4. Eraserhead
When you meet someone who loves David Lynch you've met someone who knows something you don't. Lynch burst onto the scene with his eery, black & white nightmare, Eraserhead. And the world of conceptual artistry would never be the same... it would be far more repulsively exclusive than anyone could have ever imagined. IMDB.com's plot description is as follows: "Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child." Someone got something out of it. Eraserhead, for all intents and purposes, is actually about making the audience feel like they missed out on something. You know when your friend starts to explain their dreams or nightmares to you and you take that opportunity to think about bills you have to pay and whether or not you cleaned your ears this morning? On default you say things like "That's so weird!" and "Crazy!". Your brain goes to the mental washroom while some faceless copilot takes the helm. Yeah, that's like watching Eraserhead. No, Mr. Lynch, most of us don't really care about your REM sleep, nor do we really understand it. I'm perfectly content leaving the drooling, Swimfan-ian adoration to contemporary art students and people who own both DVD & Blu-Ray versions of every movie in the Criterion Collection.