NationStates Jolt Archive

If anyone has seen Eraserhead, they'll know how complicated an answer can be. What are your opinions?

Sounds lika a crap/good name for a Crap Pop/Rock music group...

Sounds lika a crap/good name for a Crap Pop/Rock music group...
Shh, don't give any shitty indie bands any ideas.

It's probably an allegory for something....I just don't know what.

Eraserhead...sounds sexy.

It is all about a gigantic white chicken. The rest is just filler.

It is all about a gigantic white chicken. The rest is just filler.I alwayys thought it was a skinned sheep.

http://i4.tinypic.com/15ev98p.jpg

According to what I heard Eraserhead was inspired by a bad hair day. All I know is that is one ugly freaking baby "although the doctors aren't even sure if it is a baby." I saw it a few years ago. Wasnt there a girl in a furnace singing about everybody being happy in heaven?

I loved when the grandma was tossing the salad (and for those who have not seen the movie this a clean salad toss and not some sort of perverted activity). One of the family members put the bowl in her lap and put the salad servers in her hands and had this practically cantatonic woman toss the salad. I am not sure what the movie is about but it is definitely the kind of movie that I would want to make if I was a director or actor.:)

Actually, immo, it's not "about" anything particularly complicated. What makes it a classic (in some circles) is the singleminded intensity of its minimalist vision.

Normally, a story is about events and characters. The quality of the story lies in how well the characters are communicated to the audience and embraced (perhaps reluctantly) by them, and the audience's thoughts on how evocative the narrative that unfolds for the characters is.

However, there is a vein of cinema that goes in another direction entirely. The characters are mostly cyphers, or at most clearly delineated variables in a metaphorical equation....an equation attempting to instill a feeling in the viewer directly.

This is a very challenging format to do well. The last popular film along these lines to succeed was Blair Witch Project, or perhaps (arguably) Momento. Another pair of popular movies along this line are the Cube and Lost Highway (another David Lynch film that one, btw "Perfect Drug" is the "Cliff notes" to the entire thematic and atmospheric content)

Eraserhead, in my estimate, fails as art because I don't think most people are engaged deeply (even involuntarily) as in the previously mentioned movies. Though it still has redeeming value to people who _like_ this format. (Who are a tiny minority)

So in this type of movie, the key is the adjectives and the adverbs of the things that happen and the objects they happen to...the patterns between the various elements. It's about atmosphere and connotation.

Eraserhead is a long, slow portrait of alienation and degeneration. It's a drawn out snapshot in molasses of someone losing it. One of the _best_ moments in it, in my opinion, is when the main character is walking home and someone randomly holds up a payphone saying "it's for you"...it captures that acid trip detachment from reality that most people would think madness would be about.

It has no point, no endorsements, except to create the sensation and slowly strengthen it.

I count the movie less than optimum because it is not very engaging. Lost Highway was far superior immo because it pulled at even the less artsy type of viewer. Blair Witch Project was a runaway hit because it _dragged_ the viewer in to the building feelings of fear, futility and tension. (My best friend said up in Prince George where he saw it first, he was struck that the audience walked out in near total silence, "and this is a town of rednecks and mill hands, not the sort of environment that encourages contemplation of anything".) I still remember the desolate bleakness of the ending scene as they meet their fate...fabulous!

Eraserhead is art made for art critics mostly. I happened to like it, but not as much as other examples of this style.