“In heaven, everything is fine”: The Cerebral Wasteland of David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’
“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.”
David Lynch
Reassurance — a veiled hope. When we need to reassure ourselves that despite everything wrong that is going on in our lives, things will still turn out okay, we appease ourselves through mantra’s, chants, phrases just vague enough to apply to anyone. If we can’t find it outside, we look for it within; the biggest lies are when we lie to ourselves.
In his film Eraserhead, instead of hiding his characters behind the temporary hope of reassurance, David Lynch throws us — and his character Henry — into the deep end of fear and despair, both rooted in a regret over what Henry views as his past mistakes. Isn’t regret something we all have felt at some point in our lives? The need to ‘erase’ our mistakes so we can fulfill our life’s dreams without anything coming in the way? But what are we left with if we take all of our experiences and remove every moment of unhappiness and every mistake we ever made? We wouldn’t be left with ourselves, that’s for sure.
“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.”
David Lynch
There is one way to live life through what we have learnt, instead of drowning in regret over things from our past. The choices we make every day might be rooted in our past, but they only influence our future. We can begin each day, each moment with the belief that we are free to choose for ourselves, or we can be bound by fears and regrets as we helplessly feed ourselves empty reassurances. This perspective might seem bleak and unforgiving, but it has proved to be the most convincing argument that a person can have with themselves every time they find themselves giving in to self-gratifying reassurances.
In Lynch’s masterpiece Eraserhead, the cherub-cheeked lady in the radiator singing the song In Heaven to the protagonist Henry, is described by Lynch in his interviews as “a beacon of hope” for Henry and “extremely beautiful…because she’s so happy.” The way I interpret it, the lady brings out Henry’s darkest thoughts and fears to the literal ‘stage’ on which she stands, and almost symbolically ‘crushes’ those fears of his by showing him what decisions he could make to be happy instead of letting his fears manifest in his life.
While Lynch’s delivery and depiction of these thoughts are quite layered with nuance and symbolism, his message to me is straightforward, honest, and deeply familiar to us all. The message — where does this woman in the radiator come from, and how do we block out all the industrial noise and inner turmoil in order to get to her? Do we face our darkest fears by giving them a space within our dreams? Do we question those fears?
The reason why I ask questions when seeking the meaning or message within Eraserhead is because that is precisely what the film — and most of David Lynch’s work — aims to do. In another interview, Lynch puts his perspective into words by saying that at times, something that is ugly to one person can be beautiful to another if one simply changes the context within which they see it, and often that means we need to see it in isolation.
“It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It’s better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it’s a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.”
David Lynch
So, does it come down to raw honesty? Can the ugliest experience be seen for what it was in the simplest terms and be made to look beautiful in retrospect? Or should we see it in regret, by thinking of ways to rid ourselves of the experience altogether? I don’t know about you, but the former option sounds more appealing to me. David Lynch sees his film as honest, but abstract, and what is the absurd anyway if not a byproduct of reality? Life truly is surreal.
“My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.”
David Lynch
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