Eraserhead | A Call To Love Henry

Henry has the face and demeanor of a debilitated soul – hapless, dour, confused, drained, beleaguered. This world he inhabits – with its grey, smoke-filled air hanging like a fog, with its lifeless factories buzzing and churning ad nauseum, with its endless waves of cruel mundanities rooted in a capitalistic world – is almost too much too bear, to the point where fantasy must begin to outweigh reality. As Henry loses grip on his life, as temperamental girlfriends throw hysterical fits and unexpected babies turn into monsters, as he’s forced to become part of a nuclear family archetype that never cared to consider his wishes and dreams, to ask what would make his life fulfilling and meaningful, he must envision something greater – even if that transcendence comes in the form of a lady hiding in the radiator. Her appearance might seem grotesque to us, but to Henry, she simply reflects the hell he already lives in. Yet, she offers something the people and systems that occupy his life do not – the sweet, tender embrace of someone who accepts you, even if you have no direction and have no idea how to be human. Henry’s twisted fantasies are not meant to be picked apart and understood on an individual level – no, in true Lynchian fashion, we, much like that woman in the radiator, are meant to simply be with Henry, to see him for who he truly is, to be patient and compassionate – we aren’t meant to understand his ugly distortions, but instead to accept what they are the result of: how remarkably hard it is to be human in what can feel like a mind-numbingly vacuous world that we’re forced to wander alone. Henry’s fate is simply the fate of someone who was never loved, and never learned how to love. So let’s love Henry. Let’s love those who are struggling, those who project and warp, those who are secretly screaming on the inside for help. Maybe that warm embrace can do more good than we realize, can extend and reach others and help us to realize that we’re all struggling with the seemingly impossible task of being human – a state of being that we still haven’t perfected after thousands of years of practice. Lynch didn’t like his movies to be understood in intellectual terms, which in turn made his movies living examples of how to approach life: we aren’t supposed to understand this existence, but to simply accept it, to be part of it, to help each other through it.