Eraserhead midnight showings will send audiences on a mind trip

By the time Harry stabs a deformed alien baby in the lung in director David Lynch’s Eraserhead, viewers will probably have already given up trying to understand the plot. Maybe that’s why the IFC Center has chosen Lynch’s 1977 cult classic for their midnight movie this Friday and Saturday. Before Fight Club and Memento, Eraserhead was the original “mind-fuck” movie.

Is it a masterpiece? According to that annoying film student down the hall who examines the film as a critique of capitalism and social values in a rapidly changing technological world, of course. But that’s not what a midnight movie should do, and such commentary misses the real fun of Eraserhead—it is a surreal horror flick determined to scare the hell out of its audiences.

Eraserhead was the first film directed by Lynch, the unique mind behind other strange flicks like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr. Eraserhead remains, however, Lynch’s most avant-garde work. It stars Jack Nance as Harry, a vacationing pulisher who visits his girlfriend Mary’s parents for dinner. The conversation is awkward and strange things, like a piece of chicken squirting blood on its own, interrupt the pauses. Mary then reveals that not only was she pregnant, but she just had the baby, which looks like an amorphous shaped, armless creature from outer space.

Mary moves in to Harry’s one-room apartment, but the sounds of the baby force the mother to abandon her child. From there, Eraserhead becomes more about moments than storyline. Lynch sets up a number of bizarre occurrences—a singing girl with a deformed face lives in Harry’s radiator, Harry’s brain is revealed to be good material for erasers after his head falls off, and the baby’s head grows into a planet before exploding.

Logical sense is never present in Eraserhead, but what makes it such a unique film is the atmosphere it brings. Lynch is brooding, yet at the same time comical. Although the world Harry inhabits is full of giant, dark skyscrapers and structures that quarter him into his claustrophobic apartment, there is a certain sense of macabre humor that seeps through the film’s illogical progression of dialogue and narrative.

Midnight movie fans can find a lot of fun in Eraserhead—its genuinely creepy atmosphere has been copied in numerous horror films today, but Lynch’s subversive love of the grotesque is something that most films miss. And its lack of narrative cohesion will appeal to those who can’t stand today’s indie films that seem locked in their own formulas, as well.

But most of all, Eraserhead will make sure you never, ever, want to have children.