David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976)

David Lynch finds horror in unlikely places. We were going to write about his being a difficult-to-categorize director, but then it occurred to us – he directs horror films. But not the kind you’re used to, not slasher pics like Friday the 13th or monster movies like The Host or fantasy horror like The Howling or psycho scary films like The Grudge or The Cell. No, we’d put Lynch in more of the existential horror mode.

Take a movie like Blue Velvet for example. In the opening scene, the camera moves in slowly on an idyllic suburban setting: cute little house, white picket fence, green lawn. The camera keeps getting closer and closer, moving down to ground level, then into the grass, then into the dirt. Where we find creepy crawly things. And a severed ear.

Yeccchh. The scene works as a good metaphor for Lynch’s early work, that beneath the seemingly benign or pleasant exterior there is a seedy, seething corrupt creepiness, that we find this creepiness more horrifying because it exists not just next to but inextricable from the ordinary. We see it in the overdone, psychotic makeup that Diane Lane wears in Wild at Heart. We see it in Dennis Hopper sucking pure oxygen in order to amp himself up to do something evil in Blue Velvet. We see it in the endless revelations of unexpected corruption in the TV-show Twin Peaks. And we see it the whole vision that is Eraserhead.

Lynch has been asked, many times, what Eraserhead is about, or what inspired it, or just “what the heck?” His answers are frequently elliptical or philosophical or oblique, never straightforward or concrete. Eraserhead is like one of those pointillist paintings, where you have to step back from it a bit to get a clear picture of what it represents. In this movie you’ll see a young man and his wife. They have a baby. What could be more ordinary than that? The stress of their relationship drives the woman away, leaving the man to take care of their baby. Okay, that’s basic conflict and good substance for a film. But if you’ve never seen Eraserhead, then what you’re imagining right now as you try to picture the film is nothing like what you’re going to see. That’s why critics tend toward the word “surreal.”

But it’s more than that. It’s horror. Lynch’s movie makes visual the terror we suppress not just in difficult situations like the one in the film, but in every moment of our daily lives. He suggests that we live in a nightmarish world, and the normalcy is just the clown make-up we plaster over it to feel safe.

As Lynch got older (he made Eraserhead, his first feature-length film, when he was 31), he moved away from the rawness and near avant-garde feel of this film. Now his movies feel more packaged, more polished. In some ways that has only enhanced his message, although movies like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are far more than just existential horror films. He’s pushed his work into other genres, like the thriller, and turned up the psychological volume a bit, bringing his films closer to a world we recognize and acknowledging his audience’s lust for conventional entertainment forms.

As you watch Eraserhead, enjoy its weirdness, its vision of psychic turmoil, and rest easy in the knowledge that some day, when you’re at a party, and someone asks “what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”, you’ll have a ready answer. And on that other day, when life is beginning to grind you down, and your perfect life is bending under the strain of finals, or your job, or bills, or those goons who’ve threatened to break your knee caps, you’ll have an apt visual image for the pressure you feel – it’s like someone’s putting your head into a pencil sharpener.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

L. Q. Jones' A Boy and His Dog (1975)

Despite a certain amount of sex and violence, L. Q. Jones’ A Boy and His Dog is more like Road Warrior lite than a direct American counterpart to George Miller’s brutal Australian post-apocalyptic warning, which may be why the latter is better known (although one might also cite the nascent superstardom of Road Warrior’s Mel Gibson). In both movies, civilization is but a vestige of its former self and so humans are reduced to scavenging, scrabbling to eke out a minimal existence in a desert-like wasteland. Where Miller’s Road Warrior focused on the centrality of gasoline, the absence of which reduces most humans to sub-human sadists, A Boy and His Dog takes a more whimsical, general view – the movie explores more the question of daily survival than the threat humans pose each other when the social fabric has been shredded. Vic (Don Johnson) wants only food and the occasional female companionship to maintain his sense of quality existence.

In fact, if there’s a theme to A Boy and His Dog, it’s companionship. Jones juxtaposes two modern and common kinds, emphasizing them by their near-necessity in the post-civilized world: the companionship we feel with our pets (here represented by dogs who can telepathically communicate with their human counterparts) and the companionship we seek through mating (that’s right, sex and propagation of the species). In the end, A Boy and His Dog actually argues that one kind of companionship outweighs the other, but before we get to that, let’s consider the subtext. The script, from an original story by the fabulous science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, tells us that, when the world is destroyed, our greatest fear will be loneliness, a much gentler moral than those suggested by the nuclear-winter-and-cannibals hopelessness of John Hillcoat’s The Road (from Cormac McCarthy’s novel), the steroidal butchering motorcycle gangs of Miller’s The Road Warrior, the viral holocaust of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, or the genocidal irony of Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (from Pierre Boulle’s novel).

Is Jones that naïve or have our tastes merely conflated the allegorical nature of the post-apocalyptic story with our lust for horror films? (That’s a real question: discuss it amongst yourselves for a few minutes.)

One answer may come from that fact that this film, at times, has its tongue firmly in its cheek. We’ve included it in our collection of “post-apocalyptic visions,” but another way to look at A Boy and His Dog is as a cinematic shaggy dog story. Not that it’s about Blood, but that it contains a lengthy build-up to a rather sophomoric, somewhat disconcerting gag. We won’t give it away, but it may leave you wondering whether you were really meant to take the rest of the film seriously after all.

We hope you do. Ellison/Jones see their future world divided into a pair of communities not unlike those we found in the Boulle/Schaffner Planet of the Apes film – one group on the surface of the planet adapting to hardships in a remade world and one group beneath the surface, desperately trying to retain the vestiges of a passing civilization. One asks oneself, which is the more viable approach? Which the more desirable? And isn’t it better to avoid the whole choice in the first place and try to keep the world we have intact?

And if we can’t, will mere companionship make the new world palatable? (Consider what drives Viggo Mortensen on in The Road.) So now you get to choose: the dog or the human? Which will it be? Maybe you can discuss it with the person who came to the film with you while you have a bite to eat.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser