You Love to See It: Eraserhead (Patreon)

The baby in David Lynch’s 1977 nightmarish arthouse feature Eraserhead embodies a complex synthesis of fears and anxieties. With its labored, phlegmy breathing, frail neck, and filmy eyes it invokes the specter of crib death — of the terrifying fragility of infants. Its alien appearance expresses the estrangement of the adults around it from their own emotions, their discomfort with weakness and vulnerability. Its cries, though, are insistently human. Not once in the film is it picked up from where it lies swaddled on the tiny apartment’s table, and only seldom — and then with obvious hesitation — is it touched by its parents with anything resembling affection. Its obvious desire to be held goes from stressful to agonizing as its parents abuse and ignore it.

In a film so emotionally strangled, the baby, unable to disguise or repress its immediate needs, is a powerful presence. Its plaintive crying scores a large percentage of the movie and virtually every element of Eraserhead’s sparse story revolves around it. In one scene its father, Henry, comes close to smothering it while holding his hand over its mouth to conceal the sound of its cries from a neighbor he finds attractive. Its helplessness is an impediment, a handicap to Henry’s understanding of what his life should be like. It is a grotesque reminder of his own fallible humanity, a sharp contrast to his fantasies of antiseptic song and dance numbers in which a dancer tramples miscarried fetuses.

When Henry, driven to morbid self-loathing by his neighbor’s choice to take another lover after their tryst, attacks the baby with a pair of scissors, the gore that spills from its tiny frame is unspeakable. Filth pours over the table. Blood sprays from its mouth like spit-up. It’s as though every emotion bound up unspeaking inside it is loosed at once to boil and gurgle through the dilapidated one-room apartment. Distended appendages whip through the air. The cold, sterile family unit which has slowly fallen to pieces over the course of the film finally implodes, revealing as it does Henry’s total inability to grasp the meaning of human connection.