David Lynch
Eraserhead

“This is a dream of dark and disturbing things”
D.Lynch

Every human being carries obsessions, more or less veiled, that he drags along more or less throughout the span of this reincarnation, unless he tackles the source of the disturbance at its root. Something almost impossible or at least very difficult if not supported by more than appropriate tools.
David Lynch has exorcised his obsessions by becoming a cult director despite himself, producing films that are real destabilizing nightmares digging into the depths of the dark side of the soul that each of us preserves more or less consciously. This debut of his, “Eraserhead” (from 1977!), is a true journey into the subconscious of its creator and narrates a nightmare stemming from scenes and fragments truly difficult to decipher and which would delight throngs of psychoanalysts from around the world.

The story narrates the deeds of Henry (the director himself?) with vision problems and jet-black hair. A mentally disturbed man who always maintains a commendable serene calm to whom, among other things, his head detaches from his body to glide into a pencil eraser factory. Simultaneously, his young epileptic partner Mary gives birth to a freak with a face resembling a cross between a frog and a rabbit and whose head, in turn, flies in the sky.
Up to this point, the almost “rational” beginning of the story.
After that… Pure Madness!

Thus, between stages made from parts of automobiles, men breeding mechanical chickens, women living in the radiator (?), and scenes of total imaginative freedom, Lynch sets his delirious obsessions on the big screen, bordering on anguish, brushing moments of total disorientation where the aesthetic and formal canons of something commonly understood as a “film” progressively disappear, leading to the description of a metaphysical surreal universe with strong symbolic and visionary connotations rarely achieved in his later works.

Lynch disrupts the normal use of the camera, adopts an unsettling black and white descendant from Fritz Lang’s German expressionism, distorts the soundtrack approaching noise, creating effects of strong contrast with the themes suggested by the images, extends the narrative times, and intervenes heavily on the editing.
A film, to be clear, 100% experimental, costing a few thousand dollars and resulting in an actual Manichean obsession for the director throughout a gestation period lasting almost five years.

There is a permanent sensation of maladjustment and a continuous and thinly veiled perception of persistent discomfort that pervades every frame, every change of scene, even the sparse dialogues (luckily NOT dubbed!) reduced to a minimum so as not to disturb the visual orgy of which we are spectators/victims. A disturbed/disturbing film like few others, beyond any possibility of categorization, beyond every human understanding that not even all the psychoanalysts in the world could codify into a single sentence/diagnosis except that "Lynch absolutely consciously insane”… and fortunately so, I would say!

Cult Masterpiece: you either love it or hate it.