Post-Eraserhead
A quick combing of the web for Eraserhead-related information led me to the Wikipedia article on Blue Velvet, which in turn pointed out that Frank’s inhalent was actually amyl nitrite, not nitrous oxide (as has been the current EZ-E/Blood Money consensus). This is a bit disappointing, in terms of the road to understanding. However, this little tidbit does little to upset the backbone theories.
Something subliminal about Eraserhead has me about ready to rethink the entire Sandman/Ben issue, and what that place really meant. I am settled that the clown in the apartment is the keystone.
And, to continue the asides, I also see that there is another movie in the works.
Eraserhead was frighteningly frightening, beautiful only to someone who came into it wanting something that made Blue Velvet fit into some unknown genre.
Without digressing into the sexual violence of a Frank Booth-type character, Eraserhead managed to create a lurid picture of a “man” and his “wife” (both in quotes for entirely different reasons—but I’m trying to avoid spoilers). It’s about sin, and heaven, but heaven is ironically inside a very hot place.
Again, dancing around significant spoilers, heaven has a checkerboard tile floor (possibly illuminating the Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me situations regarding checkerboard floors).
My analysis does put heaven vertically above the “real world,” which reinforces some traditional Judeo-Christian meta-reality going on somewhere in there, but the whole thing is pretty much a rompus room of jumbled, uneasy images.
The signature diddy, “In Heaven Everything Is Fine” had a very end-of-Mulholland Drive feel, or even in the way of Dorothy Vallens’ performance of “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club.
There was a small box with a frightening, mysterious thing inside. Very Mulholland Drive there.
By the way, I thought this was a pretty good description of whatever the heck Dumb Land was, although I would say that #6 (“My Teeth Are Bleeding”) might have been more violent than #5 (“Get the Stick!”).
While attempting to shut up my post-Lynch chatter to wait for interested parties to see the movie, I would say that my take on Eraserhead is that it is a key element to understanding anything that followed it (meaning everything, as it was Lynch’s first full-length feature film).
My principal starting-off theme is that everything has a hole in it, and you can’t close an open door. It’s oh-so-much-more complicated than that, but I’ll leave it there pending a more complete viewership.