Output details

Eraserhead : comprehension, complexity, and the midnight movie.

This chapter explores David Lynch’s narrational strategies in Eraserhead (1977), specifically in terms of their influence upon narrative comprehension and meaning. The chapter examines the complex storytelling devices that Lynch employs to disarray audience expectations, and demonstrates how these devices function against a ground of basically orthodox conventions. The chapter situates Eraserhead not only in the context of Lynch’s oeuvre, but also in relation to other 1970s midnight movies such as El Topo (1971) and Pink Flamingos (1972). While the plots of such films were attenuated in order to foreground various kinds of outrageousness, they were also generally perspicuous, easy to grasp, and broadly coherent. Eraserhead not only delivers a very different kind of assault on the viewer, but also places far greater demands on the viewer’s skills of comprehension. In this respect, it is a typically Lynchian film. It is this demand on comprehension, moreover, that sets Eraserhead apart from the exploitation films that played alongside it on the midnight movie circuit. The chapter incorporates primary empirical research – most explicitly in the form of a first-hand interview with Ben Barenholtz, Eraserhead’s original distributor on the 1970s midnight movie circuit. Though it forms part of an anthology by a cadre of international scholars on the films and artworks of David Lynch – and thereby constitutes a major reference point for Lynch specialists – the chapter has pertinence beyond the realm of Lynch scholarship. It intersects centrally with the domains of cognitive film theory, cultural studies, and cult film studies. The chapter contributes to the areas of film authorship, cognitive film theory, and the historiography of “off-Hollywood” American cinema.