Going in vacation, Henry Spencer, a factory worker that differs from having a miserable life. He does his best to deal with his life challenges when he knows that he has a mutant child.
"In heaven, everything is fine," but in Eraserhead (1977) nothing is fine. David Lynch's debut feature is grim, disturbed, mutated, claustrophobic, a world that appears to be unraveling-or, more accurately, decaying-before our eyes.
It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.
It is the vision of the paranoid transposed upon the screen; the fact that it remains extremely interesting ought, I suppose, to be worrying. But perhaps our eyes have become so desensitised that nothing, any more, will widen the iris.
Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.
Linear plots with easily defined cause and effect are the kinds of stories we are used to, but sometimes it's refreshing to enter a world where logic takes a backseat to purely evocative storytelling.
What makes Eraserhead great -- and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision.
