Last night I felt a little too comfortable being home alone, so I popped
Eraserhead in the player
.
Yup. Right in the player. It made me think about the first time I saw
Eraserhead (David Lynch's first full-length film).
The first Lynch-directed thing I saw was the entire
Twin Peaks series, which I own on
VHS. I was in the 7th grade when I first got into
Twin Peaks. Bravo was playing it in reruns in 2000, but before they aired the whole series, it abruptly ended and was replaced by reruns of The West Wing. Back when Bravo used to be good, damn it!
My obsession never waned, and my cousin was nice enough to give me some VHS tapes of the first 3 episodes as they aired in 1990, as well as some fan books left behind by an old roommate. When I was 14, my parents got me the
Twin Peaks Box set for Christmas. Every day of winter break I was captivated and hungry for more of that puzzling feeling you get when you watch something directed by David Lynch.
Never following his filmography chronologically, it wasn't until after viewing most of Lynch's films, and being well seasoned in his archetypes and quirks, that I saw
Eraserhead. The film is unsettling, to say the least, pulling on nightmarish thoughts that use nearly no gore or traditional terror. What I always admired about Lynch's brand of fear is that he mostly plays on the uncomfortable. It's random, it's different, and sometimes it is the unknown that is the scariest of all.
While
Eraserhead still makes me check the radiators before bedtime, I have to say I wish I saw it as a Lynch virgin. I went in for the first time wondering what kind of twisted psychological terror was to be unleashed on me. But I left the experience feeling like I knew too much to ever have a pure reaction. The film
explains how Lynch's films have progressed; where his blond vs. brunette, timeless world, creepy music, awkward pauses, and random spasms all came from. If
Eraserhead was the first thing I saw of Lynch, especially when I was 12, I honestly don't know how my current level of fandom would stand: super-duper fan, or reluctant and traumatized. But
Eraserhead is still my go-to movie for a sufficient creep-out. It's a classically confounding Lynch movie. To me, the film is about a man's nightmare, which easily explains away why a lot of it doesn't make sense. In researching the film I found this intriguing and frustrating passage on Wikipedia,
He went on to write about the difficulties he was having making sense of the way the film was "growing" and didn't know "the thing that just pulled it all together." He then reveals it was the Bible that provided the solution:
So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.
Lynch states in the book that he doesn't think he will ever reveal what the vision-fulfilling Biblical verse is.
The Bible has never been of more interest to me as it is right now.
But I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who appreciates David Lynch's idiosyncrasies.
Notdavidlynch's YouTube channel, features some extremely funny and spot-on Lynch impressions. I'm a big fan of the
David Lynch & Crispin Glover's Big Blockbuster featuring
pimplywimp. It pretty much sums up the Lynch experience in a hilarious way.
Enjoy!
