Eraserhead
The first time I watched this I think I plainly wasn't ready for it. I felt it calling back to me today and oh my god, definitely one of my favorites from Lynch now. I think that it would be difficult for me to truly try to poetically express the feelings that I have about this movie and it's symbols in the way that I usually do for most movies, I almost feel afraid to touch or reveal the emotions this stirs up in public like this. It's a film that's very affecting and vulnerable for me.
Two years ago after experiencing an immense amount of personal loss, and what felt like unavoidable pain in my love life, I moved out from my comfort zone with my roommates in the midwest in the US, into a one room apartment in what for me felt (and feels) like "the big city" in England. It was quite the shock to my system on it's own, that was part of the point, I wanted to reinforce breaking myself out of my pattern. One thing lead to another, I was assaulted, the world happened to me. I wound up very very Very scared of other people, having an extended agoraphobic episode. I am no stranger to paranoia, but this was worse than anything I had ever experienced, and I had no clue how to begin dealing with it.
Turns out, for all my mental anguish and fretting, all I needed truly was to let the days go by. I am now emerging somewhat from this era of my life, I am beginning to feel ready to allow myself to reach out to touch and love other people again in that horrifyingly vulnerable fashion that so enraptured me while I was growing up, and that I have felt so far from and hurt by in the past few years. Today, I felt heightened emotions and immense grief for my place in the world, for myself and other outcast people like me. Selfish, but true, and I hope pure in it's way. I think of honesty as pure. Would you ask me for more than earnesty? Any way, my tinnitus was acting up quite terribly in my left ear. I think that all of this crescendoed and allowed me to connect with Henry like never before.
We shape chaos into our orders, we love our little ways, self soothing. Like father like son, we mold the clay into tools and machines and ideas and culture and commitments, all futile, to try to stop feeling our helplessness so directly. What a powerful portrayal of desire and the loneliness of the world, the feeling of a disturbing and unignorable lie inside of every want and every supposed comfort. Even the love we feel beneath everything and at the core of existence can be colored by this feeling of universal falsehood and corruption. and we may cling to the light, or flinch away from it, either way there is no conclusion. There is only the beautiful and disgusting and never-ending feeling: raw experience, existence. And my left ear still rings! I will try my hardest to fixate myself upon that lovely, lying yet true, irrational light.
(01-09-2026)