橡皮头

Lynch’s ERASERHEAD is a freakishl grotesquerie, shrouded in a nightmarish industrial cityscape and incessant noise, the frizz-haired Harry Spencer (Nance) is a loner, but not inarticulate (Nance has a deceptively fluent elocution fitfully punctuates his affective posturing, gait and incredible reactions), wearing a pocket protector, he lives in a gloomy one-room apartment, and is thrown into a shotgun marriage with Mary X (Stewart) after the latter delivers their atypical infant, a spermatozoon-like, snake-faced, limb-less, swaddled creature.

Mary is soon driven back to her parents’ by the newborn’s ceaseless crying fit, whereas Harry half-heartedly takes on the job of child ministrations. Surreal, bizarre occurrences transpire with ensorcelling felicity and seeming facility, slo-paced, Stygian and monochromatic, in tandem with the unrelieved foley cacophony, or a zany lullaby (“In Heaven”) performed by Lady in the Radiator (Near). It is all Lynch’s unique aesthetics and dexterity - the opening imagery superimposition, the animatronic coaxing of the child resembles a series of stop-motion, the episode of creating the literal “eraser-head”, to name just a few off the top of my head - in full swing, irrefutably ERASERHEAD is among one of the most jaw-dropping debut features ever.

Fantasticating our mundane existence with mystically cosmic entities and hag-ridden ambience (which would in time become two of the cardinal components of the idiom “Lynchian”), Lynch’s cinema bizarro reaches a rarefied sphere of metaphysics that is emancipated and reified through his inimitable, cryptic, beguilingly sophisticated cinematic language. ERASERHEAD can be deciphered as a father’s ultimate dread over child-rearing or deformation, an infanticide/parricide conflict, a Kafkaesque Freudian exploration of a straight man’s desire and impotence, a satire of dysfunctional interpersonal correlation, a critique on industrialism’s alienating side effect, or it’s everything above and then some, the list can go on and on.

After watching ERASERHEAD for the first time, Yours Truly can finally come to terms with my ambivalence and bewilderment to Lynch’s revived TWIN PEAKS series, it is an acquired taste to fully appreciate his canon, which grandly pushes the Seventh Art’s envelope with neither predecessor nor successor.