Eraserhead and Masculinity by Dylan Price
Eraserhead and Masculinity With a “nebbish” young man in the lead role, by Dylan Price David Lynch’s Eraserhead followed this insecurity, leading its viewers into the disturbingly relat- Dylan Price is a Psychology—Pre-Med major from able tale of Henry Spencer, his not-so-loving wife Lawton, Oklahoma who wrote this essay in the “Modern Mary X, and their grotesque progeny (Gross d12). Monsters” class taught by David Long. Supported by appearances from the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, the Lady in the Radiator, the X The Sordid Seventies, the Scary Seventies, the Sur- family, and bookend cameos from the Man in the real Seventies—all such alliterative aliases could Planet, the flm portrays Henry and his family in be reasonably ascribed to the decade that former a surreal, Lynchian2 kitchen-sink reality, shining a President Jimmy Carter famously believed to have light of inevitability on the shadowy conceptualiza- inspired a “crisis of confdence” (Graebner 157). tion of gender roles in the 1970s and the perceived This was a time when the sexual revolution and the castration of the male persona. women’s liberation movement drew the ire of more Eraserhead is a unique flm, even among traditionally minded men nationwide, with the Lynch’s strange flmography. It is probably the male gaze giving the evil eye to the women who most perplexing flm of his career, and its grip decided that they had what it takes to do the jobs on reality is tenuous at best. Like most flms that men had already been doing. Men, traditionally Lynch directed, it has been pulled apart and dis- the sole source of income—the so-called bread- sected repeatedly, but it still maintains an air of winners—would potentially now have to compete mystery, often considered to be so disturbing that with their wives, their neighbors, their neighbors’ many would prefer to latch on to the frst inter- wives, and any other woman who had in her head pretation that they agree with and move on.
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