Review: 'BFI Film Classics: Eraserhead'

For her entry in the British Film Institute's series of paperback monographs, Claire Henry has selected Eraserhead, a quintessential cult classic perennially ripe for analysis. Henry supplies the analysis but in a much more measured way than overzealous film professors usually bring to David Lynch's Rorschach Test. Aside from opining that the picture is most convincingly an expression of paternal fears (an opinion I personally share), she mostly collates the theories of other scholars to show how ripe the film is for all kinds of theories, and, either intentionally or unintentionally, to show how those theories cancel each other out to a certain degree. Because Eraserhead is better to experience, to live in, than to overthink, and Lynch is nothing if not an intuitive rather than intellectual filmmaker. 

Eraserhead may also be cinema's finest installation piece, a private room for dreaming, which Henry acknowledges as well. She also engages with the film's status as a horror movie, which I'm personally ambivalent about, but she did as good a job of arguing that it works as a body-horror picture as could be done. 

Elsewhere, she also does the best job of detailing Eraserhead's role as a Midnight Movie, its path from critical pariah to universally acclaimed cult classic, and its influence on films from Kitchen Sink to Barton Fink and non-cinematic artists from Charles Bukowski to The Pixies as can be done in a tiny book with fewer than 100 pages of text. Henry's conversational stories about how she came to Eraserhead as a teenager and wrote her monograph of the ultimate natal nightmare while pregnant also bring a lot of personality to the book.