But in my room—
Wish you were dead —
You bawl like the baby
in Eraserhead
dinner with girlfriend and her parents
Det. Kinderman :
Nobody could do that scene like Jimmy Stewart, Father!
No one! What a film, huh? So innocent, so Good!
It fills Your Heart!
Fr. Kevin Dyer (S.J.) :
Yeah, well, you said the same
thing about "Eraserhead"!
(Kinderman laughs)
Det. Kinderman :
Most Jews pick a priest for a friend!
It's always someone
like Teilhard de Chardin! What do I get?
I get a priest who calls children little weirdos
and treats all his friends like Rubik's Cube,
always twisting them around in his hands,
trying to find colours! What's the matter?
You're not eating!
Fr. Kevin Dyer :
It's too spicy!
Det. Kinderman :
I've seen you dip Twinkies in mustard!
Come on! Eat something, Gandhi! Stop fasting!
The teeming masses need
your strength! You're so stubborn!
Kinderman looks aside and sees a picture
on the wall with several men on it.
Det. Kinderman :
I know, I know! Me too!
Fr. Kevin Dyer :
What a wonderful man he was, Bill!
So loving, so terribly kind!
“ … One of the great things about knowing that You’re right is that it removes inconvenient self-doubt.
My Mother, who was a GP, once told me that the more she learned about Medicine the more she realised just how little we really understand about the human body.
This is not an uncommon conclusion – in almost every field of expertise, the actual extent of someone’s knowledge and understanding can be gauged by the degree to which they are willing to accept that they actually know nothing.
While expertise has been characterised as The Art of knowing more and more about less and less, True Learning (it seems to me) is all about understanding and appreciating just how much you will never know.
For example, at the age of forty-six, I am just starting to realise how vastand unbridgeable are the gaps in my knowledge of the history of cinema, a medium which has only been around for just over a century.
Even if I dedicated every waking moment of the next twenty years to studying the art of silent cinema, the growth of Indian cinema, the canon of Japanese cinema, and the bewildering marketing expanse of the ‘Pacific Rim’, I’d still be only scratching the surface. I recently read that, at a conservative estimate, something like twenty per cent of the films ever made no longer exist, thanks to the tendency of celluloid to disintegrate over time.
Yet even with one fifth of all movies wiped out by the helpful degradations of time, there’s still no hope of me ever being able to declare myself ‘across’ the history of movies which stretches like Cinerama beyond the comforting borders of the horizon.
Like my mother, the older I get, the less I know I know.
Yet at the age of twenty-three, with a couple of dodgy horror movies under my belt and a copy of Dworkin’s book in my coat pocket, I knew that I knew everything. And it was with this utter sense of blinkered self-certainty that I walked out of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – a film which I now recognise to be one of the greatest movies of the eighties – and straight into somebody’s fist.
How did this happen?
Let’s start at the beginning … I had seen David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead as a teenager at the Phoenix, where it played on a regular Friday late-night double bill with George A. Romero’s The Crazies.
The film was described by Lynch as ‘a dream of dark and troubling things’ and became the quintessential midnight movie hit in the US before slowly spreading its diseased spell around the globe. A surreal nightmare about a terrified man who finds himself in sole charge of a monstrous child, Eraserhead boasted extraordinary monochrome visuals, a hair-raising performance from Jack Nance (‘Henry’, as previously noted), and a disorientatingly powerful soundtrack cooked up by Lynch and his long-time aural collaborator Alan Splet. In an early review, the trade mag Variety described it as ‘a sickening bad-taste exercise’ – which sounded like a recommendation to me.
Eraserhead took ages to make; Lynch reportedly started work on it back in May 1972 and didn’t lock the final cut until early 1977. During the course of the film’s protracted gestation and birth, The Director wrestled with marriage, divorceand fatherhood, supported himself with a paper round, and fuelled his soul with sugary caffeine drinks from the local Bob’s Big Boy Diner.
During one hiatus, he completed the short film The Amputee, images from which would later be echoed in his daughter Jennifer’s feature Boxing Helena.
Indeed Jennifer, who was born with club feet, has been quoted as saying that Eraserhead ‘without a doubt … was inspired by my conception and birth, because David in no uncertain terms did not want A Family.
It was not his idea to get married, nor was it his idea to have children.
But … it happened.’
Exactly what Eraserhead is about remains a mystery. Lynch himself has proven consistently unwilling to explain the film, becoming particularly evasive on the subject of the creation of the ‘baby’ (some reports suggest that it is an animated bovine foetus). The director has, on occasion, claimed that it ‘could have been found’.
All we can be certain of is that the film’s primary register is nightmarish and symbolic – it is not to be taken literally.
Obviously.
The first time I saw Eraserhead was with my friend Nick Cooper, a schoolmate and jazz pianist whom I would enlist to play drums in an earnest post-punk sixth-form school band called the Basics. When I first met Nick he had a disastrous flyaway haircut and wore flares – an unforgivable crime. After three weeks in the Basics he had a killer crew cut and was sporting skintight Sta-Prest trousers and cool-as-nuts Harrington jackets of varying colours.
It was an amazing transformation, for which I would like to take full credit. The Truth, however, is that Nick’s straight-legged butterfly emerged from the chrysalis of his eighteen-inch flapping cocoon after he and I went to see The Wanderers at the Barnet Odeon. The film, which was set in the Bronx in 1963, had such a profound effect on both of us that after the screening we opened up the palms of our hands with a rusty penknife and became blood brothers there and then.
Nick promptly went home and sorted out his fashion mojo, and remains to this day one of the best-dressed men I have ever met.
God bless Philip Kaufman.
Dress sense aside, Nick’s judgement on movies was not always on the money. Admittedly he was so scared by The Exorcist (which we both saw for the first time together at the Phoenix) that he had to come back to my house and sleep on the floor, for which he will always retain a special place in my affections. And he’d been pretty open to most of the early Cronenberg canon, including Shivers and Rabid, both of which were fairly freaky films full of creepy latex mutations and twisted sexuality. The latter starred porn queen Marilyn Chambers in one of her few ‘straight’ dramatic roles as a woman who becomes infected by a phallic parasite which lives in her armpit and bites people during sex. Chambers had teamed up with Cronenberg at the suggestion of producer Ivan Reitman and had worked on the movie under the watchful gaze of our old friend Chuck Traynor, who was by then her manager/husband, and whom Cronenberg significantly described as ‘not my favourite kind of guy …’
Anyway, Nick coped with the sexual monsters of Rabid OK, but when it came to Eraserhead and its journey into the dark heart of Man’s most deep-set Freudian nightmares, he just didn’t get it at all. It was easy to tell when Nick wasn’t ‘getting’ a movie because his left leg would bounce up and down in a state of hyper-caffeinated agitation. The more his left knee trembled, the worse his experience of the film. It was like watching someone review a movie in real time, but from the waist down – even if his mouth said nothing, his fidgeting calf muscles spoke volumes.
The leg trembling began about fifteen minutes into Eraserhead, at around the time that Henry first returns home with the mutant baby whose existence is never explained beyonda general sense of creeping guilt about everything.
As Henry laid the baby on the table, Nick muttered loudly,
‘Well that would never happen.’
At first, I thought he was making some sort of profound surrealist joke, and laughed – it was like looking at a painting of melting watches by Salvador Dali and declaring that ‘they’ll never be very effective timekeepers’.
But Nick wasn’t joking. He was seriously doubting that someone would find themselves in the position of having fathered a bizarre alien baby, and then being required to tend to its needs in a small room which contained little other than a bed and a radiator in which lived a hamster-cheeked woman who sang to you at night whilst squishing extraterrestrial sperm beneath the heel of her tap shoes.
It just wouldn’t happen.
My only comparable experience of this sort of overly literal film criticism came when I took my sister Annie to see Lucio Fulci’s entertainingly revolting City of the Living Dead at the ABC in Edgware. She was training to be a doctor, and during one particularly gruey scene in which a demonically possessed young woman vomited up her internal organs, Annie turned to me and whispered, ‘Well that’s not scary – they’re all in the wrongorder.’ Apparently the offal spewing from the poor actress’ mouth was not biologically accurate and was therefore failing to send a shiver down my sister’s hospital-hardened spine.
As for Nick, he expressed his belief that Eraserhead ‘just wouldn’t happen’ in increasingly irritated tones, his pulsating left leg throbbing to the rhythm of his growing impatience, causing an entire row of chairs to quiver and quake like jelly on a plate. It was like watching the movie in Sensurround.
A year or so ago, whilst broadcasting on BBC 5 Live, I described Nick’s declaration that ‘that wouldn’t happen’ as being the stupidest thing I had ever heard anyone say in a cinema. Nick promptly texted me to take full credit for the comment and to assert that he still stood squarely behind his original assessment. This is one of the reasons that I like Nick so much : not only was he the person with whom I had the electrifying experience of watching The Exorcist for the first time, not only was he living proof that a good haircut and a Harrington could turn you from zero to hero overnight – over and above all these things, he was as forthrightly mad and assertive in his opinions of everything as I was.
This was a man who, when everyone else was sporting sunny ‘Nuclear Nein Danke!’ stickers had ‘Peace Through NATO!’ proudly emblazoned upon his windshield.
Politically we were worlds apart.
But personally we really were blood brothers.
Anyway, back to Manchester.
My respect for David Lynch had grown with The Elephant Man, which I took as proof that Nick had been wrong wrong wrong about Eraserhead (after all, John Merrick really did happen) and I’d even had a bash at embracing the dismal Dune, which I remember largely for containing a scene in which Sting comes out of an interstellar steam shower with nothing but a pair of silver wings on his knackers.
I could go back to the movie to check whether this scene really happened or whether I’m just making it up but frankly I can’t be bothered – considering Sting’s recent adventures with a lute and his outpourings about tantric sex (not to mention the rotten music he’s made since ‘Roxanne’) I think he deserves to come in for a little un-fact-checked stick.
Oh, and for the record,
I thought he was
crap in Quadrophenia too.
Ace Face my arse!”
— Kermode.
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