Eraserhead (1977)

directed by David Lynch

Lisa Mangini

We dim the lights in the living room, and I angle myself on the blue recliner towards the glow of the boxy Magnavox. We have our snacks ready: I don’t recall what, but we’ve never really been a “popcorn” family. Probably a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s for each of us. We’re making every effort to be all comfortably settled, as one might for any family movie night, but tonight is different.

Tonight I am watching Eraserhead for the first time. My father has bet me five dollars that I won’t be able to sit through it.

“But you can’t just sit there, or work on your crafts or something. You have to really pay attention. Get invested,” he says.

“Todd. Todd,” my mother is insistent. “She’s too young. It’s just...too weird. It’s disturbing. We can’t let her watch it.” At this I explode with delight: five bucks to watch something that my mom thinks is weird and awful and therefore seems deliciously forbidden at twelve years old? Jackpot. My father and I shake on it.

The film is on an old VHS taped off of television. I watch closely: the shadowy figure with an array of levers to choose from, backdropped by a broken window; a man wandering a post-industrial landscape with a parcel in his arms, checking his empty mailbox, standing alone in an empty elevator in an empty lobby.

“Are you bored yet?” My father asks, pausing the tape.

I startle at his voice; we’re ten minutes in, and there’s been no dialogue yet. I am too engrossed to say anything other than ‘no’ and wait for him to press play.

At the end, the living room is quiet. My father asks me what I think, and my mother asks me if it traumatized me. I don’t know how to explain that I feel like some kind of electrical current has been running through me, and that now the world feels full of strange secrets. Instead, I look down at my hands and say that I liked it.

*

When my boyfriend L comes over for the first time, it shouldn’t be a big deal, because he, my mom, and I all work together at the same grocery store. There is a kind of strangeness, a weight that hangs in the air, however. L is a few years older and has a car, but we don’t have much in common, so it’s hard to figure out plans. Is there ever anything to do at 16 in your parents’ house other than watch a movie? We are in the living room, which is open to the rest of the house, making it a bad choice for any possibility of making out. Which is fine, because I’m excited to see this movie for the fourth or fifth time, to get closer to unlocking what it all means. There is something of a miscommunication between L and me, and he keeps moving closer, hands wandering. Eventually, I’m spared from having to even say anything: Eraserhead is apparently a mood killer, and he retreats back to his side of the couch, brow furrowed in disgust. The scene where Henry is asked to carve the dinner is on, dark blood pulsing out of the bird’s cavity onto the plate. He asks how long we have to watch this.

“What is that thing? Is that a baby?”

“I mean, I think so. But maybe you’ll change your mind at the end.”

We make it the whole 90 minutes, and at the end, I lunge for the remote, shut the TV off, and turn to him. I urge him to tell me what he thinks. He tells me it was “creepy” and “weird,” and asks if next time we can go to the theater to see Scary Movie 2. He sneaks his arms around my waist and pulls me toward him with a smirk.

A few weeks later, I leave for a summer program, a residential arts camp about an hour away. We break up painlessly the moment I return. My mother is relieved, having heard more about his reputation than I have.

*

N is a friend who transitions into a boyfriend quickly after L and I break up. N is also two years older with a car, but sensitive and bookish, listening to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins and with a scholarship to study chemistry in college next year. He comes to the house often, usually to pick me up in the driveway, or sometimes to help me with my chemistry homework at the dining room table—but when I start to wonder if this might be serious, I turn to my litmus test.

We make it an event: we stop at Video Galaxy, the local video rental store, but only to buy a hoard of chips and boxed candy and drinks. We pull the shades across the picture window against the last of the late daylight in September. We agree that we both can pause it at any time to discuss or dissect a scene.

Periodically, I glance over, and see him watching intently, focused. Invested. With the soundtrack of incessant industrial humming in the background, my heart speeds along in my throat. N could really be the one.

Eraserhead ends, and we stare straight ahead in silence, the tube TV dim but still on with the black empty screen in the liminal space between the film and the end of the tape. The house is quiet. I am still enough to hear my pulse in my ears. I feel closer to N than any other boy ever. We are two feet apart on the couch, but our hands find each other; our fingertips touch. We exchange a few observations, but it’s late and a school night, and he should go home.

Then he blows it.

He comes over a few days later, after scouring nascent internet search engines, and has found a seven-page long interpretation of the film by some critic or scholar. N proudly explains that the gear-shifting man is God, and the slimy tendril sprung from Henry’s mouth in the opening is a metaphor for the soul and sin; the woman in the radiator is a symbol of fertility, her cheeks like ovaries ripe with eggs. He reads from a print-out, pointing a thin finger at each paragraph as he recites Lynch’s inspiration for the film.

“Stop, stop, you’re ruining it!” I can’t help myself. This is not what I had in mind. N smiles at me, thinking I’m playing. But I’m not. He looks puzzled. Didn’t I want to talk about it? Wasn’t that the whole point? Of course that’s the point, but it doesn’t count if it’s not what he actually thinks. There’s nothing special in finding the answer at the back of the book.

I showed Eraserhead to J and S and T and another T—any boy I liked, I asked to watch it with me early on in the crush phase. It almost never went well (to be fair, the film on its surface seems to be about an unplanned pregnancy gone darkly wrong), but sometimes the results were more promising than I expected. Eraserhead served more as a Rorschach or mood ring than an equation to solve. It didn’t really matter what any of them thought it meant, just as long as they didn’t yawn and dismiss it as “strange.”

Sure, part of it was showing off. All things we love and expressions of taste are a kind of signal to others of how we want to be seen, especially as teenagers: I like this experimental movie, therefore, Please see me as smart and mature and thoughtful and artistic; look how deep I am. But part of it went beyond if someone could like the things I liked, too. I was gauging whether or not it was safe to be myself, to show myself. I wanted to know if this person could pay attention, even if the object of attention was dark and difficult and inaccessible and uncomfortable, and sometimes hard to embrace. Isn’t this what we deserve from someone we want to trust, the very makings of intimacy? When we are watching Eraserhead, I am watching the face of the boy next to me on a blue sectional, but even with his eyes on the screen, he is watching me.

Lisa Mangini is the author of a collection of poetry and four chapbooks of poetry and prose. She holds an MFA from Southern Connecticut State University, and is the Founding Editor of Paper Nautilus, a small press. She lives in Central Pennsylvania, where she teaches English at The Pennsylvania State University.