Anxiety, parenthood and the ‘Eraserhead’ mutant baby
Quivering behind the red curtain of David Lynch’s curious filmography, which occupies the dreamscape between fantasy and reality, is his most venerable creation, a baby of nightmarish origin who gave the filmmaker the weight his independent debut needed. The key point of contention in Eraserhead, the nameless child who straddles the identity of human and extraterrestrial, demonstrates Lynch’s unwavering dedication to his idiosyncratic vision of reality.
While the term ‘unprecedented in movie history’ seems to be wheeled out every year to describe a rather pedestrian film, at the time of Eraserhead’s release in 1977, it was an undisputed truth that the world of cinema had just witnessed something truly baffling. Shot in bleak monochrome, Lynch’s curiosity told the story of a young man trying to navigate a purgatory-like reality where anxiety riddled every inch of existence.
Coming across a beautiful woman living across from his apartment, the man, Henry, played by Lynch regular Jack Nance, eventually ends up sleeping with the woman and birthing a child, a swaddled bundle of fleshy matter that better resembles a grown-up spermatozoa. Nothing like the cute TikTok-worthy tots of reality, the child is the kind of creature you would expect from a David Cronenberg body horror, refusing any food it is offered while cackling with a cry that flitters between laughter and genuine fear.
Driven mad by the squeals of her newborn, Mary leaves Henry in charge of the baby, with the latter forcing the father, who never wanted offspring, into an existential nightmare. What is this child? How must it be kept alive? Such questions plague not only Henry but also every new father across the globe, with the baby itself representing the fear and anxiety wrapped up in childbirth.
This sentiment certainly helps to manifest thanks to the appearance of the child, a bulbous form of sweat that looks like an enlarged testicle that has been gifted eyes and a pinhole for a mouth. Notoriously tight-lipped about the actual materials used to make the child, those close to Lynch suggest that the creature was made from the fetus of a rabbit or calf, with the director himself admitting that the idea came from his own anxiety around fatherhood.
“Eraserhead is my most spiritual film,” he told Bafta back in 2007, “But no one has ever gotten that from it. The way it happened was that I had these feelings, but I didn’t know what it really was about for me”. Tapping into the shadowed, subconscious human fears of parenthood and responsibility, the mutant baby is a grotesque manifestation of all these spiritual anxieties.
Such is exacerbated by the fact that Henry is a reluctant father and is repulsed and terrified by the child he has helped create. Lynch represents the child just as Henry’s subconscious envisages it, as a horrific, puzzling nuisance that inspires nothing but regret and guilt, forcing the protagonist into a nightmarish spiral of anxiety that sees his offspring haunt him as if a God-like bogeyman.
Something of a tragedy, dressed up as a trippy drama for film students to salivate over, Lynch’s movie ends with Henry killing his child, with the assault of terror that came with its existence being too much to bear. Still, depending on how you view the polysemous ending, it could be seen that Henry triumphs over his anxieties, kills his source of fear and elevates his consciousness to a new heavenly reality.
Either way, whether Henry is living in a waking nightmare or, indeed, a hellish reality, the fear of grotesque parenthood has passed for now.
