David Lynch’s recent passing will more than likely ignite a broader appreciation for his singular contributions to cinema—particularly, a sympathetic appreciation for his capacity to braid surrealist imagery with narratives that wrestle and intertwine identity, memory, and the subconscious. Lynch serves as a reminder that the good, joyous, and pleasurable things that we grew up with can act as a valuable creative well to draw from. From his first, Eraserhead, to his last, Inland Empire, his films resist linear interpretations, operating instead within a heightened aesthetic of, at times, contradictory logic, one in which the expected, pre-packaged coherence is secondary to the visceral experience of confronting, typically after a period of avoiding, that which lingers beneath the surface.
Lynch’s work exists in a realm of deliberate instability, each film coaxing viewers into an associative relationship with its shifting symbols. This openness, what some, including informed, tenured professors of the guilds, have dismissed as opacity, is, in fact, an invitation to reckon with the textures of human perception and desire. Recognizing this, any reflection on his legacy should do more than recount a viewing experience or rehash critical takes: this little review seeks to acknowledge the liberatory potential of his art, which so often reveals itself through reconsideration and reengagement, just as poetry does in its defiance of finite meaning.
Eraserhead remains one of cinema’s most enigmatic works, a text both resistant to and enriched by theoretical engagement. Described by Lynch as his “most spiritual film” (Catching the Big Fish), Eraserhead lends itself to multiple interpretive frameworks. Here, an introductory reading to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Roland Barthes’ lexia, allows viewers to interpret the film as a fragmented text where alienation, desire, and industrialism disrupt conventional meaning. It provokes wonderment at how Lynch, as a creator, critiques industrialism’s alienating effect while implicating his own anxieties, throughout the viewer’s first experience with the film.

What exactly is David Lynch presenting in his debut picture? In his own words, “Eraserhead is an American film, but it’s a little bit in an in-between place.” Let us start with the basic facts. Jack Nance stars as Henry Spencer, a professional printer (who also is described as being on vacation) lives in a nameless industrial wasteland more depressing and soulless than the most pitiful setting in a Fallout video game. One day his apparent girlfriend Mary invites him to her house to enjoy a family dinner with her parents. As family dinners are wont to do in cinema, the evening’s festivities are a disaster. With any pretense of fun extinct, Mary’s mother informs Henry that he is the father of Mary’s newborn child, and he will be expected to do the respectable thing and marry her.
One off-screen shotgun wedding later, Mary moves into Henry’s one-room apartment with their “child.” Their progeny is ambiguously human at best, bearing the head of a flayed bird and a squashed body encased in bandages. Besides being frightfully ugly, the baby whines constantly, and after several sleepless nights, Mary abandons her new family to return home to her parents.

Henry continues to care for the baby even as it sickens and develops sores. Exhausted from playing the role of nursemaid, he has visions of a woman with an oddly shaped face singing to him from the radiator. He later ignores the baby one night in order to enjoy a night of passion with his beautiful next-door neighbor. Thinking of Lacan while witnessing blatant desires blunted in the film, arising from an oblique sense of lack, le petit objet a serves as a running leitmotif throughout the film as an unattainable object of desire.
Henry’s encounters with the woman in the radiator (henceforth the “Radiator Fairy”) embody this dynamic. The Radiator Fairy’s refrain, “In Heaven, everything is fine,” oscillates between soothing fantasy and unsettling irony. She represents Henry’s yearning for escape: she stomps on sperm-like creatures, aligning her actions with Lacan’s death drive, the compulsion toward destruction. Yet, her physical presence also underscores the paradox of desire: she is Henry’s ideal object, but her unattainability highlights the impossibility of fulfillment.

At the core of Eraserhead, Henry’s alienation mirrors the fragmentation Lacan describes in his discussion of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real orders. In the mirror stage, one perceives unity (the Imaginary) in the external reflection: a misrecognition that perpetuates a lifelong desire for unattainable wholeness (Symbolic). As Lacan asserted, the ideal-I remains “a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual” (Écrits 76).
Henry’s surrounding industrial world disrupts the boundaries of the Symbolic and the Real. The grotesque baby swaddled like a sickly sapling is an unassimilable manifestation embodying the Real; or, that which resists representation. The baby’s constant crying ruptures Henry’s fragile symbolic order, exposing the “gap” Lacan insists exists between the imagined self and physical reality. Similarly, Henry’s repression and alienation manifest through dream sequences, which blur his desires and fears into a singular incoherent experience.
Thus, Henry’s imagined and actual escapes from paternity offer him little respite. Henry feels humiliated when the woman next door ignores him and beds an anonymous stranger instead. Even his mutant child chuckles at his pathetic manhood. After being seemingly decapitated by a mutant baby inside him in another fantasy sequence, Henry decides enough is enough. He takes a pair of scissors and cuts open his baby’s bandages before stabbing it in the heart. The monstrous child torments him even in its death throes, expelling rivers of grit-like fat, then swelling to a great size. As all seems to disintegrate, Henry finally embraces Radiator Fairy and the film fades to white.
The narrative of Eraserhead, at its core, concerns the abdication of responsibility. The crux of the film is the care for an unpleasant baby, and its climax is an act of infanticide. Henry is reluctant to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood, and as childcare increasingly comes to define him: at one point his head is literally replaced with that of his child as he seeks escapist pleasures.
Suggestions of repressed violence symbolically lurk throughout the film leading up to the infanticide. During the radiator woman’s “performance” for Henry, sperm-like masses are thrown onto the stage, and the Radiator Fairy squashes them with violent glee. Not only does the Radiator Fairy offer Henry the warmth he craves, but she also shows him how he might acquire it: by destroying anything suggestive of reproduction.
If one stretches their imagination, reproductive imagery is associated with death and violence beyond the sperm-things. During the dinner party at Mary’s house, a chicken Henry attempts to carve begins flapping its golden-fried wings and bleeds copiously between its thighs, suggestive of a particularly gory case of childbirth. Even the opening sequence of the film, when a sperm-thing spectrally escapes Henry’s mouth, conflates reproductive symbols with negative affect. If this sequence is meant to artistically depict the conception of Henry’s mutant baby, then it is utterly devoid of intimacy. Instead, it is pregnant with ominousness, a grim fatalism in which our lives are barren things studied by an unfriendly man operating a series of levers.
Lynch’s industrialized setting amplifies the Lacanian interplay of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, while critiquing the alienation inherent in late capitalism. Henry’s world is a space where public industry invades the private: a mirror stage writ large. Henry, like the viewer, is alienated from himself, trapped between the fantasies of the Imaginary and the cold structures of the Symbolic. Lacan’s Other also finds resonance here. Henry’s industrial environment operates as an external Other, imposing its alienating logic on him. As Todd McGowan explains in The Real Gaze, “Fantasy saves us from having to endure the inherent traumatic desire of the Other unprepared” (17).
Henry’s baby is another hyperfocalized intrusion of the Real into his fragile symbolic framework. By contrast, the Radiator Fairy offers Henry a fantasy escape. Her checkerboard stage mirrors the structured yet surreal boundaries of Henry’s psyche. Their final “union,” however, remains ambiguous, as the film cuts to apocalyptic imagery. Lynch disrupts the very fantasy he constructs, demanding that viewers confront the impossibility of resolution.
Likewise, Barthes argued that texts resist totality, consisting instead of fragments that invite plural readings. Eraserhead thrives on such fragmentation, its disjointed scenes functioning as individual lexias that resist closure. The film’s industrial landscape becomes a lexia symbolizing alienation under late capitalism. The opening shots of factories and desolate urban decay suggest a mechanized world that invades even the most intimate aspects of Henry’s life.
Barthes’ Mythologies describes such constructs as “natural images” masking historical realities. The pencil factory, producing tools for erasure, reflects the industrial society’s reduction of individuals to disposable cogs: literally visualized by Henry’s severed head to become material for erasers: a chilling metaphor for industrial exploitation. Denied sexual intimacy with his wife, he conjures the image of a woman in his radiator, who sings a sentimental song about paradise, smiles unceasingly, and seems to exist only for him. All in all, she is the stereotypical fantasy girl of the juvenile (heterosexual) male: not an individual with her own desires, but a comforter with limited personal agency and a predictable routine of behaviors. Indeed, as a radiator spirit, her primary function is quite literally to provide warmth to Henry.

The dinner scene with Mary’s family serves as a lexia where domestic norms are grotesquely distorted. The writhing chicken, the father’s formulaic phrasings (while endearing, offset by his mechanical laughter), and the mother’s near-seduction destabilize the coherence of familial unity. As Barthes claimed in S/Z, “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (S/Z 146). Lynch dismantles the “natural” image of domesticity, exposing its constructed and precarious nature. Regardless of her exact feelings, the woman loses interest in Henry. Between this rejection and the climactic infanticide, he again turns to the woman in the radiator, but now his baby intrudes upon his internal world, and the infant decapitates him within the fantasy. The violence of the film’s surrealism now has a homicidal quality.
The Radiator Fairy’s performance of “In Heaven” functions as both rupture and solace, a lexia offering viewers a Barthesian punctum, the detail that “pricks” consciousness. This surreal interlude disrupts narrative logic and gestures toward transcendence, even as its irony denies closure. Barthes distinguishes between pleasure (the comfortable consumption of meaning) and jouissance (the disruptive bliss of ambiguity). Eraserhead compels viewers to dwell in the unsettling space of jouissance, refusing the comfort of resolution.
Through Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Barthes’ lexia, Eraserhead emerges as a fragmented text that interrogates alienation, desire, and modernity. Lacan illuminates the film’s psychological dimensions, from the rupture of the Real to Henry’s pursuit of the unattainable objet petit a. Barthes, meanwhile, celebrates the film’s resistance to closure, inviting viewers to dwell in its disruptive jouissance. Yet, as Barthes reminds us, interpretation is never singular, never definitive. The beauty of Eraserhead lies in its refusal to be fully known, a reminder that meaning, like desire, is always just out of reach. In Lynch’s words, ones that haunt even more in his passing, the “whole picture” is “not locked in yet,” a truth both resonant and liberating.
This essay was co-written by Nicholas Skaldetvind and Jackson Harper.