Eraserhead -- 1977 -- NR

After watching enough David Lynch films that everyone seems to recommend, I'm beginning to get the idea that one way to become a great filmmaker is to create a film that makes no sense on one level, but if you use a lot of possible metaphors that people MIGHT be able to figure out, then you've got "one of the best horror films in years." Eraserhead is a film right up Lynch's classic alley of weirdness and wacked out imagery that attempts to tell a basic story while distracting you with grotesque weirdness.

What is the basic plot here? Well, as I see it, there is a guy who knocked up a girl and they had a baby that looks like a freakish mutation. The girl can't handle said freakish mutation, so the guy is left to care for it alone, and he spends most of his time zoning out. His zone out time attempts to gives us some insight into his thoughts, but deciphering these thoughts is like trying to figure out the ramblings of an asylum patient.

Strangely, I can't say the film was necessarily bad, though. I didn't fully understand it, but I was definitely disturbed by it. The dinner at the girl's house darn near made me ill...sorry, can't handle grostesque food. That one gets to me. The idea of the...um, thing...that is the baby is definitely a disturbing one, and to consider it to be a result of the world they're in is kind of frightening when you consider the direction this world has always been heading in. Their world is either post-apocalyptic or just the wrong side of the tracks...never sure which.

The sound on this one is always loud. The one thing that permeates this film is the constant drone of the noise from outside the buildings. That is the soundtrack. The only music here is the occasionally tinny record player that squeaks out some old timey musak. It's enough to make you crazy, but I believe that was the intent -- to immerse you completely in this world.

Lynch has said before that he believes movies should be like the world we live in: not everything makes sense all the time. Things should happen at random and leave with no explanation whatsoever. This philosophy is well within this, which is his first feature film. It is equally clever, bizarre, and ridiculous. One the one hand, the pacing feels slow, but on the other, speeding it up would have blown some of the mood. On the one hand, the imagery doesn't make any sense at all and the mutant baby makes even less sense, but on the other hand, the film feels well constructed, so maybe it is beyond me to figure it out at the moment. Maybe I am so ensconsed in traditional storytelling that I'm unable to read something that is outside the box. I mean, I used storytelling techniques to decipher the big twist of Oldboy just because it was an inevitability within the plot given to that point. This one doesn't follow any rules at all, and maybe that does bug me.

In the end, I can see this one going both ways. Like some of his other films, I want to watch it again someday to see if I can get more of it the second time around. It has something to it that I can't shake, and it is likely that feeling that makes this film better than it seems on the surface. After all, it is a rare Lynch film that can be taken at surface value, and this one definitely dosn't give you much on the proverbial surface.