TRAPPED! – Eraserhead Thoughts

            Eraserhead is a truly ambiguous and almost unsolvable film. Attempting to decipher is message proves to be difficult at best. Is this entire thing a dream or reality? Are we watching events that are actually taking place or is this all in the mind of a character, or more importantly, in the mind of the director David Lynch? There is no right or wrong answers to these questions. Only deliberations, discussion and analysis of the different interpretations someone could have while watching this film. One thing is true about this film, we are trapped in the film with Henry Spencer. The claustrophobic feeling he has bleeds through the screen and into the laps of the audience.

            Lynch begins the film as a comedy. Its dark and bleak, but a comedy nonetheless. Henry makes his way through the industrial area stepping in puddles. Henry gets in his elevator and waits for an eternity for the doors to close. Light hearted and silly the film disarms the audience. The areas around the sets have yet to be stripped, leaving only the blacked out spaces beyond. Lynch lies to his audience, setting up a seemingly dark but somewhat funny film.

This film is bizarre to start, but these first moments do not set the audience up for what is coming. This tone is maintained until unnerving and surreal dinner scene where the tone flips one hundred and eighty degrees. Light becomes heavy and silly turns to serious quickly. Mother is screaming, a chicken is dances on a plate while bleeding, the movie has turned. The grandmother becomes the audience member on screen, immobile, as having witnessed this turn as well. The audience needs a cigarette break here to catch up, much like grandmother, but cannot muster the strength to lift an arm take a drag. The confused look on the protagonist is shared with the audience. The film never lets up after this. Henry (and us) are never sure of anything going forward except we are trapped in the situation.

            The claustrophobia continues in Henry’s apartment. The only window into the world is covered with a brick wall. Rather than against a park, an industrial site, or another apartment building with a window across the view, there is a brick wall, and it is set as close to Henry’s window as possible. There is no escape for Henry or the audience in this manner. Even the sound design reinforces this by a constant wind running through his apartment. The window is not open, nor would an open window generate any wind, having a brick wall trapped up against it, yet we hear the draft at all times.

The only escape here is the lady in the radiator. An imagined escape, for there is no real one. The room is rendered even smaller by the vegetation that grows throughout the last half of the film, trapping Henry and the audience even further. This is not without purpose of course, as Henry finds that the only way out of his cage is to let the baby out of its cage, with disastrous results. It isn’t all that hard for the audience to accept the fate of Henry’s child for being trapped with Henry leads to a similar feeling, escape at any cost.