Eraserhead

Film poster

Eraserhead (1977) - David Lynch

Returning to surrealist cinema, Eraserhead was the debut film of acclaimed director David Lynch. Depicting a world of desolate industrial landscapes, strange people and a constant motif of foreboding doom, the film manages to tell a much more personal and emotional story than surrealist films like Un Chien Andalou or Begotten. The basic plot is as follows: a man named Henry finds out that his girlfriend, Mary, has become pregnant and given birth to a monstrous, alien-like child that the two of them must care for. The film deals with the personal struggles of parenthood and isolation in a cold, uncaring world.

Dreams and reality

The world created in Eraserhead is unabashedly nightmarish, but very subtly created. Visually bleak and desolate because it was filmed in black-and-white, the film is set in decaying buildings and sparsely decorated apartment buildings that represent the alienation experienced by both the characters in the movie and the audience itself. Commenting on various social issues, the film manages to depict the terse, cold and uncaring experience of poverty while simultaneously utilizing bizarre and alien imagery. 

Like a dream, the protagonist seems to have little awareness or interest in the world around him, drifting through everything with little agency or control over what happens. Essentially, the film aims to tell a personal story of someone struggling with the affects of a premature birth, but also the angst and uncertainty the human condition. There is no positivity, but an overwhelmingly oppressive atmosphere of powerlessness, as the events of the film are implied to have been controlled by an outside, godlike force. An existentialist reading of the film may extoll Henry's use of his radical freedom when he kills his monstrous child, yet I believe this misreads the inherent nature of Henry's condition. If this is the case, then his freedom can only be exerted in reaction to events instead of creating events. Henry is still thus condemned to a state of powerlessness, as he cannot create the causalities of his own events, instead struggling against a much more immaterial and simultaneously insurmountable force.

So where's the ideology?

Henry and Mary's "child"

The focus of the project is to examine ideology in cinema, so to create a thematic bridge between Eraserhead and the other films, I think an analysis of the film's cinematography and its relation to the plot may uncover an authentically ideological component. The more personal slant to the plot makes the ideological role more subdued and an examination of the surrealist elements would result in the repetition of the post about Un Chien Andalou, so the uniquely ideological element to Eraserhead can be found in the nature of action and consequence within the film. 

Ideology may not necessarily render someone powerlessness (see Battleship Potemkin or possibly Dogtooth as examples of the power of ideology to inspire action), but the overriding mentality of the film points toward the need for something to be in control. Whether or not this controlling entity is something benevolent or malevolent, the film never positions Henry's condition as something arbitrary or meaningless, but instead contrives a deeply personal connection between Henry and the universe. Desperate for connections in an otherwise meaningless world, the ideological structures manifest as an invisible hand looming over the entirety of the plot. Thus, ideology is the shaper and maker of all aspects of the world, but primarily serves a punitive, disciplinary function. As pointed out by Zygmunt Bauman, "the source of contemporary fear is that no one is in control." 

Thus a dilemma presents itself: is the ideology of the film constructed by its characters, an imposition of the director or a broader reflection and commentary of social conditions? Regardless of the reason, the end result is the same, as the very relationships between the characters and images within the film resonate with this ideological need for some greater control or purpose. There essentially is no escape from this need, as the framing itself of the events makes it so control can only be reacted against, not proactively eliminated by any conscious (or even unconscious) force.