Eraserhead

Last October, good friend of the podcast, Caleb Anderson, expressed an interest in working through David Lynch’s filmography and suggested that we watch Eraserhead. I had only seen it once before, right before starting my sophomore year of college (with other good friend of the podcast, Caleb Dillender) and had left the theater in a fugue state of that disgusting grime and shakiness Eraserhead likes to leave you scratching off of your skin for the next few days. It didn’t really mean much else to me at the time except that it was nifty to see where Midwest Princess, David Lynch, started his merry little filmmaking adventure. At the time of my second viewing of Eraserhead, I was sleeping on a couch (provided by good friend of the podcast, Caleb Anderson). After a series of financial emergencies that led to suddenly dropping out of college, unexpected dental operations, a minor car accident, breaking my phone twice in the same week, and a job that only handed out graveyard shifts, I was in a psychological headspace that was ripe for making my already depressive tendencies cross from self-pity into an overcorrection of animalistic instinct that often left me devoid of many emotions in the name of just trying to make it through whatever new absurdity awaited the next day. I was angry at times, but for the majority of that period, most emotions were simply void. Over half a year later, I can't remember most of those months. What I was like, what I was thinking. I don't know if I was a very good friend during that period, despite how ginormously the people around me never once flinched to take care of me. I want to hope that I was a good boyfriend and a good son and a good brother and a good friend, but I'm certain I wasn't. When first starting medication for depression, I expressed my fears to a friend, who suggested that I think of the pills as nothing more than allergy medicine. Depression was an allergy, and, like a pollen allergy, could become more prudent in certain seasons or when poked by certain emotions. You also don't need to feel guilty for having a pollen allergy. Henry can't see beauty. It isn't that it isn't there, he just simply can't see it, as if trying to explain what red looks like to someone who is colorblind. An allergy. Perhaps he could've been a husband or a father if he knew it was an allergy that could be treated, let alone, if he had someone to let him tell him. David Lynch talks in his Masterclass about how art cannot be made in the toils of anxiety and depression, which is a wonderfully refreshing rebuttal to the voice I think we all experience in the throws of depression, saying to us that, surely, this is the time for us to become tortured artists and make some great piece of art that can release us from this headspace, like popping some kind of lexapro pimple. David argues that this isn’t possible, and that the only way he has been able to create and live in his art is after he’s picked himself up from these periods. Only then is he able to look back at the wreckage behind him and express it. His stories are, in that sense, stories that inherently carry a sort of hope to them, stories that he has crawled out of alive. So now, I sit with my girlfriend and two more good friends of the podcast, Jo Person and Brynn Nieuwenhuis, in a screening room watching Eraserhead. It is the first time any of them have seen it, and, unlike both of my prior experiences, this is a viewing filled with laughter and gross-out screams and dry-heaving. A lot of emotions, to be sure, but, unlike both of my prior experiences, this was a viewing where I also had a smile on my face from start to finish. I think I have stories that I can say I've crawled out of alive. Stories that would've been impossible for me to survive without those good friends of the podcast. I officially move into an apartment next month :)