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"Quei figli che non ho voluto, sapessero la felicità che mi debbono!" [Emil Cioran, Confessioni e Anatemi]
"A me la vita è male." [Giacomo Leopardi, Canto Notturno di un Pastore Errante dell'Asia]
I have chosen to begin the review of "Eraserhead " (I will only use the English title, because the Italian one seems like pure nonsense to me) by David Lynch with these three quotes from two of my absolute favorite thinkers because I believe that in them one can glimpse the meaning of this masterpiece. Obviously, what I will present is a purely personal interpretation, because, as the director himself said in an interview with Stephen Saban, "[...] everyone has formed a different opinion of the ultimate meaning of the film. Because its open nature leaves room for various interpretations."
First of all, what is "Eraserhead" about? The plot is extremely linear and (excuse my expression) banal: Henry Spencer, a man with evident psychological disturbances, has a premature child with his girlfriend, who leaves him because she cannot stand the baby's cries, which poor Henry will have to care for alone. End of story. Fine, but what is the movie really about? What is the meaning behind these distressing visions, these sequences of pure dreamlike delirium? As mentioned, this is just my personal reading.
In my opinion, Lynch, with this film (but also with the previous medium-length film "The Grandmother"), positions himself within the antinatalist thought. Antinatalism is, in philosophy, the belief that birth is the greatest evil that can befall man (among the most important antinatalist philosophers, we remember Giacomo Leopardi, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Emil Cioran) and I believe there are traces of this thought in Lynch's first feature film. The extremely distressing atmosphere that pervades the entire film, mainly due to sound work which is the true added value to the film, is the first clue to seek the meaning of the film in pessimistic philosophy, and Henry’s reaction when his mother-in-law tells him that Mary (the girlfriend) has given birth to a premature child seems to say: "Pss, the meaning of this film is in antinatalism." At least, it seems so to me. The couple’s child is, to say the least, monstrous: it has nothing that suggests its belonging to the human race. Its cries, which only add to the already distressing and oppressive atmosphere, suggest its discomfort, its suffering. Another clue that led me to think of antinatalism:
Man is born in pain,
and birth is the risk of death.
He experiences pain and torment
as a first thing.
Thus writes Leopardi in the "Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia", and there seem to be no better words to describe the situation of the deformed little child.
When Mary leaves Henry in desperation, he begins to have visions (if we can call them that) of a woman with deformities on her cheeks who, moving on a stage inside the radiator (in fact, this woman is referred to as "Lady in the radiator") smiling, crushes fetuses that fall from the ceiling, as if to symbolize, once again, the aversion to birth. And Henry will often turn to visions of this woman, as a sort of escape from reality, as if he also shares this philosophy. But now he is obsessed with the child, so much so that, on a couple of occasions, his head is replaced with that of the premature child. And what is the only way to end the child’s sufferings? SPOILER ALERT! Kill it. And that is what he does at the end of the film. After which, he reunites with his fantasy, the Woman in the radiator. "In heaven everything is fine". Henry is now in his personal paradise. He is finally free from the chaotic reality he lived in, which was an apparently senseless reality. A dream. Just as Cioran said:
Who could endure life, if it were real? Dream, it is a mix of terror and enchantment to which one yields.
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