The Eraserhead Guide to Dadhood
What David Lynch has taught me about being a father
Today is my birthday. Today is also David Lynch’s birthday. Sharing a birthday is admittedly thin gruel, as far as personal connections go. But in this hypermediated moment, where you can know someone intimately without ever meeting them in the flesh, one takes what one can get.
I cherish sharing a birthday with Lynch. His work has meant so much to me. As an exemplar of artistic integrity, yes, but also on a more personal level. Lynch’s work has helped immensely as I’ve explored my identity as a man and especially, as a father. Today, on our shared birthday, I wanted to try to put that into words.
Reminder that, as part of my birthday month, I am offering discount subscriptions! Pairs perfectly with a donut and a damn fine cup of coffee.
There is a Margaret Atwood quote that consistently makes the rounds on social media. You know it. It goes like this:
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
The quote is not from one of her books. It’s streamlined from a talk she gave on a radio program in the early 80s. That’s one reason it continues to go viral: it was originally spoken in the public context of broadcast media.
The quote is usually presented as inherently true, capturing the asymmetrical nature of the neverending war between the sexes. And I think that aspect is basically correct. But, if you’ll forgive me for being a pedantic male, it’s incomplete. Yes, men are afraid women will laugh at them; yes, women are afraid men will kill them. But do you know what else men are afraid of?
Men.
Men are also afraid other men will kill them. As Phil Christman wrote, “To put it simply: Every social encounter between men is potentially a fistfight. You learn this in elementary school and never forget it.” Men size other me up, helplessly. Scanning for weakness. Calculating the potential violence of their targets. And not only in their targets. Staying on one’s toes against the specter of male violence, one cannot help but become aware that one too, as a man, carries that threat of violence within himself, whether he likes it or not, whether he acknowledges it or not.
Look at history; look at statistics; look at, I don’t know, Sumerian creation myths and you get the same message: violence, more often than not, enters the world through me.
What is a man supposed to do with that evidence? What is a man supposed to do with that evidence when he becomes a father?
I’ll tell you what you do: you make a movie called Eraserhead.
The first time I saw Eraserhead, I was around 24. I liked Lynch, and I liked him because he was weird. On that front, Eraserhead delivered. Before the release of Inland Empire, Eraserhead was the weirdest, artiest, most experimental film in Lynch’s oeuvre. (One could make the argument that it still is.) “Wow, that sure was weird!” I declared from my ratty couch, scrounged from Goodwill with the help of my housemates.
The next time I saw Eraserhead, I was in my early 30s. I was also a father—a stay-at-home one, specifically. A SAHF? Did that acronym ever catch on? This time, I did not find it weird. I mean, I still did—it’s a weird movie—but that was not my primary response. My primary response was: This movie makes perfect sense. Or perhaps ‘make sense’ is not the right criterion, as my response wasn’t intellectual. It was emotional.
This movie feels the way I feel.
There we go. That’s it.
What about Eraserhead felt (feels) this way to me? The movie feared the same things I feared. The capacity for violence that I, as a man, as a father, feared—knew—I carried within me.
David Lynch spent five years making Eraserhead. He filmed a couple scenes, ran out of money, worked a paper route to make some scratch, used that to film a couple more scenes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The basic plot is straightforward. Henry lives alone in an apartment, in some nondescript urban wasteland. He used to have a relationship with a young woman named Mary. Turns out, that relationship produced a child, which Mary gave birth to without Henry’s awareness. But Mary needs Henry’s help taking care of the child, and not just because taking care of a newborn is difficult. There is something off about the child. Wrong.
Which, obviously. The child does not appear human at all. It looks alien, really. A beaked head atop a craning neck, its body covered in bandages. It makes inhuman sounds at all hours.
Weird, yes, but emotionally? This is what taking care of a newborn feels like. A needy alien overtakes your life, demanding care with nothing but cries. Been there! It’s not just the sleeplessness, though. Henry is frightened of the child—frightened of what he might to do it. He fears what every father fears, what every father has to confront, if they’re going to be a responsible parent. That, if harm does come to visit upon his child, he might be the source of it. Not a guarantee, certainly. But a historical and statistical chance that one must reckon with.
Henry is plagued with visions of the harm he might visit upon the child. The lady in the radiator does a song-and-dance routine, stepping on writhing creatures that resemble the child. Henry’s fear of what he might do to the child manifests as fear of the child itself, as Henry sees his own head pop off, and the child’s swaying appear in its place.
The violence, of course, takes place. At the climax, Henry cuts open the child’s bandages. It convulses, shakes, then transforms, becoming—I still don’t know what, really? Some kind of higher being that ushers Henry into a spiritual realm? It all gets abstract in that Lynchy way. Paternal violence takes place, is the thing. It’s inexorable.
And that—that is the fear I felt when I first became a father. That violence would flow from me like electricity. It didn’t, of course, but I came to see that I wasn’t simply worrying over nothing. I was made aware, almost against my will, of the responsibility I faced, taking care of a vulnerable child. It’s a child. You should meet that responsibility with an appropriate amount of fear.
It’s a lesson every father has to learn. And I’ll forever be grateful to David Lynch for teaching it to me.