The key to figuring out the point of David Lynch’s surreal and slow-moving debut feature is found in reading about his life at the time. In the early 70s, Lynch was a young artist living in a dangerous part of Philadelphia—a kid was once shot to death near his house, he remembers—and he was married and had fathered a daughter, Jennifer, born with a club foot. He didn’t feel things were going right for him. Artists, he thought, were supposed to stay up late, do whatever they liked, and have few responsibilities beyond the creation of their art. Wives and children weren’t in the equation. It’s from this tension that Eraserhead was hatched.
This story, set in a desolate city that looks like a bomb was dropped on it, of a man who unexpectedly finds himself the father of a howling mutated Mr. Peanut monster baby is Lynch’s own story. It’s also one of Lynch’s purest, most handmade films. Every moment feels transcribed straight from his subconcious. He built the sets himself, he built the baby himself (and still won’t tell anyone how he did it), and he even lived on the sets for a time while making the movie over a grueling five year period (financed by an AFI grant and some help from actress Sissy Spacek, the wife of Lynch’s longtime friend, Jack Fisk). He had visions of making more films that took after Eraserhead’s organic and intimate production process—specifically, his celebrated, well-circulated, un-made Ronnie Rocket screenplay, for which Lynch once said he wanted to build sets and then let them age, rust, and weather for awhile before actually shooting the movie. It wasn’t until 2007’s Inland Empire that Lynch would achieve something close to that, though.