Eraserhead (1977) by David Lynch - (7/10)

Eraserhead is one hell of a way to start a career as a director. It is a Freudian nightmare, made more horrifying by the fact that David Lynch allegedly didn’t remember writing it, David Lynch has said that that it is his most spiritual film and that no one understands it the way that he does and I am going to agree with because as far as I can tell it is about sexual repression.

It is a story about a simple guy Henry Spenser who is on vacation and lives in an industrial wasteland of sorts. His estranged girlfriend suddenly calls him up, invites him to dinner and after a pretty odd gathering he is notified that she is pregnant with what he is assured is a human child. She gives birth to something that one would be really, pressed to call human. The thing scream the whole night, eventually his girlfriend abandons them. Also he lusts after the woman living next door and at night the woman in the radiator sings that in heaven everything is all right. He winds up killing his child. I would say that sex and sexual desires are a bad thing. It is an unsettling experience to say the least even if your interpretations are completely different from mine. It doesn’t matter, Eraserhead is an unsettling but interesting place to be.

Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch – (4/10)

I cannot say that I ever really got the appeal of Blue Velvet, I love Dennis Hopper’s, brilliant sex crazed, perverted, gas-huffing character just as much as the next guy. Otherwise I feel that the whole is too bland, unmemorable and frankly “normal”. I find very little appeal, the whole just feels like a sub par, test-drive for the brilliant Twin Peaks series. The idyllic American suburbia coupled with a seedy underbelly and madness are present here as well but in such a dull, standard way that very little of it sticks me as memorable or exiting. I much prefer the sugary, soap-opera style, inhabited by the clinically insane thing that Twin Peaks series had over this. Luckily David Lynch just kept getting better and better over time.

INLAND EMPIRE (2006) by David Lynch – (9/10)

INLAND EMPIRE is not a movie, it is a nightmare manifested on celluloid, debating its meaning is pointless because I am almost certain that even David Lynch has no idea on any conscience level as to what it is all about. It seems to make sense for the first hour or so and you think that you will understand it but you won’t because after that it all just starts falling apart, it becomes, a maze, nightmare, a hallucination and vision. It is not a movie, it is an experience through which you have to live, it is a baptise by fire that works on a purely subconscious level. It is a masterpiece, that David Lynch has been working his whole like towards. It is a pure expression of something, only we do not know of what. You have to experience it for yourself, it is a force of nature.