Product Description

Is it a nightmare or an actual view of a post-apocalyptic world? Set in an industrial town in which giant machines are constantly working, spewing smoke, and making noise that is inescapable, Henry Spencer lives in a building that, like all the others, appears to be abandoned. The lights flicker on and off, he has bowls of water in his dresser drawers, and for his only diversion he watches and listens to the Lady in the Radiator sing about finding happiness in heaven. Henry has a girlfriend, Mary X, who has frequent spastic fits. Mary gives birth to Henry's child, a frightening looking mutant, which leads to the injection of all sorts of sexual imagery into the depressive and chaotic mix. *** IMPORTED FROM SOUTH KOREA *** ORIGINAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE *** OPTIONAL KOREAN SUBTITLE ***

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40851 in DVD
• Formats: NTSC, Black & White, Subtitled, Import
• Subtitled in: Korean
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Customer Reviews

Remarkable and shocking - but you can't buy it here**
You could buy a bad copy of this film from one of the external vendors. But to get a good copy of Eraserhead, you have to go to DavidLynch.com, where the director sells a remarkably pristine transfer dvd in an unconventional but cool package. It is a really nice disc to own, and well worth making the extra effort to buy it on his site. I got mine in a week or so, and it looks very good (they put a lot of work into getting the details just right) and has some nice extras. Apart from wanting to get the transfer right, I think another reason Lynch decided to do it himself was that he dislikes features on dvds that allow you to skip around from chapter to chapter. If you are going to see his movie, he wants you to see it in order. I do think that is his prerogative as an artist. I can't even get my disc to fast forward any faster than the lowest speed, and I believe that is by design, for much the same reason.

** Update: Since I wrote this it turns out that the director's approved dvd of this film has appeared for sale here on Amazon. It is the one that has "2000" on its cover. The actual dvd appears to be identical with the copy I purchased from David Lynch's website, with the difference that you get it in a normal dvd case and not the bizarre oversized case that I have.

A star for every thousand nightmares
"Eraserhead" is the bizarre story of a man named Henry who fathers a prematurely born child that just won't stop crying. Crying, and crying, crying.
The movie is shot in grainy black and white, and is constanly filled with sound. Crammed with sound: crying, subway cars rushing, pipes clanking, weird organ music playing, machines humming, and the white noise roar of silence, the loudest sound of all, coursing through all of it.
The story unfolds like a dream--and probably actually includes the dreams of the main character as well. Events transpire associatively--as in dream--going from one thing to the next as a conversation hops from something to something else that one of its speakers was just reminded of. It doesn't progress at all like a typical narrative, though the darkness and the confusion and the noise and the stress and the awkwardness of it all could classify this movie as a horror film, though it's much, much more.
Its images are stark, and its dialogue almost nonexistent. When there is dialogue, it's often funny (although creepy): "Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse?"
A terrific organ music soundtrack underscores much of the movie, and its images, although black and white, will blaze themselves into your brain.
When my younger brother was in high school, he got obsessed with this film. He watched it literally hundreds of times, painted his room gray, put up "Eraserhead" posters, wore a black "Eraserhead" T-shirt, stopped bathing, and got weirder and weirder by the day. He's never quite recovered from it.
This is definitely David Lynch's best in my opinion. I don't think he's ever equalled it. It's a great movie to have on in the background of a party, or to watch by yourself late at night. It's a classic puzzle that no amount of viewings could ever solve, and a fun, wild, weird ride.

Crucial Preface to Lynch's Work
Often called the greatest cult film of all time, "Eraserhead" is unlikely to blow you away if you're: 1. seeing it on a small screen; 2. viewing one of the 2nd-rate Asian DVD copies widely available on the internet; 3. already familiar with "Elephant Man" and/or "Blue Velvet," both of which combine all of the visual, aural, and thematic elements of "Eraserhead" with topnotch production values.

As for "Eraserhead," think of it as a combination of Kafka's "Metamorphoses" and T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" told in the cinematic style of Bunuel/Dali's "Un Chien Andalou." The area in which Lynch strikes me as inarguably inventive if not innovative is in the use of the soundtrack to convey narrative and emotional meaning. Not since Orson Welles (who parlayed his radio creativity into movie fame) has a filmmaker found more ways for representing the sonic dimensions of human experience. Whereas Welles used reverberation in conjunction with deep focus to convey the sense of space separating human beings, Lynch employs much "white noise" to take us into an "inner space" of expectation, anxiety, and dread. Put another way, he's a master at recording the "silence" that, as Robert Frost puts it in "Desert Places," scares us all.

Besides the emptiness of his spiritless surroundings, Henry (the protagonist) clearly suffers from acute anxieties towards women--they entice, seduce, threaten, trap and abandon, alternately motivate and disintegrate any sense of "self," their biology constantly returning him to a natural "muck" that is hardly a satisfying alternative to the denatured and depressing industrial world.

I'm left pondering the meaning of the title. Henry's high hairdo could be described as an eraser, though it looks more like a broom or brush hiding the pinhead-sized structure beneath it. When Henry loses his head (quite literally) and a boy brings it to a pencil factory, we get our fullest glimpse of what Lynch might have in mind. The "natural" wood of the pencils is parodied by their assembly-line production. When the machine operator occasionally tests one of the pencils by scribbling something and then immediately erasing it, we sense the illusory quality of human thought and the notion of a coherent and continuous "self." In that respect, human identity along with what I've just written and the film itself are all extremely tenuous and erasable--an ending that might be viewed as the antithesis to that of "The Elephant Man" ("Nothing can ever die. Nothing").