Lynchian style refuses any certifiable interpretations, as do the films of the early Surrealists, seeking instead to create art that subverts reality.
When one thinks of David Lynch’s signature eponymous style, several words come to mind: sublime, dreamlike, ambiguous, uncanny, existential, and of course, surreal. Surrealism is deeply entrenched within Lynchian filmmaking, as the director often depicts subconscious desires, bizarre visual motifs, and an incoherent composition of plot and thematic concepts. Surrealist narratives are inherently unnerving and illogical, often appearing as an abstract puzzle one must carefully piece together. It is reality deconstructed and reconstructed without any perceivable rhyme or reason.
At Lynch’s Master Class at the Cinématheque Français in October 2010, he described his experience with Surrealists: “I love the way they would go for meaning in random acts. And I loved the way they would almost confine the opposites. And make the human mind and make them work together.”
David Lynch’s entire filmography subverts conventional Hollywood filmmaking, as he rejects the restrictions imposed by modern styles and instead embeds his art with experimental sensibilities. Personal anxieties are illustrated through psychological and body horror elements, often accompanied by hallucinatory sequences and a dissident soundtrack. Despite these recurring elements, the Lynchian style often escapes a true definition, with Lynch himself being reluctant to either confirm or reject theoretical interpretations. The ambiguity of Lynch’s filmography allows his audience to create their own meanings, or to piece their own puzzle together without any referential images. While Lynch remains a distinct director in the U.S, even his style has been influenced by other great directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Werner Herzog. But when one looks at Lynch’s debut film, Eraserhead, it quickly becomes apparent that early European silent films greatly inspired its visual and thematic elements.
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Surrealist master Salvador Dalí extended his artistic style into the film medium, collaborating with filmmakers to create an early experimental cinematic movement. As filmmaking techniques and conventions began to develop in the 1920s, the Parisian Surrealist Group emerged within the Silent film era. The Parisian Surrealist Group elaborated on the ongoing Surrealist art movement, creating contradictory and psychological works whose visual elements explored the subconscious mind and escaped the very boundaries of reality. By taking advantage of new technological advances, these Surrealists could now create longer, more complex narratives that still rejected linearity and clear-cut interpretations. Paris served as the obvious birthplace of this movement, as the cultural and artistic capital of the world, with access to cheap film equipment, film financing, and a built-in audience of interested artists and other creative personnel. Important figures of the Parisian Surrealist Group include René Clair, a pioneer of fantastical comedies, Germain Duluc, an early feminist filmmaker, Man Ray, a Dadaist and surrealist artist across many mediums and Luis Buñuel, Dalí’s collaborator and one of the most influential filmmakers in cinema history.
Despite being released 45 years ago, Eraserhead continues to confound audiences as they search for a concrete meaning amid ambiguous and often disturbing imagery. Backdropped by a desolate industrial city, Eraserhead revolves around an intimate family affair as Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is left to care for his grotesque infant after his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart), abandons them both. Spencer struggles with his conflicted feelings towards his deformed child and his sexual desire for the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts), remaining a passive character despite the tumultuous events within his home. Similarly to early silent films, Eraserhead is shot entirely in black and white and contains relatively little dialogue, with Lynch relying on shock-inducing visuals, an eerie soundtrack, and expressionist acting to portray his narrative.
The film escapes linear storytelling and often switches between juxtapositional and nonsensical imagery, interrupting Spencer’s sexual encounter with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall with a vision of his own head falling off as the Child's head appears on the stump of his body. This nonlinearity is present in many films of the Parisian Surrealist Group, such as Man Ray’s L'Étoile de Mer (1928). In Ray’s film, blurred imagery of shadowed women contrasts decrepit streets, while the film intermittently focuses on a starfish as a specimen of utmost intrigue. The film often feels more like a foray into a scientific investigation than a strictly cinematic experience, illustrating the Surrealist's contrasting approach to filmmaking.
Body horror elements reappear throughout Eraserhead, as Lynch fixates on the grotesque as an expression of fatherhood anxieties and parental disconnect. The Child remains one of cinema’s most disturbing images, as it resembles a skinless animal or even a monstrous E.T. covered in sores with gaping holes for eyes. The Child inspires revulsion within the film and in audiences. As the film climaxes, Spencer unravels the Child’s bandages and finds its organs hanging out, which he then stabs with scissors as it gasps out in pain. This type of horrific imagery is prevalent in Rene Clair’s Entr'acte (1922) and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), each of which focuses on spine-tingling close-ups and both literal and metaphorical mutilations. In the former film, matches aline themselves on a man’s head and catch fire, causing him to scratch as if it was a mere nuisance, while balloon heads with humanlike faces deflate and inflate on top of decaying dolls. In the latter film, Buñuel repeatedly cuts to close-ups of razors, slicing into a man’s skin, coming too close for comfort to a woman’s eye, and cutting out the vitreous of an animal.
Hallucinatory erotic fixations are a frequent convention in Lynch’s films, with Eraserhead’s Spencer being a deeply sexually conflicted character. Sex is embedded within Eraserhead, as it begins with the image of a conception (possibly the Child’s) overlayed with Spencer’s horrified expression, establishing both his fascination and fear of sex. Spencer primarily fixates on the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall as a form of escapism from his dull relationship with Mary X and the constant, unbearable screams of his child. An ambiguous sexual encounter between the two provides a momentary respite but evidently leaves him with guilt, as the scene shifts to the image of his head being replaced with the Child’s, punctured by agonized screams. Another film of the Parisian Surrealist Group, German Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), revolves around a priest’s erotic hallucinations as he lusts for the wife of a general. As a priest’s sexuality is an inherently taboo subject matter, Duluc portrays his reluctant desire and eventual unraveling (much like Spencer’s) in a rather disturbing manner, ripping off the bodice of the woman with barely contained shock and revulsion. As such, sex remains an element of body horror in its own right with close-ups of nude bodies appearing as uncanny as any mutilation.
David Lynch’s Eraserhead remains a stunning developing of Surrealist cinema, introducing audiences to haunting and complex cinematography. The early Silent era pioneers of the Parisian Surrealist Group have steadily influenced his work, with Eraserhead both an ode to their bizarre, experimental work and a distinct film in its own right. Lynchian style refuses any certifiable interpretations, as do the films of the early Surrealists, seeking instead to create art that subverts the very fabric of reality.
Violetta Katsaris a Sydney-based TV/Film Feature at Collider. She is a big fan of Feminist sci-fi/horror films and is always on the lookout for any new recommendations. She could go on for days about the thematic connections between Perfect Blue and Black Swan.
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