Member-only story
Intense Ominous Whooshing
I met David Lynch in the Other Room, Over There
Way back amidst the ancient history of the previous century, early in the years of the epoch referred to now as The 1980s, I saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead at a midnight showing at the IFC Theater on 6th Avenue in New York City.
As I walked down the street afterward with my friends, I recall saying something to the effect that it would be impossible to unsee what we had just seen—and, I might have gone so far as to say that I wished I hadn’t seen it all.
A week or two later I was back to see it again—and over the years have watched it a number of times more. If you are an enthusiast of cinema as an art form you cannot but be in awe of the magic happening on screen. (Stanley Kubrick, another one of my favorite directors, loved the film.)
Last night I watched it again, and again I both laughed out loud and felt my sphincter muscles tighten in horror.
I was unaware of Eraserhead until some time after I had already seen David Lynch’s following film, The Elephant Man (1980).
The deep unease of Elephant Man, a distressing dark dream, did not prepare me for the desolate grotesques and shocks of the nightmarish Eraserhead.
