Eraserhead

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🎙️ EPISODE 161: 02.21.19 That half of David Lynch’s filmography constitute all time classics is no minor accomplishment. I imagine there are only a handful of directors with a better batting average. And so, the order of these next five films is fairly insignificant. Certainly there are biases at play which have placed them into the positions you find them here. For example, I certainly haven’t watched Eraserhead enough and I’ve probably seen Mulholland Drive too many times by comparison. It’s also about timing. Maybe This Moment™ in My Life™ is more fitting for Lost Highway then it is Blue Velvet, for myriad reasons, and so on and so on. The thing to know is this… These five projects have all stood the test of time, and any one of them is deserved of the top spot. Now, back to the countdown…

Eraserhead was exactly like I thought it would be.

I neglected to watch this film for a very long time. I kept telling myself “Now is the right time to watch Eraserhead, Jeff.” What I didn’t realize until I finally watched it is that the answer to that question is both never and always.

Eraserhead is a feat of nature. A film that took years to complete feels and flows like it was molded together over a single month or week. It almost feels silly to expound on the film at this point. It’s been dissected to death. Even critics who fail to understand it can appreciate it on the most basic of levels. ** This. Is. Art. PERIOD. ** There’s no denying that.

Wherein the surrealists who decided to make films couldn’t get past the concept of the singular idea, confining their work to shorts OR a series of loosely connected “living paintings,” Lynch was able to extrapolate the aesthetic to feature length and also tell a meanigful and very human story.

It’s soundscape alone is a work of art, and perhaps the most important facet of the film from a historic point of view. This world sounds exactly as it looks: manufactured, fractured, jarring and grim. What brief respite the Lady in the Radiator provides with her haunting, off-kilter serenade is all we get by way of counterpoint to the unnerving soundtrack of Lynch’s debut feature. It took Lynch, working in tandem with master sound engineer Alan Splet, nearly a year to complete. From the 1991 book, Midnight Movies:

“The soundtrack is densely layered, including as many as fifteen different sounds played simultaneously using multiple reels. Sounds were created in a variety of ways—for a scene in which a bed slowly dissolves into a pool of liquid, Lynch and Splet inserted a microphone inside a plastic bottle, floated it in a bathtub, and recorded the sound of air blown through the bottle. After being recorded, sounds were further augmented by alterations to their pitch, reverb and frequency.”

Lynch’s first film is also his shortest, just shy of ninety minutes, and it’s hard to find any flaws. Is the detour with the severed head at the pencil factory meaningless? How about the next-door neighbor character… unnecessary? Inside the Top 5, I won’t be nitpicking just to do so. In the Top 5, everything is fine.

Listen to my 90-minute feature podcast: RANKING DAVID LYNCH.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 160B - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 161B ⫸

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