The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Lynch · a film · 1977 · about 89 minutes · written, produced and edited by the director · made at the American Film Institute
Mode
Nightmare in the form of a domestic story: courtship, in-laws, marriage and a child told wholly in the register of dream
Mythos
A maker at a window who pulls the levers of life; a seed in the water; a child that is not a child; a hidden heaven; the father who kills the son and passes into light
Phase
One stretch of Henry Spencer’s life, from a message at his door to the killing of the child, framed at both ends by the planet and its lever
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, 35 mm, about 89 minutes; little dialogue and long stretches without speech, over a continuous industrial sound and Fats Waller on the organ
Register
From deadpan farce at a family dinner to cosmic horror and one song of tenderness, held at a single pitch of dread
Scale
One man, one room, one family, a planet and a radiator’s heaven
Governing Proposition
A young man in an industrial city learns at a family dinner that he has a child, and is left alone in one room with a creature that cries without end. The wager of the film is that a young man’s dread of sex and of the dependent life it makes can be built as a world, out of sound, duration and darkness, and that his fantasies of release and the act that ends the child are of a piece. What it discloses it gives mostly as how dread feels from inside, and the terms of its myth it leaves unfixed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in a void, on a planet. A man sits at a window, the Man in the Planet, played by Jack Fisk, and pulls a lever, and a worm-like form passes from the mouth of Henry Spencer and falls into a pool. Nothing is explained, and nothing will be. The frame is set before the story begins: a maker at his machinery, a seed in the water, and a man who does not know that he is the subject of either. The film will return to this window at its end, and everything between is told inside it.
Then the walk. Henry, played by Jack Nance, his hair standing high and his pocket full of pens, crosses an industrial waste with a grocery bag under a roar that does not let up. No word is spoken. The walk states the law of the world before the story has started: a man carrying his small provisions through waste and pipes while machinery he cannot see goes on around him. The shot is held past comfort, and the holding is the point. Duration is how the film will make entrapment felt, and it begins here.
The film was made at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, with shooting begun in 1972 and spread over about five years. David Lynch wrote, directed, produced and edited it, designed the production and made the effects. Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell photographed it in black and white on 35 mm, and Lynch and Alan Splet made its sound, a hiss and roar under every scene, with a score built from that sound and from Fats Waller’s organ recordings. Long stretches pass without speech. The world is darkness with a few rooms lit in it.
Movement II
In his room a neighbour gives Henry a message from Mary X, played by Charlotte Stewart, and he goes to dinner at her family’s house. Mr. X, played by Allen Joseph, grins and has a numb arm; Mrs. X is played by Jeanne Bates. The talk is stalled, the pauses long, and the house hisses like the street outside it. It is a comedy of in-laws played so flat that the comedy and the dread cannot be told apart, and the film does not want them told apart.
The chickens are small and man-made, and when one is cut it bleeds and moves its legs. Mrs. X goes into a fit at the table. Domestic farce turns into horror without changing key, because in this world they were always one key. The dinner runs longer than its work, as several scenes of a film shot over five years do, but its one law is plain: bodies here are matter, made and worked, and a meal can move.
Then the news. Mary has had a child, born early, and with it comes a marriage. The film delivers the child as it delivers everything, as a fact Henry cannot refuse and does not understand, given in a house where the furniture and the people seem equally manufactured. The courtship, the in-laws and the wedding of an ordinary story are all here, and each has been passed through nightmare before it reaches the screen.
Movement III
Mary and the child move into Henry’s room. The child is swaddled, and when it is first unwrapped it is plainly not a child, a small creature of a kind the film never names. It cries, and the cry does not end. This is the film’s use of sound as condition rather than effect: a cry that comes and goes is an event, and a cry that never stops is a world. The child, a practical effect, still convinces, and the film never says what it is.
Mary leaves. Henry is alone with the child, and he tends it. Care and revulsion live in him at once, and the film shows both without choosing between them. A worm crawls in a cabinet, doing again the work the bed scene does. Henry waits for the lift; he stands in the room while the radiator hisses. Nance plays almost all of it in stillness and stalled reaction, and the film is carried on that stillness.
The room is a cell, and the film makes the viewer live in it. The black and white leaves small lit figures in deep darkness; the shots are held until the holding is the content; the hiss allows no moment of quiet in which to step out of the condition. What the film knows is what it is like to live inside a dread one cannot name. Told as a realist drama of a poor young father, the facts would remain and that knowledge would go.
Movement IV
Inside the radiator there is a small lit stage. On it the Lady in the Radiator, played by Laurel Near, her cheeks swollen, shuffles across it to a fairground organ and sings “In Heaven”, a song by Lynch and Peter Ivers, of a heaven where all is well. Worms fall around her, and she treads them. It is the film’s one tenderness, and it has a cost: the heaven she promises steps on the same seeds the planet let fall.
The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, played by Judith Anna Roberts, comes to Henry’s door. They go to bed, and they sink together into a milky pool. The film offers two escapes, up into the radiator’s heaven and down into the neighbour’s bed, and both are of a piece with what Henry will do. Whose fantasy the woman is, the film leaves open, as it leaves open nearly everything that would fix its terms.
On the radiator’s stage Henry’s head falls off, and a child’s head rises in its place. The fallen head lies in the street and is carried to a pencil factory, where it is made into erasers, and a clerk tests one and finds it serviceable. The comedy is deadpan and leans to sketch, and it is the dream’s account of a man’s sense of his own use: what he is can be bored out, stamped and rubbed away. The film takes its title from this passage.
Movement V
Henry takes a pair of scissors and cuts the child’s bandages. He stabs what lies beneath. It is the act the whole film has been moving toward, and the film has prepared it from the first reel: the fantasies of release, the heaven and the neighbour, were already this act in other forms. Nothing is said. The film does not tell us whether to call it murder, mercy or the last move of a dream.
The lights fail. The child’s neck stretches into a vast swaying head as the lamps burn out, and in the planet the Man’s levers spark. The machinery that started the film breaks with its last image of a body worked by mechanism. The frame, which the film needs, is here staged more as emblem than as part of the same fabric, a little outside the world it governs, and the film is stronger in its rooms than in the void around them.
Then white light, and the Lady in the Radiator embraces Henry. Whether this is death, release or madness has stayed open for forty-nine years, and the readings have accumulated rather than cancelled one another. The film ran for years at midnight in New York and Los Angeles and was named to the National Film Registry in 2004. What it makes known is chiefly how dread feels from inside, and it makes that known with a completeness of form that is its chief strength; what it leaves undecided, it leaves undecided by design.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the film as released, about 89 minutes, and its main parts answer the subtractive test. The planet frames the whole and returns at the end; the walk with the grocery bag lays down the world’s law before a word is said; the dinner delivers the child; the room is the child; the radiator and the woman across the hall are the two escapes; the head and the scissors are the catastrophe. The long durations are not slack, since duration is how the film makes entrapment felt. But the test finds real give. The pencil factory is a joke the film could lose at small cost, the worm crawling in the cabinet repeats work the bed scene does, and in a dream form many single images could have been others without the whole failing.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Disclosure comes through image and sound, and it is credited there. What can be stated: that a young man’s terror of sex and of the dependent life it makes is real and not shameful to show; that care and revulsion for a child can live in one person; that the fantasies of release, the heaven in the radiator and the woman across the hall, are of a piece with the act that ends the child; and that the industrial city is the outward form of that inner condition. It is shown with a candour no studio film of its decade risked. What holds it low is that the film makes known chiefly how dread feels from inside, not a truth that holds beyond the feeling, and it declines to articulate, even in image, what the child is or what the killing means.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation is constant, and almost all of it is dread. The planet in its void and the lever pulled; the walk under a continuous roar; the chicken that bleeds and moves its legs when it is cut, and Mrs. X’s convulsion at the table; the child’s first unwrapping and its cry; the child’s neck stretching into a vast swaying head as the lights burn out. Against the dread stands a strange beauty: the Lady in the Radiator, cheeks swollen, shuffling across a small lit stage to a fairground organ while worms fall around her and she treads them. The white embrace at the close lifts too. What holds the axis down is the single register: one pitch held for an hour dulls by the last third, and the beauty is one song and one ending against the rest.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is felt more than constructed. Its elements are present: a man at a window pulls the levers that start life; a seed leaves a man’s mouth and falls into water; a child is born that is not a child; a woman in a hidden heaven promises release; the father kills the son, the machinery breaks and he passes into light. Cosmogony and apocalypse are set around a domestic story, and the frame bears weight, since the film opens and closes on the planet. Kafka’s metamorphosis, the changeling and the Gnostic maker of a botched world are near. But the relations are never fixed: whether the Man in the Planet made Henry, whether the child is his, whether the light is heaven. A myth whose terms stay undecided is evoked as much as built.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (1929) above all; the American avant-garde of Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger; the built nightmare cities of German expressionism; Kafka; and Lynch’s own shorts, The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970). The turn is to tell a feature-length story, with a courtship, in-laws, a marriage and a child, wholly in the register of nightmare, and to build the nightmare chiefly out of a continuous industrial sound. The stake was a first feature shot over about five years on almost no money, a student production with no distributor in sight. What holds the axis near the bar is that the departure returned to a path the avant-garde had already proved: the turn within it is of scale and sound more than of kind.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what it is like to live inside a dread that cannot be named. Told as a realist drama of a poor young father in a bad city, the content would remain and the knowledge would go. The sound, a hiss and roar that never stops, allows no quiet in which to leave the condition, and the child’s cry is made unbearable by being made continuous. The duration holds shots past comfort, so time is lived as Henry lives it. The black and white sets small lit figures in deep darkness. And the dream logic, in which a fallen head is made into erasers, renders a man’s sense of his own use. Held below the top because the planet frame is staged as emblem more than woven into the same fabric.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Forty-nine years of return are evidence. The questions have stayed open and argued: what the Man in the Planet is, and whether Henry is his creature; what the child is; whether the end is death, release or madness; whose fantasy the woman across the hall is. Readings have accumulated rather than replaced one another: a dread of fatherhood, which Lynch’s account of his years in Philadelphia invites; a portrait of the industrial American city; a Gnostic allegory; a study in sound. The sound design yields on return, its layers unheard at first. What holds the axis is the kind of return: much of it is to texture rather than to meaning, and a film that withholds its key is renewed partly by the withholding, which yields less than a question the work itself frames.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film made a feature-length narrative out of nightmare and industrial sound, and showed that a film’s world could be built from its soundtrack as much as from its pictures. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, but inside a tradition the avant-garde had opened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the defining picture of the midnight circuit, with El Topo and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and that circuit was a new route of distribution for the American independent film; its sound bed and industrial imagery passed into later horror, into music video and into film, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) among the clearest; and it opened Lynch’s career, whose later work counts here only in part. The reach is wide in art, horror and independent film, and narrower in the main line of cinema than that of Citizen Kane or Chinatown.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-nine years. Form: the film as released survives whole, and the restoration of 2014, made under Lynch’s supervision, is repair. Presence: continuous since 1977, first as a midnight film that ran for years, then on television, on every home format, in repertory and in teaching, and named to the National Film Registry in 2004. It is wide in art and cult cinema and less wide beyond them. Fabric: the surface is hardly fixed to its decade, since black and white, a placeless industrial city and an ageless soundscape date it less than the colour of a studio picture of 1977. That earns the usual figure for its span, not the widest, because its presence, though unbroken, has been narrower than that of the most seen films of its age.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The making bears weight in two departments and is seamed in others. The sound by Lynch and Alan Splet is laid with exact control, every room given its own hiss and the cry pitched to wear. The photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell commands black and white: deep blacks, faces cut out of darkness, a light that falls on Henry’s hair like a halo. Lynch’s small sets give a whole city with almost nothing, the child is a practical effect that still convinces, and Jack Nance’s stillness and stalled reaction carry the film. The costs are real and not slight: the planet and the head in the street are model work whose cheapness shows; some supporting playing is broad by intention and stiff in fact; and five years of shooting leave seams of pace, with the dinner and the pencil factory running longer than their work.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the pencil factory, a deadpan comedy in which a clerk tests an eraser made from a man’s head and finds it serviceable, and the Lady in the Radiator’s song of heaven. One law covers both: bodies are matter, worked and transformed by mechanism, and what a person is can be bored out, cut, stamped or sung away. The man-made chickens, the falling worms, the cut bandages, the sparking levers and the hiss of every room obey it. The comedy is one of the law’s faces, as at the dinner, where Mr. X’s numb arm and his grin belong to the world of Mrs. X’s fit, and the range runs from farce to cosmic horror to tenderness. The strain is small but real: the planet stands a little outside the world it governs, and the factory’s comedy leans to sketch.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 89 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Henry, from inside; the family, in the X household, a marriage and a child; sexuality and generation, the film’s centre; labour and the industrial order, in the waste, the pipes and the pencil works; the body, in birth, disease and wound; the cosmic, in the planet and the radiator’s heaven. One dread holds them, and they are integrated, since the factory, the child and the heaven obey one law. What holds the axis lowest is what is missing: the state and history are absent, society beyond a family and a neighbour does not enter, the city is a set of empty streets, and every order passes through one consciousness, so that the world the film holds is narrow by design.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Swerve and The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Inner Law at 8.5. A form in which sound, duration, darkness and dream logic are the knowledge itself; a feature-length story told wholly as nightmare and built from industrial sound, on five years of a first feature; a film whole and continuously seen for forty-nine years, its surface hardly fixed to its decade; and one law of bodies worked by mechanism, from the dinner table to the radiator’s heaven.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1: consciousness, the family, sexuality, labour, the body and the cosmic are held through one man’s dread, but the state, history and any society beyond a family and a neighbour are absent. Above it, The Unconcealment at 7.7, where what is disclosed is chiefly how dread feels from inside rather than a truth that holds beyond the feeling; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, a cosmogony whose terms the film never fixes, evoked as much as built.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, each by a tenth, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short of it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 half a point short, and The Unconcealment at 7.7 eight tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.7, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate on three axes, and by its aggregate, 8.2 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Eraserhead as released for general exhibition in 1977, about 89 minutes, in black and white on 35 mm, from the planet to the white light: written, directed, produced and edited by David Lynch, who also designed the production and made the effects; made at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, with shooting begun in 1972 and spread over about five years; photographed by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell; sound by Lynch and Alan Splet, with a score built from that sound and from Fats Waller’s organ recordings; “In Heaven” written by Lynch and Peter Ivers. With Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates, Judith Anna Roberts, Laurel Near and Jack Fisk. The restoration of 2014, made under Lynch’s supervision, bears on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. No dialogue is quoted, and the one song is named by its title. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the date and length of the first public screening and what was cut after it, the distributor of the first run, how the production was paid for, how the child was made, Henry’s trade, how Lynch came to his next film, and the scene and shot counts and the share of the dialogue.