So I am a human being, as if you hadn’t noticed what with all the bodily functions, eating and breathing I do, and if theres one thing a human being likes to do and this is understand things. Ever since we were apes bashing each other in with rocks and poking at the cold funny sapien meat we rip from each others scalps, we have always endevoured to understand the process and stopped eating each other when we realised that it was emotionally troubling and a subways was open around the corner.
An Eraserhead, the first film by alcclaimed director David Lynch splits me right down the middle, in an almost cripplingly scitzophrenic manner as the lack of understanding you have of the goings on of the film is comparable to Abi Timuss’ amount of dignity, and the amount of hull integrity commonly held by an Easy Jet Boeing 747 minus parcel tape.
Person one looks at the film, an intriguing black comedy about Nervous Henry living in a strange industrial landscape in an apartment filled with grass who puts coins in buckets of water, and his forray into the strange universe of marital bliss when it is revealed his squeeze has popped out a hideous mutant cow-baby, like a fine painting. It isn’t a straight forward film where the action directly represents what is going on. It is a subtle layering of metaphors and imagary that explores the mind of a man bathed in seclusion, isolated from the world around him and unable to connect with the few people he actually meets. Small dream sequences like the chipmunked cheeked dancing girl who smashed alien worms to death with her cute shoes and sings weird songs about how Heaven is a lovely place to go on holiday, and another where Henrys head pops off and is used to create rubbers on the end of pencils, reveal the fragility of the mans mind, and also can bequite humerous.
Which is all well and good, until person two fumbles into the picture and shouts at the screen like a comical drunk irish charater from a 1980s american pop-comedy film trying to hail a cab, and wails waving a bottle of Jim Bean in his hand that the layering of imagery is so deep and so frequent, that the view is disorientated and he frequently does not know what to take seriosuly and what to laugh at. Course he probably would not say that, he’d probably phrase it as “wwwurrghawurghlw-gurgle” and fall over.
Akward silences cannot be distinguished from moments of domestic humour or instances of tension building spacing. Is that dancing chicken a metaphor or is it something put there to make me giggle. AND yes there is a dancing chicken, I just can’t make this sort of thing up.
To break this review down into a quotable but unsatisfying short paragraph, I’m left at the end, wondering if it was a fantastic piece of artist cinema, which yes, does exist, or if its an attempt on behalf of the director to seem intelligent by laughing at all the people who don’t get it.
Plus the final scene where the Baby dies, oh please, I could not ruin it for you because it is suggested all the way through, wins an acadamy award for best use of porridge as a substitute to bodily fluids and has forever put me off Ready-brek.
