The Absolute Importance of ERASERHEAD to any aspiring filmmaker by Craig Hammill

This past Saturday, we had our largest audience since COVID attend a 35mm double bill of David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive at the Million Dollar Theater. Although I’m often exhausted these days between our newest baby daughter (we love you Pamela Aida!) and the rigors of working to grow Secret Movie Club post-pandemic, I had to plop myself down in a seat and watch ERASERHEAD in all its 35mm glory. Sleep be damned!

Watching these shadowy dreamy silvery phantasmagoric images on the screen, hearing Lynch and sound designer Alan Splett’s wild expressionistic sound design work, marveling at Lynch’s ability to make BOTH a deeply spiritual AND secular movie, I was knocked to the floor yet again by the big invisible fist to the gut that is great cinema.

Eraserhead tells the story of nervous, anxious Henry Spencer who comically (though simultaneously nightmarishly) is invited to his girlfriend’s family dinner, is told she’s just had his baby at the hospital, and suddenly finds himself trying to raise said baby (which looks like a kind of skinless calf/horse monstrosity) with his girlfriend in his small apartment. At the same time, he struggles with feelings of lust for his next door neighbor and sees a woman in his radiator who sings about heaven on a mini-theatrical stage. There’s also stop motion animation. A deformed man at an old lever in front of a window. And some of the most stunning practical and lighting effects you’ll ever see.

I’ve always loved Eraserhead. It, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive are the Lynchs I return to the most (though his entire body of work is deep and rich). But watching it this time, one thing hit me like a diamond bullet to the brain (as Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz would say): this was as singular a debut feature film as any ever made.

Or put another way, whether by force of will or because he couldn’t help it (and sometimes those are paradoxically the same thing) David Lynch and his team had the courage, vision, fearlessness, and daring to make something that imitated NOTHING. To make something singularly ITSELF.

Most of us have to work through our influences (if we’re lucky) before we dare to make movies governed by the internal compass the universe buries deep in the fertile soil of our being. We make our Martin Scorsese movie. Or we make our Spielberg movie. Or we make our Hitchcock movie. Or try to at least. We borrow this shot from that film and this story beat from that work.

And hell, David Lynch loves cinema and has been open about his influences. And Eraserhead sure plays like a German Expressionist film made by a tormented soul in Purgatory.

But there’s still nothing like it. And what’s even more fascinating is that the template for much of Lynch’s great work to come is already here in this first feature. The minimalist yet maximalist (in terms of suggestion) production design. The zig zag floors. That strange brilliant thing Lynch does where he puts really off-kilter characters and behaviors right next to characters who behave very rationally and normally.

The framed portrait of the atom bomb in Henry’s room that Lynch placed there in the mid-70’s appears behind a 70+ year old Lynch in 2017’s TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN when Lynch plays FBI director Gordon Cole.

And then there’s the absolute daring to be so emotionally and spiritually expressive. The sequence of the Radiator Girl embracing Henry in a din of spiritual confusion like an embrace in an otherworldly windstorm of being is almost impossible to believe (such a thing could be captured on film).

And maybe what anchors me (or sobers me) is that it took Lynch and his team 4+ years to bring this vision to the screen. Lynch got balled out by his parents. Told to drop the movie and get a job. He did get a job-delivering newspapers in the early morning, so he could continue funding the movie. His lead actor Jack Nance kept his hairstyle for four years. Catherine Caulson (who would later appear as the Log Lady in Twin Peaks) helped finance the movie with waitressing money and tips.

And they stuck with it.

Eraserhead ultimately is a high water mark in folks making a movie NOT as a calling card (though it did become that because of its singularity) but because they believed in it and thought it could be a great movie.

And they dared to commit to their internal barometers.

Orson Welles said in an early 1980’s interview that he didn’t get it when people would come up and say they were influenced by him. Welles went on to explain, it wasn’t that he wasn’t flattered, but that he felt that was the wrong way to go about moviemaking. Welles felt folks should always make movies, experiment with cinema, to discover their own unique approach, style, take on material. Not try to emulate others.

There’s brilliance and words of deep wisdom in what Welles said. There’s brilliance and proof of this truth in what Lynch made.

Eraserhead. Always and forever. Sui generis. Its own thing.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.