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& Dumberer
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The
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Kong
LXG
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of the Caribbean
Sinbad
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2
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3
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Van
Helsing
Eraserhead
David Lynch’s mindboggling avant-garde feature film debut, Eraserhead, is available on DVD, but only through Lynch’s website at www.davidlynch.com. It is priced at $40 and comes in an oversized box that you practically have to pry open to get to the platter. There is also a nice little booklet with photos and memorabilia.
The presentation looks fantastic. It is in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. In comparison to the cropped LD, there is substantially more picture information on the sides and a little bit more on the top, with only the bottom of the letterboxed image being very slightly masked. The black-and-white image has been meticulously cleaned up and has precise contrasts, so that every subtlety is discernible.
The booklet claims that the audio is in uncompressed PCM mono, but in fact it is in two-channel Dolby stereo, creating a mild but distinctive dimensionality. The sound is very clear and free of distortion, with a well-defined low end. The 89-minute program is not captioned or chapter encoded.
The 1977 film began its theatrical life in midnight screenings and was therefore known only to a certain breed of moviegoer willing to expend an uncommon level of personal commitment to view it. Hence, when Eraserhead appeared on home video a few years later and became the subject of conversation with movie fans who would never think of leaving their homes after 11:00 at night, it represented a monumental shift in how movies are seen and digested, one that raised the level of aptitude and film literacy throughout the world. Maybe not everybody could sit through it, but a great many more viewers became aware of its presence—and of the presence of other movies with similarly challenging artistry—than ever before.
On a superficial level, the film has a surprisingly straightforward narrative. A factory worker played by Jack Nance is invited to his girlfriend’s house for dinner, where he learns she has recently given birth to a baby thing. They try to live together in his apartment and care for the thing, but she gets frustrated and leaves, so he is left to care for it himself. Then it gets sick. He also has daydreams and thinks there is a woman with puffy cheeks dancing beneath a proscenium inside his radiator. And then, well, things get a little weirder.
The most important thing to remember about a movie like this is that you can interpret it anyway you want to. Even Lynch cannot definitively say what the movie means (he claims no critic has ever expressed his interpretation of the film). Instead, it is constructed so that you can look inside yourself and explore your own imagination and emotions, taking cues or inspirations from its images to massage your own subconscious. What Eraserhead appears to depict, more than anything else, is anxiety. Although populated with human characters, its landscape feels like a human psyche turned inside out, with emotions, such as anxiety, represented by the objects and actions the characters become involved with. It may not be the movie you want to see if you are pregnant with your first child, but it is on the money in communicating what the downside of your feelings is going to be like after that child is born.
There are three special features. One, a trailer, is disappointing, because it is a standard trailer and not Lynch’s Woody Woodpecker trailer. The second is a deleted clip from the film that plays over the menu, in which Nance’s leg is wired to a dead cat. Fun stuff. The primary special feature, however, is a doozy, an 85-minute retrospective documentary that has to be one of the all time great retrospective documentaries ever, and, since it was obviously put together by him, essentially the latest David Lynch movie. Most of the documentary consists of close ups of Lynch—sometimes shoulders-and-head, other times, just head—talking into an Orson Welles-style microphone as he tells the story of his five year stay at the American Film Institute (he actually lived there a lot of the time, even though he wasn’t supposed to) while he and his friends pieced together the movie whenever they could get their hands on some money. Lynch does not read his story, he talks it, slowly, as if he were just thinking about it, and often digresses to other, unrelated anecdotes about his friends. To vary the image, there are also snapshots and still photos from the production. Lynch’s assistant, Catherine Coulson, shares her memories as well, ostensibly on a speakerphone in conversation with Lynch during the course of his talk, or so it seems. The whole effort is deceptively realistic, but just artificial enough to transcend that realism, so that you’re always half wondering if he’s pulling your leg (“And tar preserves things. And the cat has served many purposes, but I lowered this cat in there, and then about a year later, came back, and pulled the wire and the cat came out, impregnated with tar. And I lay the cat down on the ground and came back another year later and it was a perfect marriage of cat and earth.”) or if satire just follows him around like fairy dust.
Nance is the subject of another DVD, I Don’t Know Jack, a Had To Be Made Special Collector’s Edition from Next Step Studios (07789, $25). Nance had a long association with Lynch and is probably best remembered, after Eraserhead, as Piper Laurie’s ineffectual husband in Twin Peaks. The 91-minute documentary is primarily an oral history, as various co-workers and others recollect what Nance was like and how he got along in life. It is an interesting portrait of a character who remained on the periphery of Hollywood but clearly left an impression with those who crossed his path.
The full screen picture has a documentary quality and is grainy in spots, but workable. The sound is primarily centered, but the opening is stereophonic. There is no captioning. The 2002 feature is accompanied by a 24-minute documentary about Nance’s death, which consists primarily of interviews with the Twin Peaks actress, Kimmy Robertson, the now retired detective who investigated his case, and a psychic hired by Robertson to contact him. It makes an appropriate epilog to the documentary. There is also a 3-minute montage of photos from Nance’s life, a production essay and text profiles of those involved with the documentary.
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