Every David Lynch Film Ranked From Worst To Best
5. Eraserhead
Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost once suggested that Lynch's work is deceptively simple, and that he doesn't seek to confound.
Lynch himself, a curator of mystery, maintains that the imminent birth of his daughter did not inform the events of his batsh*t debut feature Eraserhead (1977) - though the reading is impossible to ignore throughout the film and its pulsating existential dread. Its protagonist, the beleaguered Henry, stumbles through a ghastly depiction of domestic life of oozing, anthropomorphic, man-made deformed chickens, hideously awkward dinner table conversations, and cold/redacted romantic encounters. This sense of anxiety, compounded by the harsh, suffocating industrial sound design, is evoked most distressingly through the depiction of his offspring: a relentlessly wailing, incurable indeterminate snake-like being held together by stitches that provide no respite to the unbearable pain - a pain reflected into the sore ears of the audience through its constant pierce.
It is a tortuous life Henry chooses to end - mercifully, or selfishly - with Lynch challenging also the patience and thus empathy - the moral make-up, even - of his audience. Even the scant beauty in the film, the much-covered 'In Heaven', is framed as an obfuscation of horror from which there is no escape.
A harrowing film, Eraserhead proved inescapable for Lynch also, its unique textures reappearing in The Return.