Movie review: Eraserhead

The dark and surrealistic movie by David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). The abstraction was aggressive to describe, giving the viewers a cinematic poem rather than a visual story. The subconscious was in charge of making this movie. The sublimity of fear delivered in paradigmatic manner.

The movie starts in an otherworldly place, a place indescribable. Industrial landscapes, which added to the coldness of the environment. The film was entirely shot in black and white, which added to the strangeness and mysteriousness of the film. For some reason the setting that is mostly, shot in a confined place gives me a phobic feeling.

My first impression was the alienated main character was trying vainly to humanize his world by adorning his apartment with human decors, however the process deceived my perception. The post-apocalyptic surroundings, no people, no animals, no plants, gave me unpredictable excitement and keep on deceiving my consciousness.

The usage of semiology was massive, from start to finish a circus of semiotics, for example the framing of the characters, the scene where Mary’s mother confronts Henry for having a sexual intercourse with him, then Mary came to abrupt the incidence, Mary was framed inside the steal pipe to represent confined emotions she kept from her mother, because she was afraid to lose Henry. The number on Henry’s apartment the door #26, it represents the alphabet on the opposite room numbered #27 means outsider, a fiend. The scene where Henry‘s head fell of and a piece of his head turned into an eraserhead, he feels he’s existence should be erased, he feels that he does not exist at all. The worm he found in his pocket and hid it from Mary, but he did not throw away in absence of his emotions, he let the worm grow and play on his house, this represents the sins he made and let it grow until a time came he was infested with his own sins, by hiding his affair with his wife.

When humans does not capable of comprehending what is around him, he shrugs off and stop investigating. When there are things we cannot explain it does not mean it does not have a value. Even our existence might not have a value but we still exist. The film is a big blow on us that deals with the critical questioning of reality.

The presentation of unpresentable succeeded in this film, greatly abandoning the aesthetic process. Lynch found a way of formalizing the informal way of moviemaking. Shifted his focus on visual ideas away from the ideas that represent the representable. By using paradigmatic process sets the discourse of the real. Pushes our thoughts to the limits, like a chicken on drugs eating grass with the goats.