Cinema Weirdité

Eraserhead was the holy grail of David Lynch films for me and my friends in high school. We'd all seen Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, were obsessed with Twin Peaks, and had even managed to find a copy of The Elephant Man hiding in the stacks at Hastings. But Eraserhead...

By Jennifer Elaine-Davis

October 25, 2007

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Eraserhead was the holy grail of David Lynch films for me and my friends in high school. We'd all seen Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, were obsessed with Twin Peaks, and had even managed to find a copy of The Elephant Man hiding in the stacks at Hastings. But Eraserhead eluded us. Before the days of Amazon.com, there just wasn't a lot you could do to find "avant-garde" flicks in a small town where most video stores consisted of 30 copies of Dirty Dancing and 12 of Top Gun. We made it our goal to find a copy of the damn movie, and one night, while other teenagers were out roping steers or cruising the drag, we went through the phone book and called every video store in town. We finally found it at a store outside the military base more prone to carrying things like Emmanuelle II than the oeuvre of David Lynch, but whatever. We high-tailed it out there, made popcorn and spent the next hour and a half wondering what the hell was going on. You might not have to do quite the amount of work we did to see the thing, but I challenge you to explain that movie to me without using the words "It's really a visual piece". You'll get your chance midnight Friday and Saturday during the Inwood Theatre's (5458 W. Lovers Lane) presentation of the 1977 Lynch flick. Tickets are $9.25. Visit landmarktheatres.com.
Fri., Nov. 2; Sat., Nov. 3, 2007

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