Chris Flackett
Being as distinctive as it is, both visually and formally, it’s no surprise that admirers of Eraserhead, the 1977 debut feature film from David Lynch, hold very specific moments and images from the film in their hearts: the moving, bleeding chickens; the Lady in the Radiator; a head being used to in a pencil factory to make erasers; the killing of the baby and its aftermath. All are extremely visceral moments that leave indelible impressions on viewers and, quite often, come to define the film for them.
One of the elements that fascinates me is not so much a single image or moment but how the film deals with the entrapment of its central character, Henry Spencer (the wonderful Jack Nance). This theme might seem obvious to the viewer (if anything can be said to be obvious in Eraserhead), but what strikes me is how the film layers this unspoken sense of entrapment thematically alongside what critic Steven Jay Schneider referred to as “the primacy of the audio-visual image” to allow a richer, multi-textured, multi-sensory expression of the theme of entrapment without the characters or the narrative explicitly referring to such, thereby allowing the theme of entrapment to colour the tone and mood of the film without offering itself up as a definitive interpretation.
The Passivity of Henry Spencer
If ever a character has given off an air of complete vagueness, then it must be Henry Spencer. I don’t mean that the writing of Henry is vague—far from it. It’s more that his defining characteristic is his vagueness. The only definite things we can say we know about Henry is that he works as a printer at Lapelle’s factory and lives in a heavily industrialized area by himself in a tiny one-room-with-bathroom apartment. Other than that, it is hard to say what, if anything, drives Henry, or even what he enjoys: he has a photo of a nuclear test blast on his wall, he listens to the chirpy organ music of Fats Waller, but all this added together does not a complete person make.
What we might take for vagueness or passiveness, though, might be more of a zen kind of state. Lynch explained that “Henry is very sure that something is happening, but he doesn’t understand it at all. He watches things very, very carefully because he’s trying to figure them out. He might study the corner of that pie container just because it’s in his line of sight, and he might wonder why he sat where he did to have that be there like that. Everything is new. It might not be frightening to him, but it could be a key to something. Everything should be looked at. There could be clues in it.”
This suggests that Henry could be a seeker of some kind, albeit a semi-oblivious one. Like Lynch himself when it comes to creativity, Henry is running on the intuition that something bigger might be at play. It also suggests that, because he is so hyper-aware of everything around him, he might actually be a kind of victim of sensory overload, something which can be debilitating to those sensitive to too much noise and movement around them. If this is correct for Henry, then it might be the case that he is entrapped by his own sensory perception—he can hardly move or react for being pinned down by the environment around him.
Whilst this may be true, it is also true that Henry, through his passivity, allows things to happen to him, with little or no resistance, rather than making things happen by actively asserting himself. We see it when he is put upon by Mrs X, the mother of Henry’s sometime-lover Mary X, to face up to his responsibilities and marry Mary so they can form a family around their illegitimate child. Mary asks Henry if he minds about getting married, to which he placidly replies, without emotion, “Oh no”, as if to say he doesn’t mind at all. Whether he does or he doesn’t, if he secretly wants to protest, he doesn’t do so, simply allowing others to make decisions for him.
The same occurs when Mr X delegates the responsibility of carving the chickens to Henry. Henry looks terrified (and this is before the chickens begin to move and bleed!) but he doesn’t refuse, passively accepting the responsibility while his anxious expression suggests he’d rather do anything but this (there are also his encounters with the baby and the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, but we will revert to these in more details in due course).
We can see then that Henry’s essential passivity can, and does, leave him vulnerable to becoming entrapped. But how does this entrapment occur and how is it deployed in the film? First, we need to take a closer look at Henry’s environment.
The Environment of Henry Spencer
Lynch often described Eraserhead as his version of The Philadelphia Story, referring to a period of time when he lived in the city with his then-wife and baby daughter, finding the place to be the complete opposite of its nickname, ‘The City of Brotherly Love’. The atmosphere that Lynch picked up on in Philadelphia became an influence on Eraserhead, as it was for many of his other films: “I always say, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is my biggest influence. There is something about the mood here. The fear, insanity, corruption, filth, despair, violence in the air was so beautiful to me”.
While the neighbourhood Henry lives in is not a direct representation of Philadelphia, it serves to express that uncomfortable atmosphere that Lynch associated with his time there. Lynch described the neighbourhood of Eraserhead thus: “it was a world between a factory and a factory neighborhood. A little, unknown, twisted, almost silent lost spot where little details and little torments existed. And people were struggling in darkness…It was just like a mood“.
This claustrophobic sense of mood is written into Henry’s surroundings, first becoming evident early on as Henry makes his first appearance, away from the Man In the Planet, in a flash of white light (nodding to his encounter with The Lady In the Radiator at the end of the film). Henry has apparently been born into a world of unease and, on its own terms, the environment is cold, anonymous, impersonal. Shooting in black and white allowed Lynch to drain all the colour out of what was already a muddy-brown and grey industrial landcape (filmed in Los Angeles), enhancing the bleak monotony of Henry’s world. Textures and materials are reduced to basic elements; metal fences, puddles, steam, rubble, brick and stone—earthy without going back to nature, with minimal variety and maximum austerity. No other people. No community. Not even any homes, as far as we can tell.
This monotony of the world would be enough to entrap Henry in its bleakness, but Lynch cleverly uses visual perspective and contrasts of size to demonstrate how even the buildings loom over and ensnare Henry. Quite often in this early sequence of Henry walking through the neighbourhood to his apartment, Henry walks away from the camera, or even begins far away from the camera, so that he begins small or becomes progressively smaller as the shot progresses, a neat metaphor for Henry’s place in this world. As Henry becomes smaller in the frame, Lynch has him move across or near to much larger structures, drawing the viewer’s attention to the disparity in size between Henry and his environment, the buildings effectively hemming him in. This can be seen as Henry walks through the tunnel at the start of his walk, with the tunnel effectively swallowing him whole:
Or when he walks from the left of the screen to the right, across the length of an old industrial building which, with its imposing height and dominating presence in the frame gives it something of the feeling of Brutalist architecture from some old forgotten Eastern-European Communist state. The dominance of the building, and the way it turns Henry into a mere speck by comparison, suggests an entrapping environment from which there would be little or no escape.
There is no respite for Henry, not even at home. The lift to his apartment comically holds him in place for (approximately) 15 seconds before it grants him the right of movement. His apartment is essentially just one room, with a tiny bathroom just off of it. The room itself is tiny, with little room to move. There’s nothing romantic about this place, nothing of the struggling artist’s garret about it. This is low-rent, low-quality accommodation, which suggests Henry’s printing role at Lapelle’s might not be the most well-paid of jobs, therefore economically trapping him as well (it’s revealing that one of the scenes Lynch deleted from the film was of homeless people fighting over some dimes in the street, with Henry desperate to join them and grab his share, suggesting he is barely over the poverty line).
This is a room with only barely a view: the sole window opens onto the building across the way from Henry’s apartment building, but Lynch fixes the perspective so that the brickwork of the other building appears to be right up against the window, almost touching the glass. This is impossible, of course—who would build a window so it was touching a brick wall?—but it only serves to further add to the sense of Henry’s apartment suffocatingly encroaching upon him.
Even the hallway to his room squeezes and pinches Henry into place. The corridor is noticeably very narrow, much more narrow than a normal corridor of this type would usually be. As Henry passes along the corridor near the start of the film, it almost appears that there is only room in the corridor for one person at a time, Henry’s shoulders nearly touching each wall on either side of him. Considering there are apartment doors on both sides of the corridor, this is a major inconvenience at the least, but more importantly for the film, it offers further visual detail to the concept of Henry’s entrapment without openly drawing attention to itself.
But it’s not only Henry’s environment that is entrapping him. His relationships are too.
A Dangerous Dinner With the Nuclear Family
Early in the film, Henry is invited to dinner at the house of his sometime partner Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) via a message left with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, but as he approaches Mary’s house, it appears to be less of an invitation than a trap being sprung on an unsuspecting Henry, possibly against Mary’s will. In what follows, it appears that her mother, Mrs X, is the one in charge. She is the one who reveals to Henry that he and Mary have a baby (while I’m arguing for Henry’s entrapment here, to be clear, I am not making any moral judgement regarding parenthood out of wedlock or parental responsibility or taking any sides or moral position. This is more a description of what the film seems to be telling us and how it relates to the bigger theme).
Mrs X, in her interrogative ‘small talk’ with Henry in the living room, appears cool, self-contained, and ever so slightly disdainful of Henry. In fact, she almost observes him as if she were an ethnologist impersonally observing a specimen in a test environment (and perhaps the family environment is a ‘test’ environment for Henry. If so, it’s a test he arguably fails later in the film).
By contrast, Mary’s Dad, Mr X (Bill), is caught and pinned by a frame within the frame, the strangely mushroom-shaped entry into the dining room restricting Mr X into a small visual space. This demonstrates his essential separateness from the women in the X family. He doesn’t seem to be involved in the trap to bring Henry into line and into the family. In fact, with his obscure rambling about plumbing and the neighbourhood, and with his wonderfully goofy facial expressions, he seems oblivious to everything but his own compulsion to speak. Notably, Mr X never crosses the threshold from the dining room into the living room; as he walks just to the lip of the threshold, demanding Henry examines his plumbing-damaged knees, Mrs X chases him back through the dining room and into the kitchen. It’s a comical sequence, but also demonstrative of the antagonism within the family unit; you get the feeling Mr and Mrs X don’t really get on, a premonition perhaps of Henry and Mary’s future relationship.
Later, after dinner has collapsed into a catastrophe of bleeding chickens and strange character fits, Mrs X decides to pull Henry aside and reveal the real reason for the family meal. Henry is pulled out through the mushroom-shaped entry, out of the dining room, and against the wall to the side. As Mrs X does so, this puts Henry and Mrs X to the left of a pipe (just standing there randomly in the front room—Mr X’s strange plumbing?), so that not only are they separated symbolically from the rest of the room, but Henry and Mrs X are also trapped; there is no room for them between the wall and the pipe, forcing them to be pressed together.
Henry is trapped and at a loss to escape. The camera appears to recognise this and gives him some momentary respite by moving away from the pipe to create some space. However, Lynch appears to be teasing both Henry and us, the viewer, as well. Henry cannot move into the freed-up space within the frame because he is being blocked from moving—from Mrs X suddenly and disorientatingly trying to seduce him! While I wouldn’t want to interpret Mrs X’s seduction attempt (perhaps Henry, as a recent father, represents a virility that Mr X has long since lost), what we see here is the frame allowing for movement, but Mrs X cutting movement off with her body as a physical representation of trapping Henry into the family. This brings Mary into the frame, in more ways than one.
The Entrapment of Mary X
The attempted seduction forces Mary to act, pulling Mrs X away from Henry, but she has done so at the risk of the frame trapping her also. Visually, the pipe clearly splits the frame in two, with Mrs X and Henry on one side of the pipe, and Mary alone on the other. She is separate, even though she is involved, to what is being hatched—Mrs X’s effort to force Henry to take responsibility for his fatherhood, and to marry Mary to at least make good on his ‘mistake’. Mary, meanwhile, is represented symbolically within the frame as not wanting to get involved and being unable to intervene, something Mary somewhat confirms when she objects to Mrs X’s revelation to Henry of the baby with a horrified cry of “Mom!”, as well as debating whether the baby actually is a baby. Yet, Mrs X will hear nothing of it, meaning she is entrapping Mary as much as she is entrapping Henry.
Lynch provides us with a hint of Mary’s own entrapment even before the confrontation with Henry plays out. As Henry makes his way to the X house for dinner, we are shown, in close-up, Mary’s head framed in the window of her front door. With her face in close-up, therefore taking up a substantial amount of frame, it leaves little room symbolically and visually in the frame to move and escape into. The window then provides a frame within a frame, further pinning and fixing Mary into place. There is nowhere to go outside of her parental family home, an ironic reminder of the family home she is to set up with Henry and the baby (in what will prove to be an even smaller and more encroaching space).
It doesn’t last long, though, and Mary’s abandonment of Henry involves her crouching at the bottom of the marital bed, the bars across her face visually expressing the imprisonment her relationship with Henry has led her into. Ironically, the pulling that Mary does on the bed takes on a sexual rhythm, ironic in that the physical act of sexual intercourse led to the chain of events that placed Mary in this prison. No matter; by asserting herself in this way, she finds a way to escape back to home. Whether this is merely swapping out one prison for another, we’ll never know: from now on, all traps we see are Henry’s and Henry’s alone.
The Black Abyss of Desire
Perhaps the biggest trap for Henry is his libido. For someone so seemingly passive, Henry certainly has an active sex drive. Not only did he impregnate Mary, but he also appears to lust over the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall. The opposite of Mary, the Beautiful Girl, with her dark hair and features, seductive eyes and manner, evening wear and sultry voice, appears to have been designed with the idea of the stereotype of a temptress in mind. She gives off an aura of worldliness that Mary simply does not have.
To someone as passive as Henry, an actively sexual person such as the Beautiful Girl must offer a fascination, fairly or unfairly, that Mary doesn’t hold for him. He even appears to be a little frightened of the Beautiful Girl when we first see her, passing on Mary’s invitation to dinner to him. However, once Mary has escaped back to her parent’s house, and Henry is alone in close quarters with no one but the baby, the Beautiful Girl becomes a much more attractive proposition to him and his libido, offering a form of escape, however temporary.
We are shown, in a particular scene, the hold the baby has on Henry and how it affects him. As soon as he looks to leave the apartment the baby wails in distress—twice—and only stops once Henry goes back to the table, where he sits down with a look of weary recognition on his face. It’s certainly not unnatural for a baby to cry for a parent’s attention, but the timing of such here—when Henry is about to leave his apartment and achieve distance from the baby—suggests a design to overtly demonstrate the effect of the baby on Henry’s life, and from Henry’s point of view, it doesn’t appear to be a happy one.
Later, when Henry is asleep in bed, Mary inexplicably appears to be sleeping next to him, bumping Henry and waking him. As Henry pulls sperm-like worms from under the covers (and, it’s implied, out of Mary), he throws one at his wall, where it seems to enter onto the planet surface from the prologue and skitters about, eventually opening itself wide and allowing the camera to enter a black void. The film never overtly confirms whether this and the scenes that follow are part of a dream, but the sudden sequence of irrational moments suggests the possibility (my interpretation is that the section from Mary re-appearing in the bed to Henry re-appearing on the bed after having his head turned into erasers are one, continuous dream).
We appear to descend downwards, judging by the camera movement, along some sort of rock face, where a hole at the bottom shows back into Henry’s flat, Henry sittimg miserably on the bed in some sort of contemplation. This movement through blackness from within Henry’s apartment outwards, to looking back in from the outside through a small hole, further suggests Henry is pinned to his spot in life, stuck in this apartment with the baby, and that there may, on some level, be some sort of cosmic influence at play (the worm pulling the viewer through and down the planet-like surface).
The Seduction of Henry Spencer
This is the moment the Beautiful Girl makes her second appearance, knocking on Henry’s door to announce that she has locked herself out of her apartment and could she spend the night at Henry’s? Her slow, sultry manner is demonstrative of a seduction, and so it proves to be, but what is interesting is how Lynch presents Henry as he opens the door. When he sees its the Beautiful Girl knocking, Lynch has Henry framed by his door frame, rooted by it to the spot. Henry appears to be stunned: he can’t move, can’t act, can say very little. He is effectively impotent in his anxious passivity, which is perhaps why later in the film the Beautiful Girl sees Henry as having his baby’s head instead of his own. She sees Henry not as a man but a baby, or more a man-child she can manipulate to her own ends and desires. Once again, this occurs as Henry is framed and held tightly within his door frame, which acts as the expression of Henry’s own limited ability to act. He has trapped himself until he commits the one act that somehow sets him free, but I’ll return to that shortly.
The seduction is consummated in what appears to be a symbolic fashion, with the pair naked within a crater that inexplicably appears in the middle of Henry’s bed, filled with a milky-looking fluid, the whole tableau indicative of human sexual organs and bodily fluids. Curiously, though, it is not Henry who becomes passive here but, for a moment, the Beautiful Girl. She responds to the sound of the baby crying with a look of fear and anxiety. It could be assumed that she suddenly sees the baby as symbolic of the risk she is now taking, engaging in (assumedly) unprotected sex. We can assume from her fear that she doesn’t want to become a mother.
You would expect Henry to be passive, to wait for the Beautiful Girl to return her gaze to him before continuing, but amazingly no; Henry chooses this moment to demonstrate an activeness that we have not seen from him before. He turns the Beautiful Girl’s face back to him, not even opening his eyes to see what she is afraid of, and continues to kiss her, the pair sinking into the milky pit (and therefore into the sexual act).
Here we see how Henry’s libido is ultimately what drives him and yet is the thing that traps him more than anything else. The only real time (bar the film’s conclusion) that we see any activeness on Henry’s part is when he decisively takes control of the Beautiful Girl in their intimacy, not even acknowledging any fears or concerns she may have. It is this single-mindedness in fulfilling his sexual needs that defeats him. He does not look at the baby as the Beautiful Girl does, thereby keeping the thought of risk out of his mind so that it does not distract from his gratification. Yet, this gratification has already resulted in one baby and could lead to more. We have seen that Henry feels entrapped by his baby, and yet his libido is pushing to put him in a position where he could trap himself further. It’s a form of self-sabotage in a way and the one form of entrapment in Eraserhead that Henry could arguably have control over.
The Freedom of Henry Spencer
The climax of Eraserhead is infamous for being hard to read as well as being genuinely disconcerting. However, I would argue that, whatever way the scene can be read, one thing about the end result seems clear: Henry is happy with whatever it is he has done. He ends up in the embrace of the Lady In The Radiator, a look of serenity on his face, as white light bleaches out everything around them (it’s tempting to read this as Heaven, as in the Lady’s famous song, but that’s another article for another time).
What we can say definitely of the ending is this: Henry kills his baby, setting off a chain reaction that seemingly blows up the Planet (and the man in the cabin on it) from the prologue and brings Henry to the Lady In The Radiator. What is curious about this and seems to relate to Henry’s freedom is that a third and final encounter with the Lady in the Radiator is the catalyst for Henry to act and kill his baby.
Moments before Henry grabs his scissors to cut through the baby’s bandages, he hears the Beautiful Girl arrive outside her apartment. He seems excited by this, rushing out to see her, only to be dismayed by the sight of the Beautiful Girl in the arms of another, lecherous-looking, man. It is here that the Beautiful Girl sees Henry as having the baby head (which brings into question whether Henry and the Beautiful Girl did actually sleep together, or whether this was a fantasy of Henry’s and now the actual sight of the Beautiful Girl with another man is the reality).
While we can speculate why this disruption of Henry’s expectations—of the Beautiful Girl as either a partner or a potential partner—drives him to act in the way it does, the tipping point is the baby, with an unnerving awareness considering its age and state, begins laughing at Henry mockingly, seeing humour in Henry’s disappointment.
Whether these moments are to be read literally or symbolically, for my purposes, they not only relate back to Henry’s entrapment as demonstrated above, but they seem to reveal this entrapment to Henry, forcing him to act in a moment of self-awareness. Not only is the baby trapping him, but it’s laughing at him as well! Not only has his desire led him to the Beautiful Girl, the Beautiful Girl has spurned him, revealing Henry’s own passivity to himself. Thereby, we can read Henry’s final escape into seemingly another plane as being a result of his own self-confrontation with some of the things that I have demonstrated in this article have entrapped Henry.
As an aside, and I claim no definite interpretation here, but in several religions, true peace cannot be found until one has rid oneself of the baggage weighing them down, entrapping them in the mortal plane. And let’s not forget Lynch did claim Eraserhead as his most spiritual movie.
In Heaven, everything is fine…
