​ came out of that’” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 223-224). The spatial binaries of the suburban and urban changes in society mirror film noir’s narrative binaries of the domestic and the libidinous, and noir’s seedy urban settings, gross but surrounded by prosperity, are modified to show a cityscape that is not soaked in a shiny coat of rain but a matte film of grime. As Sherry Lee Linkon writes, “[d]eindustrialization literature locates and explores [the tension between labor as a source of value and a source of meaning for workers] through the duality of past and present” (Linkon 45), and while this film does not say much about labor itself, its urban horror expresses the fear present when both value and meaning are sapped from an environment. Keeping in line with other texts on deindustrialization, Eraserhead​ modifies past and present by updating film noir’s spatial concerns to match the conditions at that time.

Lynch’s trademark surrealism works to further the connection of these catalysts by providing associative links and, like dreams, bring to light issues plaguing the American psyche. Cinema has the power to do this, as Surrealist theorist André Breton says, “‘I think what we valued most in [cinema], to the point of taking no interest in anything else, was its ​power to disorient’​ ” (qtd. in Matthews 1-2). Few things are more disorienting than the parade of body horror imagery and incongruity that dances across the screen during ​Eraserhead.​ Its midnight movie and cult status are a testament to that sense of surrealist spectacle. However, beyond just a disorienting and incongruous experience, surrealism in film becomes “reality raised to a new level of significance, more in accord with the inner needs of man” (Matthews 4). When examining pressing issues in society, surrealism works on a more fundamental and psychological level than political modernism or other more literal advocacies in cinema. Associations are so subdued that they become subliminal, subtext behind subtext, hidden in character interactions and the environment itself. ​Eraserhead​ works exactly like a dream because it dramatizes the social problems that arise from geographic phenomena of the time using a surreal mutation of the formal DNA of film noir. Social problems are interwoven with strangeness to show that both are a puzzle needing to be solved, and unlocking the puzzle of the latter brings to light the significance of the former.

Film noir provided a mimesis of domestic concerns, fleshing out masculine resignations to domestic fates, and ​Eraserhead​ uses those familiar stylistic components, archetypes, and tropes in order to deconstruct them and provide an epilogue to the ending of every man who did not succumb to the femme-fatale. The social concerns of geography in ​Eraserhead,​ beg the question: what happens when you transplant the nuclear family into an industrial urban environment? The corrosion of the soul that occurs in these deindustrialized wastelands is a corruption of the family unit and a rebuke of the social conditions that tried to normatively impose such standards. Eraserhead’​ s variations on film noir tell a geographic story in the strangest way possible because doing so elevates the story to a place of pure sensory experience, rather than political ideology. A monstrous infant and a woman in a radiator with deforming acne and a severed head being turned into pencil erasers are all just ways of making the ideas present less didactic and more psychologically impactful. To most viewers, however, they’re just a lot of fun, and that is what has made ​Eraserhead​ such an enduring cult classic for more than forty years.

Works Cited

Brookes, Ian. ​Film Noir: A Critical Introduction​. New York City, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Damico, James. “Film Noir: A Modest Proposal.” ​Film Noir Reader,​ edited by Alain Silver, Ursini, Limelight, 1996, pp. 95-105.

Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. ​Hollywood in the Forties.​ A. Zwemmer, 1968. Hoberman, J., and Jonathan Rosenbaum. ​Midnight Movies​. New York, Harper & Row, 1983. Kaplan, David H., et al. ​Urban Geography.​ Third ed., John Wiley, 2014.
Linkon, Sherry Lee. ​The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about

Economic Restructuring.​ Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2018.
Lynch, David, and Kristine McKenna. ​Room to Dream.​ New York, Random House, 2018. Matthews, J. H. ​Surrealism and Film.​ Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1971. Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” ​Film Comment​, vol. 8, no. 1, 1972, pp. 8–13. ​JSTOR,​

www.jstor.org/stable/43752885​.