don't let me be understood
An abridged and cursory account of my David Lynch experience.
I finally watched Eraserhead.
Back in the late 1990s I got interested in Film. What a refreshing discovery that you could take a college Film class and write essays on Films, which meant watching Films, often in the middle of the day, perhaps while smoking pot, or you watched the Film and then smoked pot and played pool while drinking $.25 pitchers of Pabst Blue Ribbon and talking Intellectually and Artistically about said Film in context with other Films.
So Dreamy.
In Boone, North Carolina there was a music and video store called Fat Cats (shuttered in early 2017) that was, for many of us, a response to Blockbuster (remember those?). Fat Cats was the missing piece for those of us seeking access to foreign ideas not easily found in small towns or the South at large.
My fellow movie fanatics were also my classmates in the photography department, where we were earning degrees in that field, so we were well steeped in the visual. I think we all loved David Lynch’s work, for me especially, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. were top picks. Though I remember seeing The Elephant Man as a kid, I’m sure by accident, and unaware of what any of it meant—directors and artistic vision or even acting and storytelling. Despite that early 80s television release, with legends Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, being the most mainstream of Lynch’s work, I was hooked on the black and white drama and the strangeness of it, the outside the norm of the tale.
Yet somehow, in my college days of devouring every art and independent film I could get my hands on, I never watched Eraserhead. But as I was perusing the Kanopy app1 on my smart TV last week last week, I saw they’d created a section dedicated to Lynch, who recently passed, and this was the first one listed. So I went for it. And man, it was weird and a little gross and absolutely delightfully absurd.
The next day I texted one of those old college buddies.
“I finally watched Eraserhead last night and now I know I’ll never understand David Lynch.”
My friend responded that he’s seen the film a few times over the years. “My take away was he just had to get this stuff out of his head I guess.”
As a writer who often wonders if what I’m writing is even anything or if it’s too “off track” from what people want (WHAT DO THE PEOPLE WANT?!) I get that. If it’s in there, it’s gotta come out.
Eraserhead was shot in black and white and released in 1978. It’s about a young couple who gets pregnant out of wedlock, they get married, and then the baby turns out to be something like an alien spawn with a slimy turtle head and unformed body that stays wrapped in gauze. It is grotesque. As is the oozing chicken dinner our main character, Henry, cuts into the same night he finds out he’s an accidental father. Maybe because I work in metaphors, the effects and details sorta feel like a string of metaphors stretched like Silly Putty until the original shape of the thing is no longer visible, thin strings hanging loosely and threatening to attach to anything it touches. The moving images leave a trace.
It’s also funny.
The best humor often dances with absurdity. When the brain can’t comprehend what’s in front of it, fear or laughter are our natural reactions. And I’ve written enough jokes for the stage and for reading to know that a simple flip of the expected into the unexpected can be gold. Or grotesque.
Or I just have a different sense for the haha than most people because I’m not sure I’m supposed to laugh at Eraserhead, like I’m not sure I was supposed to laugh at Lady Bird when Saoirse Ronan complains something to the effect of, Didn’t your mother ever just let your room be messy? and Laurie Metcalf delivers the deliciously deadpan line, My mother was a raging alcoholic. I LOL’d and no one else in the theater chuckled. Or maybe I’m just loud. Like David Lynch’s movies, there are so many unknowns.
Anyway, I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the scenes in Eraserhead.
When Mary says, “If it even IS a baby!” Which turns out to the be the aforementioned alien spawn like creature with slimy turtle head that her mother argues is “premature” and still recovering in the hospital. How is that not a metaphor for an unwanted child born to ill-prepared people? Or just new parenting in general?? (I can only guess, never had any myself.)
But my favorite haha scene is when Mary’s trying to free the suitcase from under the bed after a breakdown from sleepless nights, and announces she’s going back to her parents.
She’s crouched at the foot of the iron bed frame, and you’re not sure at first what she’s doing. There’s this image that she’s behind bars, one hand on the frame, her face peering through, and she’s banging it, pulling on the bars. It lasts a few seconds, maybe thirty, which is a long time in a movie. It’s long enough that it becomes funny. Henry is staring at her from the bed. Neither of them are speaking. Then we see that she was trying to yank a suit case out from under the bed, that’s where the banging was coming from. I LOL’d.
For a few days after watching the movie I thought, this is how I find out I’m not that deep after all.
And this felt like a tremendous relief. Maybe I can just be simple. Maybe it’s a gift that I’m too dense to understand the work of one of the most respected filmmakers of all time.
Then I read a brief article in Nautilus2 about how we’re not supposed to understand Lynch’s films because he trades in the absurd, and the absurd is not to be understood. That’s why it’s absurd. It breaks cognizant patterns with our sense-making minds and, in a way, breaks us.
Or breaks us into laughter.
No doubt it has something to do with where I am in life—very late 40’s, definitely peri-menopausal, definitely tired of existing for others, definitely done with fitting in to get along—but appreciating that I can not truly understand Lynch’s work hits on another notion I’ve been pondering behind the curtains.
I will never truly be understood.
Is this what we really mean when we say we want to be seen and heard? Or can it be enough to simply be witnessed? Some of us want to also be validated, justified, agreed with…that’s the ego at work in one of its more insecure states. But how many of us also want to feel understood? Does that have to be requisite for being seen and heard? Or can we still change perspectives and realities without being understood? In art, in personal relations, in politics. Do we need society to understand what it feels like to be a woman before we can be treated with complete equality? Or do we just need to be heard and seen, and then trust that we are deserving of equality?
Yes, I just diverted into a thought alley, but that’s what good art does. It diverts your mind into more expanded ways of seeing and thinking about the world.
And so—Are we wasting our energy seeking understanding? What really is the worth of being understood? If that’s even possible?
Maybe to believe you can ever truly be understood is to believe in a myth, right up there with the myth of perfection. And that some Jew boy carpenter has a virgin mommy and later arose from 3-days dead. If millions of humans can accept that story with no solid proof (only a belief) and live full lives, surely we can let go of being understood.
David Lynch did.
Kanopy is a film streaming app available through some public libraries and universities where you can access thousands of movies for free with your library card.
“David Lynch Opens a Portal to Our Minds”, Steven J. Heine, Nautilus, January 27, 2025