“Eraserhead” is a film about total alienation. Harry Spencer wanders through a haunting industrial cityscape, subjected to constant groaning, mewling; the sound of metal twisting and shrieking. He is charged with taking care of his child, a grotesque and deformed creature that cries horrifically and emits pus. And his dreams are no respite: a moon cheeked girl sings “In Heaven” with no end while meter long sperm assault her. To a large degree “Eraserhead” defies interpretation; its symbology is non-traditional, and, I believe, intentionally convoluted. But its mood is clear, evocative, and unmissable: Harry Spencer is suffocating in a modern world.

Most instrumental in conveying this emotion is the cinematography and set design. “Eraserhead” is shot on (gorgeous!) high contrast black and white film, but, as opposed to “The Last Picture Show” or “Hester Street”, where this technique is used to evoke nostalgia and the past, in “Eraserhead” it instead serves to create a nightmarish, claustrophobic atmosphere. As Spencer walks past decaying buildings with their windows smashed the camera observes him from a distance, his body small and dark against large concrete expanses, we get a sense of how small and powerless he is. These buildings, suggestive of industrial zones and factories, gesture to a world where machines have outstripped human production and men have become separated from their labor. The shot composition makes this literal in other ways, too; at one point, the Beautiful Girl across the Hall backs Spencer into a corner, kissing his neck, and he turns his head to the side and we see his fearful face, and his shadow cast long against the wall, and we know he is trapped.

“Eraserhead”’s score and sound design also contribute to the dread and unease of the film. Director David Lynch worked with audio engineer Alan Splet to create a highly dissonant and mechanical score- although to call it a score is perhaps disingenuous, because it’s more a series of sounds: metal, whooshes, hums, cries, all suggestive of the industrial and urban hellscape Spencer travels through. ‘In Heaven’, the song the moon cheeked girl sings, was written by Lynch himself, and is appropriately disconcerting and eerie. (Sidebar: my favorite Lynch song is ‘Ghost of Love’ from “Inland Empire”, which is not a movie I otherwise enjoy.) The soundtrack here plays second fiddle (ha!) to the visual aspect, reinforcing and deepening its themes, but it does not create the feeling of this film whole sale.

“Eraserhead”’s plot and symbolism are oblique and non-traditional, its symbolism beyond the typical. The film is genuinely surreal, in the original, dada-adjacent artistic sense. We see Harry Spencer entrusted with caring for his sperm-like, pus-oozing, skin-crawling mutant baby, and he is just as repulsed by it as we are. (Critic David J. Skal writes the film “depict[s] human reproduction as a desolate freak show, an occupation fit only for the damned”; consider its horrific outcome here, and later the flying sperm that assault the Girl in the Radiator.) Spencer seems uncomfortable with the responsibility of parenthood, particularly in the absence of a maternal figure, and this lends to my interpretation that he is a man out of time: I read “Eraserhead” as the story of a conservative male figure struggling to adjust to the present, a world where his work is just one step of many, where household labor cannot be abstracted away to his girlfriend and he must perform domestic labor, a world where decay and decline are omnipresent and he is tiny and powerless against it; a world so foul and decrepit that dreams are no respite from its horrors but in fact an extension of them. Just as patriarchal, conservative men of the 1970’s, post-Vietnam, the sexual revolution, industrialization, and the civil rights movement felt unmoored in a world no longer totally oriented around them, Harry Spencer too is adrift, motivated seemingly only by sexual desire and avoidance of disgust. But I believe “Eraserhead” is a not a film designed to be dissected, analyzed, turned inside out. That is not to say we should not think about it critically- only that doing so is fruitless, and that it’s better to simply turn the lights out, watch it, and let it wash over you.