David Lynch’s two visions of life

“In heaven, everything is fine . . .”

Either this line means nothing to you, or it calls to mind the uniquely awful—and awfully unique—dread of Eraserhead. Such was the influence of the surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, who passed away this week shortly after evacuating from the LA fires: his films were, if nothing else, an experience not soon forgotten.

In my college years, I became fascinated with the auteur’s work, in particular his first and second feature films: Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. As various tributes to Lynch begin cropping up, I can’t help but return to these two films and see in them two competing visions of life.

Eraserhead is quite possibly the most unsettling thing ever put on screen (warning: summary to follow). Filmed in stark black and white and brimming with strange ambient noise, it’s a journey into the bleak world of Henry Spencer—a cold and lonely industrial landscape where human warmth and personal connection are utterly absent. That this world is like our own, yet also decidedly and disturbingly not, becomes apparent rather quickly: Henry visits his girlfriend Mary’s house, where he’s invited to stick a carving fork into a cooked baby chicken—which then wriggles and spurts blood. Whatever there is of a plot revolves around Henry and his girlfriend struggling to care for their child: an alien-like infant whose swaddling clothes turn out to be part of its body. Other deformed figures inexplicably appear—a “Man in the Planet” ominously pulling levers from afar, a “Lady in the Radiator” in 50s get-up (the singer of “In heaven”) stepping on sperm-like creatures—and various disturbing and surreal dream-like sequences culminate in Henry killing the alien child.

The film is a veritable field day for psychoanalysis, and various theories have been put forward about what it all means (if anything at all). But one thing is certain: Eraserhead captures, like perhaps no other film before or after, a vision of life as alienation. The world becomes an utterly foreign field of dark forces with no meaning or purpose, overwhelming the subject and filling him with dread. Typically this alienation is associated with existentialism—Sartre, Camus, and company—but Lynch’s film also overlaps with that other great worldview of alienation, which the scholar Hans Jonas compared to existentialism: Gnosticism.

For the Gnostics, the world is a great “design of darkness to appall,” as Frost wrote. Wine, animal flesh, and especially sex and babies are means of entrapment in this world, and the human spirit is called to escape it through abstinence and especially gnosis (knowledge). The film’s sense of disgust and dread toward meat, sex, procreation, and all things natural suggests Gnostic overtones, whether intended or not. (It’s worth noting that Lynch has called Eraserhead his “most spiritual movie” and said that a verse in the Bible pulled its meaning together for him. Though he never disclosed which verse, perhaps it’s one the Gnostics were also fond of.)

Contrast this vision of life with The Elephant Man, Lynch’s second directorial feature (whose screenplay he also co-wrote), which follows the life of the severely deformed Englishman John Merrick. Like his debut feature, The Elephant Man is shot in stark black and white, features strange dream sequences, and revolves around themes of deformity and the darkness of the human experience. But the film marks a dramatic shift from surrealism to direct storytelling—and more importantly, from alienation to something more beautiful and true enveloping it.

We see Merrick’s use and abuse at the hands of a cruel ringmaster, who makes of Merrick a freak to be displayed, gawked at, and mocked. But the film doesn’t leave us sunken in the darkness and disorientation of the world. Treves, a London surgeon played by Anthony Hopkins, takes Merrick in, and things begin to change. In one scene—one of the most powerful in film history—Treves hopes to show his superior that Merrick isn’t mentally incapacitated. The latter is unimpressed, as Merrick simply parrots things Treves has taught him, including lines from Psalm 23.

But suddenly Merrick goes beyond what he’s been “taught” and continues reciting the Psalm, revealing his rich inner world to the two men. In its most famous scene, Merrick is chased down by a crowd in a London subway, where he cries out for recognition of his own dignity even more than his survival: “I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being!”

Through Treves’ intervention, Merrick comes to experience authentic friendship and love, and a place to call home. “I am happy every hour of the day,” he tells Treves. “My life is full because I know that I am loved.” And while the film also ends in death—Merrick lays down to sleep, effectively sealing his fate—it is, unlike Eraserhead, a death marked by great hope. At the film’s close, Merrick’s mother quotes Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Nothing Will Die”:

Never, oh! never, nothing will die;
The stream flows,
The wind blows,
The cloud fleets,
The heart beats,
Nothing will die.

Andrew Petiprin remarked—and I agree—that this is “one of the most beautiful movies ever made,” and a “portrait of the indomitability of human dignity.” And at its heart is a vision of life not as alienation but as communion—a communion between humanity, the world below, and heaven above: “Surely goodness and loving kindness shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Both Eraserhead and The Elephant Man capture something deep in the human experience. But which is the truer depiction of reality? Is life an absurd horror show? Or is it a valley of tears in and through which we’re called to a higher communion—one of dignity, beauty, and love?

Lynch, who was raised Presbyterian, seems to have reconciled these two visions of life by fusing them: he became a devotee of transcendental meditation, finding the peace of communion in and through a kind of escape of the world below. But is transcendental meditation enough to answer the deep questions about reality his oeuvre raises? Doesn’t the great pain and apparent senselessness of reality continually confront us time and again, no matter how much inner stillness we might cultivate?

This world is either a cruel absurdity or it is building toward something, either a sea of meaningless “stuff” or a womb in meaningful labor pains. It cannot be both. And while Lynch will perhaps always be remembered as a great surrealist, and films like Eraserhead do mirror back to us something of the strangeness of reality and our anguish within it, The Elephant Man may just be his most important contribution to film in the end—and the closest he came to displaying the truth of things through the art of cinema.