Eraserhead

What makes Eraserhead great -- and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision.

A murkily pretentious shocker.

The mind boggles to learn that Lynch labored on this pic for five years.

Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.

Lynch, as he does with all his films, refuses to explain anything, although he does say that he has yet to read an interpretation that matches his.

What a masterpiece of texture, a feat of artisanal attention, an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze.

"In heaven, everything is fine," but in Eraserhead (1977) nothing is fine. David Lynch's debut feature is grim, disturbed, mutated, claustrophobic, a world that appears to be unraveling-or, more accurately, decaying-before our eyes.

Linear plots with easily defined cause and effect are the kinds of stories we are used to, but sometimes it's refreshing to enter a world where logic takes a backseat to purely evocative storytelling.

It is the vision of the paranoid transposed upon the screen; the fact that it remains extremely interesting ought, I suppose, to be worrying. But perhaps our eyes have become so desensitised that nothing, any more, will widen the iris.

It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.

David Lynch never explains because he doesn't need to, his is the faith of the irrational, disconcertingly childlike in its illusionism.

David Lynch's Eraserhead must stand as a pinnacle of screen surrealism to rival Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou.