This Time on Greenscreening

Eraserhead (1977) directed by David Lynch

Synopsis:

David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, evocative sound design, and unforgettably enigmatic performance by Jack Nance, this visionary nocturnal odyssey continues to haunt American cinema like no other film. - Criterion

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Why Eraserhead?

"I felt Eraserhead, I didn’t think it." - David Lynch

In this series, we’ve frequently discussed the evolution of cinema-going. Every American generation has invented a new way of seeing movies, from the early days of sweaty screenings in the back rooms of storefronts, to the grand movie palaces of Hollywood’s Golden Age, to the gimmicks theater owners tried during the 1950s industry malaise (3D, roadshow exhibitions, drive-in movies, double-features).

In the late 1960s and 1970s, a handful of theaters began showing specialized programming for late-night audiences. These were unconventional, alternative films that defied genre, and became synonymous with their time-slot: midnight movies.

Eraserhead was one of the quintessential midnight movies, and - along with a few similar films - marked the birth of modern moviegoing.

Midnight Movies

In the late 1960s, the counterculture embraced alternative expression in art, theatre, music, and cinema. In cinema, this meant embracing films that pushed the envelope - sometimes in terms of narrative convention and symbolism, and other times in terms of what was acceptable to show in a movie. After all, the Production Code Administration was gone, and the worst the MPAA's rating system could do was give a film an X rating.

The programming of midnight movies was characterized by an eclectic mix of films, including cult classics, experimental works, foreign films, exploitation films, and unconventional narratives. These screenings provided an opportunity for audiences to engage with films that were outside the mainstream and offered a communal and participatory experience. Some of these were X-rated films, but some weren't rated at all.

Most theaters rejected showing these kinds of films at all; a small subset of independent theaters embraced the weird crowd that would show up at midnight and specifically seek out these kinds of experiences.

Let's pause briefly to define the term, "cult classic." The best definition I've heard is a film that's only considered a classic by a small but very devoted audience, who love the film so strongly that they tell everyone they know about the film. Most other people (and critics) don't share the cult's love for the film, and in fact find these devoted fans a bit weird for their near-obsession with the film.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is probably the most widely known midnight movie and cult classic. Its combination of camp, music, audience participation, and midnight screenings turned it into a cult sensation, with fans dressing up as characters, reciting lines, and engaging in interactive rituals during screenings. But it was far from the first or the last midnight movie.

It’s a matter of dispute where the first true midnight movie was screened. Historians tend to put the date in 1969, in either San Francisco or New York City. In San Francisco, two art school grads sold out a midnight screening of their thesis film, and were then hired to program a series of avant-garde films that would play at midnight. In New York, the Elgin Theatre premiered a short film by experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger at midnight, around the same time as the San Francisco program.

Ben Barenholtz, manager of the Elgin Theatre in New York, is often called the father of the midnight movie.

Barenholtz began playing Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid Western El Topo (1970) exclusively at midnight. The film is a surrealist tale of a gunslinger (played by Jodorowsky) as he searches for enlightenment and navigates a strange landscape. It’s full of bizarre imagery, Christian (and other religious symbolism), and shocking violence; many of the symbols are inscrutable, as is the overall plot. Barenholtz had seen the film at an art museum and was intrigued.

El Topo sold out every night for months, with many audience members returning to see the film multiple times, sometimes dozens of times. Among its chief supporters was John Lennon, who helped the film get wider distribution, and the film began screening at midnight in cities across the country. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his essay on the film, the fact that El Topo’s symbols didn’t really add up to a cohesive meaning was part of the whole point; this was a film to be experienced and overwhelmed by, and potentially experienced under the influence.

The next major midnight movie was John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972). The film centers on the criminal Babs Johnson, who has been labeled “the world’s filthiest person” by a tabloid. Rival criminals are jealous of Babs’ moniker, and travel to challenge her for the title. Hijinks ensue.

The Elgin Theatre championed the film and began showing it at midnight. The film quickly earned a reputation. In fact, the film’s trailer consisted of interviews with audiences’ reactions as they left screenings. Midnight screenings frequently sold out, and audiences began memorizing and reciting some of the film’s dialogue.

The heyday of midnight movies waned in the 1980s, their cultural legacy endures. The concept of late-night screenings for cult films remains. Fans still come out in throngs for revivals of the classics - in particular Rocky Horror Picture Show. And occasionally, there are new entrants to the midnight movie canon, like The Room (2003, Tommy Wiseau), which fans come to laugh at for its awful acting and low production values.

David Lynch

Lynch was born in 1946 and grew up between Boise, Idaho and Arlington, Virginia. Small town 1950s Americana would become a lifelong fascination he would explore in his films, particularly the mix between wholesomeness and a dark underbelly that he occasionally witnessed as a young man while getting into trouble with his friends.

Lynch’s artistic career began as a painter, drifting in and out of art schools on the east coast during the 1960s. He was a terrible student, as he wasn’t really into the structure of classes. All he wanted to do was paint. He was obsessed with painting, often working late into the night and sleeping during the day. And he had tremendous promise as an artist, as he won awards in student competitions.

While in school, he began developing his artistic voice, which verged towards the surreal, the dark and darkly humorous, and often the grotesque.

Then one day in 1967, while working on a painting, he felt the wind and the light on his painting gave the momentary illusion that it was moving. The idea was there - a moving painting. He knew nothing about making films, but had the vision and the drive to jump right in.

His first foray into filmmaking was animation, through a visual art piece called Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). The film loops six times over the same sequence of images, as six human figures’ stomachs fill with liquid that rises up to their heads, causing them to vomit. The soundtrack is a siren wailing.

Lynch was then commissioned to make a few art installations for wealthy friends. Late in 1967, he quit the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to pursue filmmaking full time.

He made a second short film, the four-minute The Alphabet, which he described as “a nightmare about the fear connected with learning” and concerned a sleeping woman (played by Lynch’s wife) anxiously reciting the alphabet in her sleep, interspersed with animations and an innovative collage-like soundtrack. It was on this film that Lynch discovered one of his trademark techniques: distorted sound effects. Lynch had bought a cheap sound recorder, only to discover that it was broken, warping all of his recorded sound effects. But he loved the effect and felt it fit perfectly with the film’s dreamlike atmosphere.

Lynch used The Alphabet, along with a script for a thirty-minute short, The Grandmother, to apply for a grant from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The grant money helped Lynch and his wife transform the third floor of their house into a film set and dive head-first into making this more ambitious film. He basically did everything on the film himself, from writing the film to directing it, but also art direction, sound design, and cinematography. He was learning to be an auteur by doing literally everything and obsessing over every detail. He spent over 60 days, working nine hour days, just to create sound effects for the film. All-in, it took almost two years to complete the film.

AFI was so impressed with The Grandmother that they invited Lynch to become a fellow in 1970. So Lynch packed up and moved to LA and tried to figure out what to make next.

AFI was on an 18-acre, 55-room residence in Beverly Hills, formerly owned by an oil baron. The Institute was dedicated to mentoring and cultivating young filmmakers. Lynch was part of the first class of fellows, which included future legendary filmmakers Terrence Malick and Paul Schrader. Their curriculum was loose - the filmmakers mostly spent their days watching and discussing films and developing projects.

Lynch struggled for a year to figure out what he wanted to make. He workshopped a script based on a painting he had previously made, but he wasn’t all that excited about it. He was getting excited about a new idea, which became Eraserhead.

Eraserhead

Lynch’s biographer summarizes the film in this way: “Living in a dismal, post-industrial dystopia, a young man named Henry Spencer meets a girl named Mary, who becomes pregnant. Henry is gripped with anxiety at the arrival of their deformed infant and longs for release from the horror he feels... In a sense, it’s a story about grace.”

Lynch produced a script that ran just 21 pages long (the typical script is one page per minute of screentime) and focused mainly on describing the film’s mood.

AFI granted Lynch ten thousand dollars to make Eraserhead, thinking it was a short film rather than a feature.

Lynch used his typical at-home, do-it-yourself approach to filmmaking when he made Eraserhead. He commandeered the old servants’ quarters, garages, stables, and a few other buildings and turned them into his studio. AFI basically gave him funding, access to the equipment and facilities, and left him alone to make his film.

He proceeded to take the next five years to make Eraserhead.

Part of this had to do with his painstaking process. Lynch had a talented crew supporting him, but he didn’t know how films were typically made. He had always done everything himself, so that’s how he launched into Eraserhead.

“I couldn’t believe how long everything took that first night. And the reason it took so long was because David had to do everything himself - really, he did everything. The light fixtures had to be just so; he made the chickens for the dinner - he had to touch everything on the set. I remember thinking, Oh my God, this kid is never going to make it; he doesn’t understand that you can’t take this long in this business. I felt bad for him that he didn’t know this.” - Charlotte Stewart

Much of the crew came and went over the years, needing to find steadier work.

Lynch himself had to put the film on hiatus starting in spring 1973, about a year into production. He worked odd jobs to make money, even at one point delivering newspapers, and poured his earnings straight into making more of the film. He was obsessed, and the film consumed his life.

Part of the way through making the film, Lynch experienced a spiritual awakening. He had been seeking for much of his adult life, and discovered transcendental meditation. The effect on Lynch was profound, and he became a lifelong adherent. As he describes it, his anger completely dissipated, and he felt free.

Lynch finished filming in mid-1975, almost four full years after starting production. He spent the rest of the year and much of 1976 cutting the film and adding sound.

Sound is one of the most brilliant aspects of Eraserhead. If Lynch felt Eraserhead rather than thought it, the soundtrack is what we the audience feel most. Lynch and sound editor Alan Splet rescued tons of discarded sound stock from the Warner Bros. lot, and painstakingly restored them for reuse. They layered in sound effects and soundscapes, frequently experimenting with altering the sounds’ reverb and pitch, often achieving a similar effect to Lynch’s broken sound recorder.

Lynch submitted Eraserhead to the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, but was rejected. He screened the film for a test audience at Filmex in LA, and received terrible reviews and poor audience reaction.

Though he was fairly demoralized by rejection and this initial reception, Lynch pressed on. He decided to cut 20 minutes from the film to tighten it to 90 minutes.

Someone who caught the Filmex screening suggested the film to Ben Barenholtz, of midnight movie fame. He approached Lynch about distributing his film. According to Lynch, “he said to me, ‘I’m not going to advertise much, but I guarantee you within two months there will be lines around the block.’ And it came true.”

Eraserhead was the ultimate cult movie. Critics mostly panned the film. Audiences were sharply divided. People couldn't even agree upon what it was about, let alone whether it was good. But the word of mouth from the film was super strong; it was film you simply had to experience.

The film had years-long engagements as a midnight movie at theaters in New York, San Francisco, and LA. John Waters and Stanley Kubrick were among the film’s admirers.

Ultimately, Eraserhead went on to make over $7 million at the box office, and turned David Lynch into a hot commodity.

David Lynch - Auteur

While he kept his edgy sensibilities and unique voice, Lynch gravitated towards mainstream Hollywood almost immediately.

His next film, The Elephant Man (1980), based on the true story of John Merrick, a severely deformed man in Victorian England, was a massive box office success, earning a Best Picture Oscar nomination and a nomination for Lynch as Best Director.

Lynch’s career continued with a series of haunting films and the cult favorite television show Twin Peaks (1990-91). His films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are also masterpieces, and his Palme d’Or winning Wild at Heart (1990) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) are also stellar. While certainly not for everyone - these films delve into dark territory and can be difficult to understand - they’re incredibly well-made, thought-provoking films, beautiful to look at, and impossible to forget.

Throughout his career, Lynch has maintained nearly complete artistic control over his films, from directing to writing and often composing the music.

His body of work defies categorization, as he traverses genres and blurs the lines between reality and the subconscious. Lynch's films are marked by their atmospheric intensity, unconventional narratives, and exploration of the dark recesses of the human psyche. He returns time and again to themes of identity, duality, the nature of evil, and the hidden darkness lurking beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary lives. Lynch's films are often an exploration of the subconscious, delving into the realms of dreams, desires, and the human condition.

Lynch's distinct style is a fusion of surrealism, neo-noir, and elements of horror, often combined with an undercurrent of dark humor. His narratives are enigmatic, deliberately defying linear storytelling and embracing a dreamlike logic that challenges our conventional understanding of reality. This unique approach creates an unsettling and captivating cinematic experience that lingers in our minds long after the credits roll.

Legacy of Eraserhead and Midnight Movies

Eraserhead and midnight movies are essentially the birthplace of modern American independent film. A bit later in the series, we’ll look at some filmmakers who took a similar road as Lynch (and Waters and other midnight movie directors) - producing their work on a small budget outside of mainstream Hollywood, sometimes taking years to do so, and wowing audiences and critics with their singular vision.

Lynch’s progression from DIY filmmaker to Hollywood auteur mirrors the rise of much of the current generation of auteurs. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderberg, and Sam Raimi made their breakthrough films on tiny budgets with a big, bold artistic vision.

This year’s two biggest hits, Barbie (Greta Gerwig) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) were directed by auteurs who got started with micro-budget, DIY films (Gerwig in the mumblecore movement of the late-aughts, and Nolan with his multi-year passion project debut, 1998's Following).

More broadly, midnight movies offer us some insights about moviegoing in the age of streaming, and post-covid theatrical moviegoing.

The last two years have given us several examples of meme moviegoing. In 2022, groups of young men calling themselves “Gentleminions” dressed up in suits to go see Minions: The Rise of Gru, often disrupting screenings with loud cheering and chanting. And in 2023, audiences dressed up in pink over the summer to go see Barbie - the participation in the dress-up was for many viewers an essential part of the experience. And Barbie was best paired with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as the Barbenheimer double-feature, another meme that helped both films dominate the 2023 box office.

And of course Swifties took over cinemas in fall 2023 to sing and dance along to Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. Swift released the film in a limited-time engagement, and the experience was every bit about the ritual, the community, and participation, just like many midnight movies.

Of course, for years studios have worked to make the premiere of their blockbuster films into cultural events, selling advance tickets and often scheduling the first screening at midnight so the most ardent fans could see it literally at the first moment of opening day.

Since many of the markers of cult fandom (ritual viewing, audience participation, dress-up) have made their way to the mainstream (Star Wars, Marvel's MCU, Barbie, Swiftiedom) it's quite possible all fandom is cult fandom.

One idea that I’ve been sitting with this week is that with the movie industry’s shift to streaming, we’re reaching (or may have reached) peak niche programming. Streaming platforms understand individual user preferences in more detail than ever before, and can better segment their audiences, and have a direct, cheap distribution path directly into their users’ homes.

In the bottomless pit of content that is the streaming ecosystem, until the writer’s strike in 2023, studios and particularly Netflix were willing to greenlight just about anything. User retention is one goal, another is virality, and yet another is generating sleeper hits through word of mouth. One benefit is more creators than ever are getting a chance to create, and distinct voices from underrepresented groups have flourished. I’m thinking primarily of television, with creators like Issa Rae (Insecure), Mindy Kaling (Never Have I Ever), and Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs) able to secure development deals that traditionally weren’t available to women or creators of color. This is also the case in cinema, as independent films have more reach than ever before, but is fraught with challenges, which we'll discuss in the coming weeks.

The streaming ecosystem has also flattened the timeline - 20 years on, shows like Friends and Frasier can still draw as much of an audience as Succession of House of the Dragon. Look no further than David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which has continued to find new audiences over 30 years after its release.

And of course, the last film we discussed, Jeanne Dielman, found its cult audience in the age of streaming, and rose to the top of Sight and Sound’s list of the greatest films ever made.

Midnight movies and cult fandom used to involve the audience seeking out alternative content in a specific format and venue. The audience had to do a lot of work. The (utopian and/or dystopian) promise of data-rich streaming platforms is that, given enough time and data, any show or film can find its audience and develop a following. As a viewer, you no longer have to do nearly as much work. The content will find you.

Learn More About Eraserhead and Midnight Movies

Review of El Topo and Great Movies Essay on El Topo by Roger Ebert

Room to Dream by Kristine McKenna and David Lynch. A hybrid biography and memoir that's perfectly Lynchian.

I See Myself: Eraserhead interview with Lynch for the Criterion edition of Eraserhead