'Eraserhead' Ending Explained
Filmmaker and artist David Lynch famously prefers to keep a buttoned lip when it comes to analyzing his own movies. However, much of his personal life from around the time of the production of Eraserhead, his debut feature, is on record. This allows us to contextualize some of his creative decisions. The story follows Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) who, after a space-set sequence in which a sperm-like creature emerges from his mouth, is eventually shown as returning to his home in an Orwellian dystopia.
There, the "Beautiful Girl Across the Hall" (Judith Anna Roberts) tells him that he's been invited to dinner with his girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) at Mary's parents' house. In a sequence reminiscent of a fever-dream, Henry is invited to carve a puny chicken which bleeds when he cuts it, and Mary's mother tries to kiss him before informing him that Mary has given birth. Mary, however, isn't entirely sure the baby is human.
'Eraserhead' Echoes Lynch's Personal Anxieties of Becoming a Father
The film continues, exploring this nightmarish dreamscape of anxiety over becoming a father. It's well-documented that Eraserhead is a projection of Lynch's own personal anxieties surrounding parenthood, but his decision to use such an abstract dreamlike style tells us even more about the personal depth of this project.
Lynch himself has said that "Eraserhead is my most spiritual film, but no one has ever gotten that from it. The way it happened was that I had these feelings, but I didn't know what it really was about for me." In Lynch's autobiography Room to Dream, Eraserhead cinematographer Fred Elmes recalls, "David and I agreed that the mood you create is the most important thing. Yes, there's the writing and the acting, but the mood and the feeling of the light is what makes a film take off. With Eraserhead, David told the story almost purely through mood and the way things look." Lynch added that "I felt Eraserhead, I didn't think it," and anyone who fully surrenders to the film understands what he means. As his book states, it's a magisterial film that operates without filters of any sort. "Eraserhead is pure id."
The baby in Eraserhead, nicknamed "Spike" by Jack Nance, is the most crucial prop in the film according to Lynch's own autobiography. Lynch began creating it by hand himself, months before the shoot started. It has, to this day, never been disclosed how he created the baby, not by Lynch nor any of his cast and crew. Production manager Doreen Small recalls that "to get umbilical cords, I lied to hospitals and told them the cords would just be in jars in the background of a movie scene. Those are real umbilical cords in the film, and we got five or six of them — Jack [Fisk, who played "the Man in the Planet"] called them 'billy cords'."
Henry Kills the Baby in 'Eraserhead'... and That's a Good Thing!
The making of Eraserhead took five years, and thus its context is vast and rich. In short, Lynch was becoming a father, something Henry also experiences in the film. It's a paranoid, anxiety-ridden fever dream in which an expecting father envisions his baby (and by virtue, his part in raising one) as monstrous. The ending sees Henry (the Lynch proxy) opening the child's bandages to find it has no skin, accidentally freeing its internal organs. With stress and anxiety at its highest point, Henry cuts the organs with scissors, killing the child — or more likely, in terms of its potential meaning, killing his unhealthy fear of his failure as a father (since this grotesque child is merely his nightmare version of how he perceives fatherhood).
He then hugs the "Lady in the Radiator" (Laurel Near), the embodiment of happiness, embracing what he was unsure about before. Lynch's nightmarish dreamscape could be read as having a happy ending after all, despite the imagery of pedicide. He is, in essence, remembering that a child is a product of love and intimacy, reminding himself that there are two people involved in caring for a child, and those two have (at least at one time) shared a love. He kills his nightmare, embracing affection and his paternal role to come, with love.
As Room to Dream's co-author Kristine McKenna writes, Henry "experiences the mystery of the erotic, then the death of the child, and finally, the divine intercedes and his torment ends. In a sense, it's a story about grace."
The Original Ending of 'Eraserhead' Was Very Different
In Lynch's original script, the film concluded with Henry being devoured by the demonic baby. This could be read as the inescapable nature of parental life once a child has been born, and thus the death of one's previous lifestyle. This would have been the kind of bleak ending worthy of the major Eraserhead influence Metamorphosis by self-loathing author Franz Kafka. This doesn't occur in the film however; rather, Lynch introduces the Lady in the Radiator (a source of warmth), and she transforms the conclusion of the otherwise cold story.
It's understandable considering the five-year production of Eraserhead that Lynch would have adapted to fatherhood by the time of the film's conclusion, and his discovery of transcendental meditation played a vital part in that metamorphosis of his own. "Lynch experienced a spiritual awakening," claims McKenna in the book, "and it makes sense that the film changed along the way."
Henry (and Lynch) Take Control in 'Eraserhead'
Eraserhead opens with a character called the Man in the Planet, controlling Henry's life by pulling levers in space. His actor Jack Fisk has his own interpretation of his role, stating that Eraserhead is in fact about karma. "I didn't realize it when we were working on it, but the Man in the Planet is pulling levers that symbolize karma. There are so many spiritual things in Eraserhead." Perhaps he didn't realize this during the production because, due to the original planned ending, it wasn't initially going to be a story of karma, but became one throughout the process.
Henry is a character with very little control over his own life in Eraserhead, and his whole world is turned upside down by external forces, or so it feels to him. In fact, in order to father a child, he must have made a certain decision, and fatherhood is simply a karmic repercussion of that choice. This would imply that this story highlights the effect everyone has over their own lives, especially in cases where they feel their most helpless. Henry becomes active in the film's final moments, choosing to kill this monstrous version of fatherhood his fears have manifested, and take matters into his own hands.
In essence, Eraserhead is a messy, fluid and ever-unfolding experience of David Lynch's personal internal journey, so much so that the story itself even changed as a result. It no longer existed as a moment-in-time insight into his anxiety and paranoia, but rather, became a complicated exploration into the full process of even accepting that paternal role, and embracing the future. The time it took to complete Eraserhead wonderfully documents the process Lynch himself underwent in his life throughout those five years, and how making the film as well as the context behind it helped shape who we know him to be today, both as a filmmaker and as a man.
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