Eraserhead

Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.

• Director: David Lynch
• Genre:Drama / Fantasy / Horror
• Runtime:89 minutes

Cast

Jack Nance : Henry Spencer (as John Nance)
Charlotte Stewart: Mary X
Allen Joseph : Mr. X
Jeanne Bates : Mrs. X
Judith Roberts : Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (as Judith Anna Roberts)

Eraserhead is set in the heart of an industrial center rife with urban decay. Henry Spencer is a printer who is “on vacation” for the duration of the story. The film begins with the mysterious Man in the Planet manipulating large mechanical levers while looking out of his window. As he does so, an image of a flagellate-like creature is superimposed on a image of Henry floating in space. The creature eventually flies away amidst images of rock formations, a circular opening, and bubbling fluid. In the industrial center, Henry receives a telephone invitation to have dinner with Mary X, his estranged girlfriend, and her family. At Mary’s family’s home, Henry is puzzled by a series of emotional outbursts by Mary’s mother, the banal, disconnected conversation offered by her father, and a miniature roasted chicken he is given to carve, which kicks on his plate and oozes at the fork’s touch. The dinner conversation at Mary’s house is strained and awkward, after which Henry is cornered by Mary’s mother and told that Mary has just had a baby after an abnormally short pregnancy. Henry is then obliged to marry her.

Mary and the baby move into Henry’s one-room apartment. The baby is hideously deformed with a large snout-nose with slit nostrils, a pencil-thin neck, eyes on the sides of its head, no ears, and a limbless body covered in bandages and continually whines throughout the night.

A sleep-deprived Mary abandons Henry and the baby (who also turns out to be sick). After Mary leaves, Henry must care for the baby by himself, and he becomes involved in a series of strange events. These include bizarre encounters with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), a woman with grotesquely distended cheeks who appears in his radiator first doing a dance routine on a stage in which she shuffles and stomps on sperm or foetus-resembling creatures that fall from above, and then later singing a song that goes “In Heaven, everything is fine/ You’ve got your good things, and I’ve got mine” (with subtle variations); visions of the ominous Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk); and a sexual liaison with his neighbor, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts).

In a dream sequence, Henry’s baby’s head comes up from under Henry’s head, popping it off of his neck, and replaces it. Henry’s head sinks into a growing pool of blood on a tile floor, falls from the sky, and, finally, lands on an empty street and cracks open. A young boy finds Henry’s broken head and takes it to a pencil factory, where Paul (Darwin Joston), the desk clerk, summons his ill-tempered boss to the front desk by repeatedly pushing a buzzer. The boss, angered by the summons, yells at Paul, but regains his composure when he sees what the little boy has brought. The boss and the boy carry the head to a back room where the Pencil Machine Operator takes a core sample of Henry’s brain, assays it, and determines that it is a serviceable material for pencil erasers. The boy is then paid for bringing in Henry’s head. The Pencil Machine Operator then sweeps the eraser shavings off of the desk and sends them billowing into the air. Read more