Eraserhead: An Introduction

For Nottingham Puppet Festival 2024, I was invited back by organisers to introduce a special sell-out screening of Eraserhead at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema on 17 April.

The following is a transcription of my talk …

Six years ago, I conceived and co-produced Nottingham Puppet Festival, during my time working at the Theatre Royal Nottingham. The festival is now back for its third incarnation, which tonight’s screening of Eraserhead forms part of.

In fact, this is the third time I have presented a Puppet Festival event at Broadway. In 2018 I hosted a celebration of the work of Gerry Anderson, and in 2021 I interviewed celebrated TV and film puppeteer Ronnie le Drew, the man behind, or rather below, Zippy from Rainbow.

Compared to those two puppet-related events, this screening tonight of David Lynch’s 1977 debut masterpiece Eraserhead is in a different universe entirely.

In this introduction I am not going to try and provide you with any kind of meaning of the film. Many have tried. I tend to side with an early review that said that “this is a movie to be experienced, rather than explained.”

The best description of it probably comes from David Lynch himself who said it was … “a dream of dark and troubling things” And that is the closest he has come to provide any kind of meaning or interpretation to his work.

This dreamlike, some would say nightmare vision of the film, is oft repeated. Danny Peary in his classic book Cult Movies writes:

“Ever had a dream while sleeping face down, with your mouth and nose buried in your pillow? In your discomfort you might have conjured up something that approximates Eraserhead.”

I first discovered Eraserhead in my mid-teens, having discovered Lynch through his second film The Elephant Man, which Lynch was hired to direct, famously by Mel Brooks, using Eraserhead as his calling card.

I video-d a late-night TV screening of Eraserhead and watched it the next day on my own, with parents out and curtains drawn. I can still remember that emotional rush, fear, and disorientation of watching this very strange film. It was unlike anything I had ever seen, and to this day little has come close.

Years later, Chris Rodley, editor of the seminal book on the director Lynch on Lynch, was able to describe mine, and probably many of yours, first experience of watching Eraserhead when he wrote that it is hard to pinpoint exactly what one has actually seen, because the uncanny lies at the very core of Lynch’s work.

And to create that ‘mood,’ a key word for Lynch himself, Eraserhead utilises and fuses together all the available elements of cinema, including puppetry, to unnerve us and create this uncanny atmosphere. This fusion of forces enables the ordinary and everyday, such as a space behind a radiator, to become both tangible and other-worldly.

But it is the relentless sound-score by Lynch collaborator Alan Splet that immediately and constantly unsettles us in Eraserhead. It is pre-dominant from the start, an unnerving, relentless, crafted sound, inspired by Lynch’s simultaneous love and fear of the city, particularly from his time as an art student in Philadelphia. Eraserhead is “the true Philadelphia story” he once said.

As a child, Lynch was frightened visiting his grandparents in Brooklyn:

“I had a taste of horror every time I went to New York. My grandfather owned an apartment building with no kitchens. A man was cooking an egg on an iron – that really worried me. I could just feel fear in the air. It was great for future fires.”

This fear is reflected throughout Eraserhead and so it can be argued that this is Lynch’s most personal film, and so throws up many questions. Is the baby a reflection of his own early fatherhood whilst an art student? Does Lynch’s discovery of Transcendental Meditation during this period permeate into our lead character Henry Spencer’s journey and inner life?

It’s also a personal film due to the nature of its comedic moments. Lynch is well-known for his sense of humour and fun. He has spoken of the influence of European cinema and was a huge fan of Jacques Tati, reflected in Henry’s Tati-esque inspired walk through the industrial wasteland. The dinner scene with the synthetic chickens, satirises the wholesome American family, possibly plundered from his own 1950s upbringing.

These, as well as smaller, almost slapstick moments, reveal how funny Lynch and his work can be.

But of course, this must be a personal film as Lynch laboured over it for half a decade.

He conceived Eraserhead in 1971, having shifted his focus as an artist from painting to experimental filmmaking, and started filming in June 1972.

Five years later, in March 1977, it premiered at Filmex, a small Los Angeles film festival.

For those five years Lynch and a small, devoted crew, including actor Jack Nance playing Henry, who let’s not forget, sported that haircut for the whole period, toiled over the film, immersing themselves in this world; slowly working in an unused stable complex owned by the American Film Institute in Beverley Hills, late into the night. A key element that provided the perfect mood for the director.

Lynch and Nance meticulously rehearsed, spending long periods of time together in that bedroom, amidst the mounds of dirt, crafting each tiniest move and glance of Henry Spencer.

Eraserhead defines low-budget filmmaking. There was some funding from the AFI, but Lynch was also reliant on loans and donations from his father, actor Sissy Spacek, and Nance’s then wife Catherine Coulson, who also took on many behind-the scenes roles and was later to become well-known as the Log Lady in Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Lynch even took on a paper round to support himself during filming.

Filming stopped when the money ran out. Lynch has spoken how in one scene, Henry walks down the hall, turns the doorknob and a year and a half later, when they had got some more money together, he comes through the door.

The first screening in LA was markedly low-key. Some critics certainly didn’t know what to make of it. Such as this from Movietone News …

“If anyone could demonstrably suffer permanent damage seeing a film, there’s a good chance that film would be Eraserhead”

But its notoriety grew and it soon became a regular fixture on the Midnight Movie urban scene of underground, cult films, during the 70s and early 80s. Eraserhead was continuing the Midnight Movie tradition of out-there movies such as El Topo and Pink Flamingos, but it’s clear that Eraserhead was having a different effect on its viewers.

We have a short clip of some fascinating audience-goers who were seeing Eraserhead around this time.

Clip … Audience reactions to David Lynch’s « Eraserhead » (youtube.com)

So, why include Eraserhead in a festival of puppetry?

In 2018, we conceived Nottingham Puppet Festival as an opportunity to celebrate puppetry in all its forms, including some of the genre’s more darker elements. Eraserhead certainly highlights how puppetry can be used to shape a nightmarish vision.

The film has been named by the BFI as one of the ten great puppet films. Lynch’s use of meticulous puppetry, notably for the famous “baby”, which he has steadfastly refused to discuss how it was made or operated, and the strange chickens during the dinner-scene, is a key element in the film’s moulding of our unease. Their mis-shapen oddness add to our over-whelming uncanny feelings, and yet are entirely appropriate for the surreal world that Lynch has created.

Lynch has a clear understanding of the relationship between a puppet and the viewer, as puppetry, when successfully done, enables an audience to be united in a collective encounter.

Puppeteer David Currell describes this as being “invited to invest the puppet with emotion and movement, and to see it ‘breathe’” This breath is the key to audience engagement in a puppetry performance, whether on film or in a theatre. We, as well as the operators, give a puppet life.

Currell reminds us, that puppets are inanimate objects and as an audience, we have to be involved. He states:

“Puppets also need to work in the here-and-now, and in concrete terms. They cannot philosophize and cannot reflect on the past; they must be in the moment or moving forward. This is a fundamental principle: the audience must do the philosophizing, not the puppet.”

Despite the horror surrounding the baby in Eraserhead, Danny Peary is right to state that “Lynch is on the side of the child in the film, and by the end of the film, so are we.”

It is through puppetry that we become invested in Henry Spencer’s strange offspring. We allow it to breathe and to mewl its desperate cries. What happens subsequently becomes even more shocking due to our investment in that macabre puppet. I wasn’t a parent when I first saw Eraserhead. This film now has even greater resonance for me.

I want to finish this talk with David Lynch himself.

In many interviews I’ve watched and read, Lynch is always humbly grateful for the support that Eraserhead received through the late-night Midnight Movie screening circuit. In particular, the Nuart cinema in Los Angeles contributed to the film’s growing acclaim with screenings once a week, every Friday night, for four years.

I looked at its website and the Nuart is still continuing its late-night cult movie screenings. This week we can go and see The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Blow Up.

In 1982, Lynch, alongside some ‘goofball’ friends, appeared in a trailer for Eraserhead that was shown prior to the Nuart screenings. It feels right that we should now have that same introduction from the film’s director for this special Broadway screening of the film.

Thank you.

 Clip … 1982 Trailer for Eraserhead - A message of hope - David Lynch (youtube.com)