Quodlibets & Quiddities

It's hard to say what Eraserhead is about – it boasts spare dialogue, fantasy sequences that are difficult to disentangle from the film's surface action (if you can call it "action"), not much plot, and no discernible moral. To borrow from Homer Simpson, it's just a bunch of stuff that happens. Or, more accurately, a little bit that happens in the bleak life or equally bleak dream world of Henry Spencer, whose absurdly improbable hairdo (which would put Don King and Cosmo Kramer to shame) presumably supplies the film's title. (Or not, as a scene at a pencil factory suggests.)

Henry is a working stiff living in a grim, shabby industrial environment in which almost everybody acts like a dolt. One of the only normal human beings in his world, a beautiful woman – possibly a prostitute – in the apartment across the hall tells him that his estranged girlfriend Mary has invited him to dinner at her parents'. Henry goes there – reluctantly – and amid an artificial roast chicken that bleeds and moves its legs, a catatonic grandmother, and ominous power failures, Henry is informed by Mary's mother that he has fathered a baby. Mary protests that they aren't even sure it is a baby, but next thing he knows, Henry is sharing his tiny apartment with Mary and their monstrous offspring, trying to be a good father.

What is it that he sired, though? It certainly acts like a baby. But did Henry actually have sex with his girlfriend, as her mother demanded to know? He never really answers her, and Mary's disdain for him suggests that their romance went unconsummated. That's not to say that he isn't the father; poor Henry seems to have been the victim of an ethereal disfigured man who early in the movie used a machine lever to propel a single gigantic sperm cell (or perhaps a homunculus) from him while he slept.

Enormous sperm cells are a recurring sight in Eraserhead, for example, dropping onto a stage where a deformed woman smilingly crushes them with her feet. She is a fantasy of Henry's, who dwells behind his radiator, dances (sort of), and sings, "In heaven everything is fine…" Her bright-white cheeks look as though she has two baseballs in her mouth, bulging enough to match her large blonde hairdo. Is she a personification of a mushroom cloud?

That possibility occurred to me that last time I watched it (my fourth or fifth viewing). The movie hints at some sort of post-apocalyptic setting by its depiction of human degeneration at both an individual and societal level. Does Henry wistfully recall the bomb that somehow spared him for a lifetime of drudgery and joyless relationships, and does he anthropomorphize it as a creepy seductress? One who is behind the radiator? I don't know. It's a stretch. You could also interpret the movie as a satire of the dehumanizing nature of industrial society, or as a Freudian nightmare, or in a number of other equally plausible ways.

As with the comparatively mainstream Mulholland Drive, any explanation you can come up will explain only so much of the film. Just when you think you have it all figured out, you remember a scene that doesn't fit into your carefully woven interpretation. But that's part of the enjoyment. Is Eraserhead a surrealistic work of social criticism, or a depiction of universal fears, or David Lynch's subjective, nightmarish vision? I suspect the answer is "yes."