Results tagged “David Lynch”

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Eraserhead is best seen, not described. And yet, in the fifteen years since I first saw David Lynch’s first feature, thanks to a tape from a local rental place, I’ve tried to do just that over and over again for the sake of all those who haven’t yet seen it. The fact that it was so difficult to find in the first place only made it all the more frustrating; they could hear my words, but not find out for themselves what I meant. The VHS was hopelessly out of print, a rare Japanese LaserDisc pressing changed hands for ungodly sums of money, and the movie itself was so dark and low-contrast that even first-generation bootlegs were unwatchable. The only way to really see the movie was to go watch it in a theater, whenever a local cinema had a print of it. My father and I were lucky enough to catch it in a downtown New York art-house that has since closed due to spiraling rents and declining audiences. The battered and splicy condition of the print — and the puddles of water on the theater floor — made the film all the more eerie.

Now that Eraserhead has been finally reissued in a director-sanctioned DVD edition, I don’t feel bad about urging people to see a movie that has been a massive cultural influence for the better part of three decades. Almost every horror / fantasy film of value made since the 1980s — Pi; The Shining; Begotten; Clean, Shaven — has been influenced by Eraserhead, and not in terms of its plot or themes but in terms of its feel. As many other people have said, it’s the closest thing anyone has yet achieved to putting a nightmare on film — not just in terms of the darkness and the sensations of dread, but also the disconnected logic and leaps of fantasy that govern dreams as a whole. Most horror films scare us with images of corpses or innards; Eraserhead gives us nothing short of the void itself.

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Here's a dichotomy for you: As entertainment, or an adaptation of a novel, or anything vaguely resembling a watchable movie, Dune just plain sucks — but as some kind of freaky '70s-throwback movie-art head-trip experience, it's only paralleled even moderately closely by Alejandro Jodorowsky freakouts like El Topo. That Jodorowsky, the single weirdest director in the world, was originally tapped for the film and that David Lynch, the second-weirdest directory in the world, eventually came on board to replace him, makes a kind of perverse sense. A more workmanlike director wouldn't survive trying to get through a story this far-out; Dune needed someone as whacked as Lynch to even begin to get off the ground.

Well, they got off the ground, all right, and after three and a half years and $40 million the whole flaming Zeppelin went aground, hard. Roger Ebert hated the movie ("the whole thing looks like it's been left out in the sun too long") and the New York Times devoted an entire page or more, if memory serves, trying to say something nice and in the end helplessly admitting that it sure was one strange film. Even fans of the books were scratching their heads in complete disbelief at how weird the thing was.