― Matt Rebholz (Matt Rebholz), Wednesday, 11 October 2006 03:11 (seventeen years ago) link
I did recently rent Eraserhead, man, I'm still getting over it.
― Barb e (Barb e), Tuesday, 17 October 2006 16:52 (seventeen years ago) link
― Josh Aldridge (Josh Aldridge), Tuesday, 17 October 2006 20:39 (seventeen years ago) link
― Matt Rebholz (Matt Rebholz), Tuesday, 17 October 2006 23:30 (seventeen years ago) link
― Barb e (Barb e), Wednesday, 18 October 2006 03:15 (seventeen years ago) link
― Sam Grayson (Sam Grayson), Wednesday, 18 October 2006 10:03 (seventeen years ago) link
Josh, if you are willing to watch one more Lynch movie, see Eraserhead without delay.
Seeing that movie for the first time, in 1978 at age 17, at a packed midnight screening with an audience who'd never heard of David Lynch (it's his first feature film) ranks as one of my all time high points as a filmgoer. I love all his movies, though if I had to rank them, Elephant Man and Wild at Heart would be low on the list, Blue Velvet in the middle, while Eraserhead is still #1.
Barb, I think the themes of the film are far more relevant to me now, as a newly married guy, than when I first saw it. And I agree with you- to describe its meaning in words is pointless. Thinking about it now makes me want to watch it again tonight.
― Peter Chung (Peter Chung), Wednesday, 18 October 2006 15:05 (seventeen years ago) link
I would definitely put Eraserhead in an artistic category. I admire Lynch for his courage to express feelings not often portrayed in films. Work of a true artist.
Btw; there are some interesting investors in Eraserhead, including I think Sissy Spacek. I was surprised at the end of the film to read the credits.
― Barb e (Barb e), Friday, 20 October 2006 02:57 (seventeen years ago) link
I feel like the ideas expressed were located through the authentic experience of removing, to some degree, a perspective normally located within typical human social structure. Perhaps this relates to why words (social structure) do not suffice to explain the ideas expressed. And perhaps that is largely due to the amazing (sociopathic?)level of integrity, suspectably present, in the state of preservation these ideas are delivered to us in.
I love listneing to David Lynch talk about ideas, and his processes as a story teller.
― Sam Grayson (Sam Grayson), Saturday, 21 October 2006 13:20 (seventeen years ago) link
I actually disagree. I rented Eraserhead and finally got around to watching it last night, and I've got to say, if you can't use words to describe the idea's to something, and their justification, then it means those ideas probably aren’t there.If someone argues toward something, but their rational is either faulty or missing then it just means their stubborn and unreasonable. Why is it not the same for art?I'm in a poetry workshop right now and the first thing the teacher asks is "how can you justify having that there?" And if you can't, then you have to take it out. At first it bothered all of us, still does for some, but most of us saw the reason in it. If you can't justify something being there then it shouldn't be there. That's why I think that not being able to explain the elements of something in words really doesn't speak highly for the work.
As for Eraserhead I would say, meh. I thought it was moderately funny, but I don't think that's what he was going for.I'm pretty sure I got most of the symbolism. His happiness, or content, in the radiator didn't want the mutant baby, which would explain why she was stepping on the mutant sperm, and why they were dancing in the end after he killed the baby. But why was she in the radiator? Then how the role of father made him feel like his identity was being taken over by the presence of the child. I must admit, that one scene of the stage, and the blood running down the middle with his head in it, and his body with the mutant head twisting the pole, that was really cool.The eraserhead thing though, I did not get at all. If anyone wants to tell me their take on it, I'd be happy to hear it.
The social interaction was interesting at first, but after a while it's awkwardness and over dramatization got really boring. I did like that dinner scene, until the chicken shited and the mom seized, but I think that was pretty much the peak of the movie. I also liked the scene of the mother with the baby, and the one where they are both in bed, but they were pretty much lost in a sea of monotony. The one where they sink into the bed was alright as well, but I thought it was ruined by the sudden eraserhead thing. Although maybe that’s just because I didn’t get it.
Overall I thought the movie took a lot of time to say really very little. I guess it might have to do with my lack of experience with these types of films, but I don’t know, I just thought it was pretty bad.
― Josh Aldridge (Josh Aldridge), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 17:18 (seventeen years ago) link
The woman behind the radiator to me seemed to signify the unconscious mind. He displayed a suicidal wish to go to 'heaven' because one only gets there when one is dead. Death being the only way out to his mental anguish.
Crudeness unintended, the scene with his head separated and used to manufacture erasers seemed to me to be a reference to the situation of that relationship with the woman and the baby, and his own loss of control. His complete loss of being. Seperated from his actual self.
I thought it represented the penile head and it's ability to erase a man's identity through the creation of a baby. There's my take on it, but it is not very eloquent.
― Barb e (Barb e), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 21:16 (seventeen years ago) link
Actually I quoted Sam Grayson, and I wasn't trying to bash him, I was just saying that if you can't describe something in words, maybe there's not as much substance in it as you get from a first impression.
As for the eraser scene trying to display that the action of his penis erasing his identity, I suppose that makes sense. Sort of. But then wouldn't it make more sense to get an eraser from one of the mutant sperm? I don't know, I guess this is why it bothers me. I know someone is going to say that everything doesn't have to fit together easily, but I would think that it would need to be a little more rationally.I mean, then who was the boy who found his head, and the guy at the counter, and the boss. They had clearly defined personalities, but seemed to only serve the purpose of extending one analogy to some twelve or fifteen minutes. An analogy that's ultimately confused by too many stray and unimportant, I think, elements.
By the way, I hope I'm not stepping on anyone’s toes by trying to pick this film apart.
Plus, the entire film is about how this one guy looses his identity to the birth of a child, but it gave no indication that he ever really had an identity. I mean, his habits don't seem to change, and the worms were beneath the radiator both before and after he found out about the baby, which I guess were the maggot recesses of his mind. So I guess the change was just the fact that he had the baby, his new role as a father, and the responsibilities that ensue?Plus I know I'm going to get yelled out for this, but THE SCENES WERE STRETCHED TOO LONG!! I have no problem with making scenes that work like his did, but I think they should be spliced by quicker paced segments. It would give the long pauses more meaning and make them seem slightly less excruciating.
I must admit though, and I'll reiterate, that a lot of my disposition towards the film could just be the fact that I'm not used to this sort of cinematography.Maybe I should watch it again in a few months.
― Josh Aldridge (Josh Aldridge), Tuesday, 24 October 2006 23:13 (seventeen years ago) link
Josh, I couldn't disagree more with this, which to me, is a very academic prejudice, widely taught, which places the primary value of aesthetic experience on text rather than the experience itself. I do think the principle may apply justifiably to literature, including poetry.
But film is not a literary medium. It's an experiential one- visual and auditory. This applies especially to Eraserhead, which contains very little dialogue. Would you dismiss any claim a musician has that his composition has meaning just because that meaning cannot be reduced to a verbal description? Or the work of a painter?
If anything, this tendency to filter all experience of art through the artificial symbolic matrix of words is getting increasingly prevalent-- such as filmgoers who demand that the director explain everything to them on a dvd commentary track-- which, incidentally, David Lynch absolutely refuses to do.
― Peter Chung (Peter Chung), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 01:20 (seventeen years ago) link
Whereas the written word is, after all, just another medium of expression. No closer to any other at being able to accurately convey the sensation of seeing a sunset, or of the anxiety a man feels when faced with fatherhood-- both of which have as their origin the physical interface between the individual's consciousness and the world. The convention of words is merely a convenience, with merely the hope of approximating, through associations, the raw experience of life.
― Peter Chung (Peter Chung), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 01:53 (seventeen years ago) link
― Josh Aldridge (Josh Aldridge), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 18:17 (seventeen years ago) link
― Peter Chung (Peter Chung), Thursday, 26 October 2006 09:42 (seventeen years ago) link
― Antimax (Antimax), Friday, 3 November 2006 11:18 (seventeen years ago) link
People say it's Lynch's most difficult film. It's not difficult, just formally dense. His usual style of expositing through metaphors is in effect. Metaphors that catch, tangle and coil together in a serpents' mating ball, mind you, but metaphors nonetheless.
You have to suspend disbelief. Surrender to its metaphysics. Eventually, I parsed it as a rational, psychological, linear story, but that sure wasn't how I felt in the darkness.
Can this movie be understood? In your dreams...
Interpreted: Who was dreaming and why, the reconstructed flow of events, the space the characters inhabited.
Didn't interpret: the letters on Nikki/Susan's arm (what letters were they, again?), the word "AXXON" painted on a wall (Exxon + axon maybe - oil spill + neurotransmitter?), lots of little details.
Has Peter watched it yet? Anyone else?
― Syra (Syra), Thursday, 4 January 2007 19:27 (seventeen years ago) link
― Syra (Syra), Thursday, 4 January 2007 19:28 (seventeen years ago) link
The story to me is about an actress (or an artist, or any of us) who is horrified to discover that one's own life, unlike the lives that we can inhabit temporarily for creative purposes, cannot be so easily discarded or escaped for another. An actress can take the role of an adulteress or a whore, then drop it and forget about it later; but the real adulteress can't walk off the stage and finish the movie. When the actress becomes the subject herself, flirting with an affair that may as well have been pulled from her script, she becomes trapped in her own film. But none of us writes our own movie, and so her movie is not hers, either. It's frightening and unfamiliar, and the ending is a mystery. She goes through a catharsis; she comes to understand the character she is playing, and all the real people who may have inspired it, because she is one of them. She sees herself on the screen, and then embraces the one who has been watching her there, allowing each other to return to their proper places. Each sees the other through the screen, which is really a mirror.
On a lighter note, I loved the final scene as the credits rolled. I do love movies that end with dance scenes, the music was great, Laura Harring shows up, monkey dances in the strobe light, the red-lit stage curtains (in my very Lynchian theater in Portland, anyhow) close at just the right moment, and I've just had one of those rare, once-every-few-years moments that is a new David Lynch film.
― Matt Rebholz (Matt Rebholz), Sunday, 14 January 2007 09:21 (seventeen years ago) link