Eraserhead (1976)/The Short Films of David Lynch New Year’s Day. Not willing to start the year shuttling in the new, especially with a ton of paperwork to move from one end of his desk to the other. Frank dusts off a stack of LPs and selects Help! (Beatles 1965) (British Release). Frank taps his Chuck Taylor’s to the title track for 00:20 but doesn’t quite make it to the well-known double tracking timing error on “I never needed anybody's help in any way.” He instead opts to skip over to Track #3, “You've Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and returns to checking his logbooks. But he finds himself staring at some old crew photos tacked to the wall behind his monitor. When the track is over, Frank waits til the stray guitar noise on the right channel at 00:41 in Harrison’s “I Need You,” then switches back to Track #3. Frank liked the Beatles much much better down then he ever liked them up (and if he had selected the White Album he’d now be jumping between “Happiness is a Warm Gun”: on side A “I’m So Tired” on B. Besides, if Frank wanted schmaltz, he’d listen to the same titled, “I Need You” on America’s self-titled 1971 debut. Anyway, the bottom line was that Frank puts Track #3 on for a third, fourth and fifth time. It’s no record (pun?). Frank once listened to Tom Waits’ “Cold, Cold Ground”/”Train Song” (Franks Wild Years 1987) for ten hours straight while drinking Laird’s apple jack from a mason jar, and had also listened to Cool for Cats (Squeeze 1979) over and over all the way from Philadelphia to New Orleans, tapping out Gilson Lavis’ catchy drums on the dash board of his Impala, long before the Louisianan heat and had irrevocably cracked said dash, wrecking the speaker underneath. Now he strolls into the office lobby and fills a glass from the water cooler. He dons his knit cap and scarf and hangs in the doorway watching the snowfall. As Y.G.T.H.Y.L.A. climaxes for a sixth time Frank can see Andrea down the block undoubtedly headed towards Starbuck’s. Her head is down and she playfully swings an umbrella and jumps snow bank to snow bank in her little yellow rubber boots. It is perfect moment that makes Frank smile and cry at the same time and wish she was forever and always that innocent. But she wasn’t. And Frank is as much a conflicted dream state as Henry in David Lynch’s classic 1976 debut Eraserhead. It will be re-released by Subversive Cinema on January 10, 2006. Frank has no idea what extras this new disk will contain, however, it is certainly a film which cannot be appreciated on pan and scan VHS [check out a comparison of screen captures on DVD Beaver]. Even if you don’t “get it” [and to be honest, no one truly 100% gets it], there are volumes of deep textured imagery that are clinically beautiful, even if they makes you cringe. Frank won’t attempt synopsis, de-coding, interpretation, Freudian analysis, deconstruction, or anything. Eraserhead is, if ever there was, something you just have to see to believe. Its somewhere between an industrial tone poem, Gnostic parable and personal nightmare. In synopsis, Henry lives in a burnt out husk of a cityscape. He has given in to his physical urges and knocked-up Mary X causing her to prematurely give birth to---err, something.

‘Nuff said. The greatest mystery is why movie fans once flocked to midnite showing of the cult film in the same way they did for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman 1975). The film is cool, but Frank cannot figure where the group experience might come in. Now, the real disappointment is the “companion” DVD, The Short Films of David Lynch, also to be released January 10. The films, mostly early work, are far from spectacular and are not in the least an eye-opening look into the mind behind such a large body of odd work. Packaged as supplemental material on the Eraserhead DVD, where they should be, they’d be worth perhaps a single viewing by a Lynch fan. They ar,e after all, interesting singularities along the Lynchian timeline. Packaged as a separate DVD for $22–$29, it is simply a rip-off. Try as Frank might, there doesn’t seem to be that hidden Easter egg that makes the whole disk worth it. That said, the films on the DVD: Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times): Lynch’s first film, a looped animation from an art installation. Short and Gilliam-esque (Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975). The Alphabet: Live action and animation. Pretty cool. Short and Gilliam-esque (and Edward Gorey-esque, too.) The Grandmother: Live action and animation. An abused boy plants seeds in his bed to grow a grandmother. Think Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel 1929) meets Naked Lunch (Cronenberg 1991). The Amputee: Two versions. Weird static nine minutes, but is really Lynch testing video-tape for the American Film Institute. [irony pointed out by Lynch in intro.] The Cowboy and the Frenchman: Lynch invite to French TV. Comedy isn’t Lynch’s strong point as shown in this one one-gag disappointment. Really sad to see it stars Harry Dean Stanton (Cool Hand Luke; Rosenberg 1967). Lumiere: As a tribute to 100 yrs of film, Lynch invited to film 55 seconds using a model of an original Lumiere camera, and given the production restrictions of the 1890s. Possibly the best thing on the disc, although, not for any particular reason except that “brevity is the soul of wit” (Hamlet; Shakespeare 1602). Anyway, most likely Lynch had to cheat to accomplish the piece. Lynch himself, introducing each piece, is a bit sigh of relief, however. Far from the egoist, he lets the pieces stand for themselves forgoing any interpretation or explanation beyond the circumstances of their creation. Still, if you want to see early films to blow your mind and give you a new appreciation for a director, Frank recommends shelling out for the Criterion two-disc release of Polanski’s Knife in Water (1963). The films are gorgeous, thought provoking. If you are a Lynch fan (or a fan of surreal stoner flix in general) buy the Eraserhead DVD, but wait for the rest to be re-packaged again. Or borrow the disc from Frank, he wouldn’t give it a second look, even if he wasn’t stuck at work indefinitely…