GROSS DISTRACTION - David Lynch's Eraserhead - against interpretation
Should we even bother to try to figure out what it means?
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed - plus the occasional detour like this one.
ERASERHEAD, director DAVID LYNCH, cast JACK NANCE, CHARLOTTE STEWART, ALLEN JOSEPH, JEANNE BATES, JUDITH ROBERTS, production AFI/Libra Films, 1977, 89 MINUTES.
I’m a David Lynch sceptic. Sorry. But when the splendid old weirdo died last week I had to write something about this paradigmatic Hollywood insider-outsider. And to find a movie that actually had a serious effect on me (an effect I think I can still almost access if I close my eyes: I’m at the Scala in about 1980, clutching a warm can of Holsten Pils), I’ve gone back to his first feature, Eraserhead.
I find it hard to interpret Eraserhead. That’s okay - everyone else does too. And Lynch obviously never helped, cantankerously refusing to offer any useful material for those of us trying to figure out the movie’s various terrifying and/or nauseating and/or poetic images (likewise for all the other movies, of course). In one of the DVD extras he’s asked to explain the origin of one of these bizarre images and it looks, for a second, like he’s actually thinking about it but then he snaps back to the excitement of putting the effects together - the practical side - and we learn nothing.
Against interpretation. In resisting interpretation he’s not unusual, of course. Artists have done this for most of the history of art: pulling that face when you ask them “what’s it about then?” or when you excitedly try to pin their work to something definite or final. For many artists this seems to cause distress, if not actual pain. If you know any artists you’ll recognise this: the furrowed brow, the rolled eyes.
Lynch essentially lets us off the hook. He gives us nothing and we’re consequently not obliged to try. I’m serious. Interpretation, even where possible, is not compulsory. There’s a whole world of contemplation, exegesis, close reading, contextualisation, ekphrasis and just straightforward enjoyment available to us without or beyond interpretation.
Susan Sontag should be our authority here. When she talks about the “…perennial, never consummated project of interpretation” (in Against Interpretation obvs) it’s a kind of lament. She recognises - but scorns because, let’s face it, that’s the kind of person she is - the urge to locate and then fillet the content of every work of art. As I get older I find Sontag’s magisterial positions more and more attractive. She’s a blunt Plato for our age:
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
Interpretation won’t go away. In fact, in the present-day corporate art-culture ecology, a lot of work actually comes pre-interpreted. When you read that an artist (a filmmaker, a painter, a playwright…) sets out to ‘explore’ or ‘challenge’ something or to ‘engage with’ ‘an issue’; or when an institution proposes a season of work that’s ‘about’ climate breakdown or trauma or indigineity, or, well, anything, you’re being provided with the elements of an authorised interpretation in advance. The work itself may or may not be magnificent, transformative, but you’d be forgiven for thinking you might not need to actually experience it at all, just absorb the interpretation and move on. Job done.
What can we actually do with Eraserhead then? Well, I would counsel cutting ourselves some slack. We should read this work as closely as we want but not feel obliged to try to figure out what it means. For instance, we might stop at talking about the sensations and emotions it produces in us (and it certainly does, right?). Or place the movie in its historic context, locate it in an industrial city on the Eastern seaboard at the turn of the neoliberal era, or find its place in the history of transgressive American modernism - Meshes, Chelsea Girls, Scorpio Rising… Or in the parallel history of freakshow and b-picture horror shockers… or the loftier surrealist tradition. Others have already done all this, of course. Many have found Kafka (“the one artist I feel could be my brother” says Lynch) or Dostoevsky in Eraserhead (I personally see some Dickens in the lodging houses and dark lanes; the suffering ‘baby’, the skin complaints, the pathos). Could we jam this movie into the involuted New England gothic tradition? Or is there a more vigorous Melville, Twain, London genealogy to trace?
And what if there’s actually nothing there? We have to consider this. One of criticism’s functions, in history but also in our lives, is to uncover the emptiness or triviliaty of what is thought to be great. As a sceptic I wouldn’t be at all surprised if what we find, in looking closely at these movies, is actually a bland continuation of Hollywood’s unreflective individualism done up as a chronicle of the weird, the dark and the wrong. Is it possible that David Lynch is really just a bore?
It’s possible that I’m in over my head here. I mean I think I’ve shown, right here, in this dilatory examination of the whole history of Hollywood, that the urge to interpret (or to offer an interpretation alongside the work submitted) is as old as the movies. But reading the 2025 Oscar nominations, just out, I can’t help but see this kind of hyper-interpretive thematic overkill there too. Is it just me or are more of the nominated movies than is usual ‘exploring’ a theme or a political-economic conjuncture or a social issue? Maybe I should just shut up and watch the movies.
Here’s the thing: I have a feeling I’ll be tapping up Susan Sontag again next time, because it’s Goldfinger, 1964’s top-grossing movie, an absolute cathedral to kitsch, released, it turns out, in the same year as Sontag’s Notes on Kitsch, one of those coincidences I just love.
Plato was suspicious of art and thought that, for purposes of moral hygiene, we ought to understand what it meant, in case it turned out to have bad intentions or was weak or corrupting. This, thinking about it, isn’t a million miles from the censorious present-day idea of ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ art. Maybe this explains why interpretation is still considered to be vital: if we don’t forensically analyse our works of art, how will we know if they’re acceptable or not?
John Berger wanted us to stop trying to interpret art. In his book about Picasso he asks us to do the much more important - more exciting and fulfilling - work of locating him in history and in the story of art. He quotes the man himself: “Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.” ― Pablo Picasso
In this interview, Lynch skirts around meaning and interpretation charmingly.
Eraserhead is not presently on any of the streaming services. You can buy the Criterion Blu-Ray, which has a bunch of interesting extras, though.
All these reviews are on Letterboxd, obvs.
Enjoyed this, thank you. I don’t get him either and your point about individualism makes sense to me.
The quote from Picasso is gold — it’s both humbling for any artist/writer and is a bit of a misdirection in the sense that the visual images, words, or notes, etc. pieced together by an artist — kind of like a morpheme or motif, blocks of meaning — have enough information or significance that they capture an audience’s attention much longer than a birdsong. Clearly, the more someone knows about birdsongs, the more they might perseverate on it and come to see how the song itself is unique to a bird, reflects the bird’s state of being in that moment, geography, etc. But most aren’t as readily equipped to take these in as the images and other blocks of meaning used by artists. The point is, one reason most (me included) don’t spend more time on birdsongs than art is because we don’t understand some basic things about it.
As you point out, Sontag’s essay also encourages a more meta-analysis of the work, not just how it lands in history (missile crisis), but what are the themes this artist ruminates about, what tools do they use to catch the mood or capture our interest. But, I think just as important, art made with a certain level of ambiguity is going to act like a mirror that tells you something about yourself. And in this sense, it becomes one of the best platforms for both getting to know someone — whether that someone is the artist or the person next to you in a theater or gallery — and for learning about oneself. Not to minimize that art absolutely can reinforce destructive mythologies and function like propaganda (as Plato and you point out), but it also can deconstruct these mythologies and get people talking about it.
As for Eraserhead — in my personal experience, I see a few threads. As a parent, I see the fears of parenting. As a scientist, I see that Henry has hair remarkably like young Oppenheimer did, I see the nuclear bomb explosion image by Henry’s bed, I see the defoliated tree, the deformed baby, the strange Radiator lady with deformities, and note that Lynch started making this in 1971, not long after the Cuban missile crisis. The film has an obsession about containers — the missing pot of the defoliated tree, the mailboxes, the box that Henry opens from the post. And also the brain being reduced to the white noise of eraser shavings as a sort of annihilation of meaning and intent. And on top of all these storied observations, I see a metaphor of an artist afraid of his work (the baby). Nurturing something that could be ultimately ugly that no one wants to see and destroying or not finishing it at the end (like so many artists before.) I see a meditation on monstrosity, fear and the unexamined life and how seeds of fear, living as one “should,” going through the motions, leads someone to an act of perverse curiosity and destruction — which is the ultimate absurdity. And finally, I see Lynch’s production company name, Absurda, and Beckett’s defoliated tree, all as a sort of grand joke that dreams have no meaning, but trying to interpret them gives us a sense of purpose and significance in a vast world where we are ultimately an insignificant speck. Is it a comforting time with Lynch? No… but I do learn a lot about myself and then enjoy listening to other reflections. I feel as though this piece makes me more human and connected to what I find beautiful in the world — people and nature, and the fragility of these gifts. So thanks for hitting this on your detour! I came for this, and now I want to stay and learn more about high grossing films.