I haven’t decided yet if I am going to go through a David Lynch watching period, but this movie has shown up in so many places, on so many lists of one sort or another, I thought I should give it a go.
Preliminary thoughts:
First, it occurred to me watching this how Surrealism, in a way, is to reality somewhat what comedy is, but in an unpleasant and yet perhaps more instructive way. It does mean, after all, more less hyper-Real.
What I mean by this is that much comedy takes something quite real but absurd, and exaggerates it just enough that we laugh at it. Laughter is a way of releasing social tension, and “comedy” is what creates that tension, allowing the release.
Here, we see real human interactions, and actions, taken to the extreme, past what is possible, and into the directly representative. As one obvious example, most parents at times view their babies as little monsters. The first thing I did when I finished the movie was look to see if Lynch had had any kids when he made this movie. Yes, he had.
How much of a true transformation does it take to turn a real baby, which is constantly emitting body fluids of one sort or another, constantly crying, constantly needing something, to a little monster? How often do parents feel the urge to kill or crush their children? As I have long said, no parent is telling the truth, in my view, when they say they never, ever had the urge to strangle that little thing that woke them up every two hours for months on end.
And how often do we see madness? Have you never seen the smile of that father when he visits his girlfriend? It was one of the creepiest things in the movie, on purpose.
And animals bleed, do they not? Their bowels have be pulled out of them before they can be eaten, do they not? I was reading, in fact, that many farmers on septic systems consider that chicken intestines work well to feed the bacteria that make septic tanks work. And I sat next to a guy who grew up on a farm on an airplane a few weeks ago, and he said he killed and plucked and gutted a couple chickens a week every week for most of his childhood. He also worked in a pig slaughterhouse for a summer, which definitely bothered him more. He shared some details of that.
And he has many shades of women, does he not, which even if we reject Freud himself can easily come to stand in for varying relations with his mother? The crazy young woman, the crazy older woman, the femme fatale, the women with the insane grin and inappropriate childishness? As I think about it, she was the scariest of them all, in some ways. I have seen this madness before, the regression combined with suppressed rage, Pollyanna with a pickaxe. The insane grin, and sweet little girl smile, while crushing little babies, and singing eventually of heaven. He nailed that, I think.
And is that monster baby not an image–as we could now view it, I think, although much of this theory was not worked out yet well in the 1970’s–of developmental trauma? When he looks across the hall, and his neighbor looks back at him, and sees a bawling monster baby, is that not what is inside him emotionally?
And in terms of the title, the baby displaced the head, did it not? And the role of the head was to erase. To forget. To distract. To make disappear. And to do so rationally. With his pocket protector, Henry must have been an accountant in spirit. His accounting was emotional erasing.
I doubt very much Lynch articulated to himself all this. But he felt it That’s what good artists do. And I strongly suspect all this MUST be in him. It is certainly in me. That is how I see it.
I cannot honestly say this movie was cathartic for me. It was too raw, and in some respects too real. But it was a useful watch. And the way my brain works, I will be seeing these images for several weeks. I suppose I am like an emotional cow, with four stomachs. But I do tend to digest things quite finely, over time.