The only honest rating one can give a movie like this is a five. It is filled with striking and disturbing imagery, it is slow-moving, and its score is minimalist. For these reasons you will either love it or hate it. It's a movie that doesn't fit into any other genres or rating systems. It is psychological to its core and symbolic in its blood.
Many things have been said about Eraserhead, but it is a monster of a different breed and to truly begin to develop an opinion on the film, one must attempt to understand it.
I'm going to start out by saying that Eraserhead is not as complicated as people make it out to be. Eraserhead is the autobiographical account of the anxiety experienced by a young man who is struggling with his new life as a a father and provider in a relationship which has taken an unexpected turn. Everything about the film is exaggerated and reeks of fear and dissatisfaction. From the start we feel pulled along by the man in the planet as he pulls Henry's life force out of him (seen as a sperm-like worm). Henry feels a terrifying lack of control as we can clearly see, which only magnifies his sense of isolation at the absence of his lover Mary.
We sense Henry's growing anxiety as he meets Mary's family. What once a pleasant clandestine liaison between he and Mary has been interrupted by her insistence on meeting the family. Henry senses something is amiss and his feelings grow more intense as he is exposed to the family's eccentricities. He asked by Mary's father to carve the chicken, a duty reserved typically for the patriarch of a family, and hallucinates a menstruating chicken, a manifestation of his suspicion, which is confirmed in the following scene: Mary is pregnant.
Soon it is not simply Mary's family that is encroaching on his personal space, but also Mary herself and their newborn child. We sense that Mary and Henry have become far more distant, but also that Henry feels no personal connection to his unplanned child. The child remains a worm-like fetal abomination. Despite its infant-like qualities, Henry sees it as nothing more than a personified sperm and does his best to repress the remainder of his own worm-like sperm.
He fantasizes constantly about life beyond his tiny apartment. He is plagued by the thought of sexual responsibility and through the voices in the radiator he imagines a paradise where his sexual actions have no consequences. It may not be perfect, but to him it means freedom. A world where women swallow.
Mary, meanwhile feels overwhelmed at Henry's lack of interest in anything but sex and her new motherly responsibilities. She leaves him in a fit of rage, yet we can see her desperately wishing for Henry to reach out for her as she prolongs her goodbye. Henry is left to care his child, which he feels grossly unprepared for. As the child grows ill he again looks for a way out of his predicament.
This way comes in the form of the attractive neighbor, whom Henry uses to escape his responsibilities. He dreams of abandoning his child for a life of freedom, but he knows that inside he was once a child too and imagines what kind of a person he would have been had his father ran out on him. He sees himself as a sperm-like child with an inability to care for himself, just as his child requires his care.
This is the first time Henry feels a real connection with his child. He realizes that in order to keep his child healthy and safe he has sacrifice himself and his desires. This culminates in an elaborate scene where Henry hallucinates his own head falling off and bleeding, while a young boy takes it a factory where it is turned into erasers. The eraser dust of his dreams and desires is blown away by the hand of the factory owner. An elaborate illustration of the plight faced by breadwinner who works to feed his family.
Next, Henry is faced with a hard task. He has to let go of his fear of fatherhood and embrace his responsibilities. In this final scene Henry destroys his preconceived notions about his child, through a symbolic murder of the worm-like creature. He realizes that only he has control of his actions and through his conquering of his fears destroys the man in the planet. Having accepted his responsibilities and conquered his fears he moves into the light of existentialism.
It's a story about sacrifice, fear, responsibility, and single-parenthood. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but it does a remarkable job of expressing the anxiety that a new parent feels.
4 out of 7 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
Tell Your Friends