I’d go as far as to say that you haven’t really watched David Lynch unless you’ve done so in the wee hours of the morning, sick as a dog and stoned out of your mind on NyQuil.
That’s what I did the night before my son’s fourth birthday. I was so stuffed up from this nasty virus that’s been going around that I couldn’t breathe out of my nose, which made sleep a noisy and inconsistent affair.
I waved the white flag at 3 a.m., and after taking a bath to ease my aching body, melted into the couch and signed up for a free trial of the Criterion Channel (which, it should be noted, I forgot to cancel and got charged $99 for a week later).
If my sickness was going to keep me up in the middle of the night, the least I could do was get weird with it.
Let me start by saying this: I’m the furthest thing from a film buff. I didn’t grow up watching movies. My parents weren’t anti-movie, per se, it’s just that movies never crossed their minds. “Rescue 911?” Sure. “America’s Most Wanted?” Every week. Fiction, though, was mostly non-existent. It’s kind of a running joke among people who know me: they’ll name some famous movie that supposedly everyone has seen, and I’ll sheepishly admit that I haven’t seen that one, either.
“I didn’t watch movies as a kid,” I’ll say, at which point the person will look at me like I’ve just gut-punched their mother. I did, however, go through a lonesome phase in my mid-20s where I rented Criterion Collection DVDs from the local library with the unstated goal of watching the strangest films I could get my hands on. One of those movies was, inevitably, “Eraserhead,” which is, like, the “Sargeant Pepper” of weird-art cinema, and also the entry point into Lynch’s work for most people. So it was for me.
“Eraserhead” has been lodged in my mind like a bloody half-witnessed car wreck since I first saw it eight-ish years ago. I decided to rewatch it the other afternoon while my son was taking a nap, two days after my late-night NyQuil excursion. I only got 20 minutes into the thing before my son woke up shrieking from his bedroom, demanding to “eat a salad,” even though he’s never eaten a salad in his life.
That brief revisiting of “Eraserhead” was enough to remind me of its utter uncanniness. The details were somehow stranger than I’d remembered: the haunted industrialized setting, the shots held for a few unnerving seconds too long, the weird meatball planet hanging in space during the opening montage, the constant look of soul-deep worry on the main character’s face, the insufferable hissing of the radiator, disjointed dialogue, emotionally vacant actors, and of course the sense of existential horror that pervades each scene like a poison sap.
What struck me more than anything else, though, was the movie’s dense ambiguity: “Eraserhead” is scaffolded with symbols that seemingly mean something (i.e. the meatball planet), yet these symbols are so abstract and arranged in such a baffling manner that they could be interpreted in an almost infinite number of ways, or perhaps no way at all, which might be more to the point. I recall reading somewhere that Lynch’s films aren’t equations to be solved, but dreams to be shared. Trying to understand them is a surefire way to develop an acute headache and/or chronic psychosis. In a 1979 interview, Lynch discussed the subjective nature of “Eraserhead:”
It’s up to whoever’s viewing to make up their own mind about what’s going on…It’s an open-feeling film. Anything goes. If somebody wants to make a political film out of it, they can do that, it’s fine with me. It’s not fair for me to say ‘oh, you didn’t get it,’ because the film is so abstract. But it’s not just a thrown-together abstract. It’s meant to be that way. … It’s not fair for me to say that there’s a definite way it has to be interpreted.
If you’ve ever seen one of Lynch’s films, especially his early ones, you know there’s a yawning gap between what happens on screen and what’s able to be articulated. What about his films makes them hard to describe? They’re often incomprehensible and indelible: incomprehensible because the plots are impenetrably dreamlike, indelible because Lynch, like Kafka before him, is a master of the unconscious, a maestro at creatively manifesting deep-seated urges, so that the viewer is left feeling like what they just watched, whatever it is they just watched, is somehow true, even if articulating the plot is a struggle.
I’m not broaching any new ground in Lynchian criticism here, and please take all of this with a grain of salt. Again, I barely watch movies. I’ve only seen three of his films: “The Grandmother,” “Eraserhead” and “Lost Highway,” which makes me closer to a Lynch incompletist than a Lynch completist. Yet this trio has had such staying power with me that all three feel like they somehow originated within me, which is probably how most Lynch enthusiasts feel about his work. The late director’s style is so uniquely his own, his sense of world-building so convincing, that his movies often pull even non-film-buffs (like me) into their otherworldly vortex. His work is impossible to ignore, and often difficult to forget.
The late David Foster Wallace was a huge Lynch fan. He wrote a novella-length essay about him in his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Wallace, an icon of my college days, has been described as a writer uniquely adept at voicing the unvoiceable, so in many ways he’s the perfect guy to describe Lynch’s indescribability. Wallace defines the adjective “Lynchian,” which entered the cultural lexicon around the time Lynch was gaining mainstream popularity, as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” Wallace goes on to give examples of instances, both real and fictional, which may be considered “Lynchian.” To wit:
Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively – i.e. we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian.
A domestic-type homicide, on the other hand, could fall on various points along the continuum of Lychianism. Some guy killing his wife in and of itself doesn’t have much of a Lynchian tang to it, though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over something like a persistent failure to refill the ice cube tray after taking the last ice cube or an obdurate refusal to buy the particular brand of peanut butter the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having Lynchian elements.
Lynch died last month, at the age of 78, and the Criterion Channel compiled a collection of his interviews and movies into a clickable selection at the top of its home page. So in the wee hours of the morning, with a nose full of snot and a head full of sleep syrup, I dimmed the lights to an appropriate level of eeriness and put on “The Grandmother,” which was described in the synopsis as “a boy plants a seed that grows into a grandmother.”
This seemed plenty Lychnian for 3 a.m. It’s one of his early-career black-and-white joints, very much in the spirit of “Eraserhead,” though it was released seven years prior (1970). The gist of the 34-minute short is this: a lonely boy who for some reason is constantly wearing a suit keeps peeing the bed, which invites the rage of his feral parents, who treat him more like a dog than a child (i.e. rubbing his nose in the pee spot). The boy is depressed and in need of a friend, so he creeps up a set of shadowy stairs to a secret room where he finds a burlap sack labeled SEEDS. He dumps a bunch of dirt on the bed and plants one of these seeds, which grows into an unnervingly large potato-like thing (with coarse hairs sticking out of it, naturally). When the grandmother is “born,” she slides out of this enormous potato like a calf out of its mother cow. This scene alone gives Eraserhead a run for its money in terms of low-budget grotesqueness.
The boy and the grandmother become best friends (or maybe even lovers, considering they kiss on the lips at one point, which is kind of weird, but undeniably on-brand for Lynch) before she eventually dies (or at least I think she dies, because it’s often hard to tell anything with certainty in a Lynchian universe) and the boy is once again forced to endure to the violent whims of his animal-like parents.
All of these scenes are punctuated with incomprehensible animations: people sprouting out of the soil like plants, blood spurting from said people-plants, pits in the ground filling up with white fluid…you know, typical early-era Lynch stuff. The film, like much of the director’s work, isn’t outright horror, but instead horror-adjacent, a darkly surreal cheaply-made thing featuring minimal dialogue, anonymous actors and an indefinable sense of dread. In other words, perfect to watch in the middle of the night while stoned on NyQuil. Being in a warped, groggy headspace added a layer of unreality to a film that’s already thoroughly nightmarish.
So there I was on the couch, cringing as some random grandmother slid onto the floor like a slimy newborn calf (sorry for conjuring that image again). I was eating a plate of chicken nuggets with barbecue sauce, which felt like a semi-Lynchian move on my part. The night was entering that purgatorial period when insomniacs are finally drifting to sleep and early-birds have yet to wake up.
My eyelids were growing sluggish and eventually I fell unconscious, though the line of demarcation wasn’t clear: I was half-here and half-there, suddenly strolling through a dimly-lit meat processing plant, raw chicken breasts and thighs strewn about the concrete floor as an acrid smoke hung in the air. The rusty machinery was flecked with yellow and pinkish-white chicken parts. Pistons were squealing and steaming, pumping for seemingly no reason. Somewhere, a baby was crying, and in that odd dream-like sense of certainty, I knew I had to find this baby or something very bad was going to happen to me.
I walked for what felt like miles in the direction of the crying, but I was on a treadmill, of sorts: my surroundings never changed, the contaminated machines never stopped pumping, the baby’s cries never grew closer. I awoke in a sweat, and through filmy eyes saw the feral father in “The Grandmother” once again rubbing the poor child’s nose in the pee spot. The plate of half-eaten nuggets rested on my stomach, rising and falling subtly with my belly breaths.
I couldn’t make sense of any of this, and perhaps there was no point in trying: better to relegate it to the land of the ineffable, and avoid the acute headache and chronic psychosis that would inevitably develop.
I finally fell into a true sleep around 7 a.m., just as the sun was peeking through our bamboo blinds. I abruptly awoke 13 minutes later to our son shouting “GET ME OUT OF BED!” from his room at the end of a dark hallway (no demands for salad this time). For a transitory moment, our house was black-and-white, and I swore a radiator was squealing somewhere in the kitchen. But no: it was just another day on Earth. There were no meatball planets hanging in space, no grandmothers being grown from seeds. Lynch was dead and I was still sick, but my son was awake and he was four and he wanted to watch “Blues Clues.”
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected].
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