Silent Hill Chat

[Sacred Jellybean]

The stabbing of the baby was euthenasia. Henry removes the bandages and sees only organs underneath. Not only was his (premature) baby a mutant, but the bandages were literally the only thing holding it together. I think Henry panics, and I probably would have done the same thing. Okay, I'd probably just call a hospital or let it die, stabbing it is kind of extreme, but euthenasia would have been on my mind from the moment I laid eyes on that baby.



Honestly, the movie didn't fall into place until someone explained to me that the white lines inside Henry are sperms. The opening shot is of him, horizontal, looking off into the distance, always so somber and thoughtful. Jack Nance has a presence that could not have been emulated by any other I think. He's a big reason why the movie is so strong.



A little man at a control panel pulls a level and releases the sperm. Then the real opening begins, with Henry walking home from his job at the printing press. He passes by chain link fences, smoke stacks, abandoned buildings. He steps in a puddle.

He goes upstairs into a tiny room with a window that looks straight out into a brick wall. He takes off his sock and puts it on the radiator and tries to relax. He goes to his dresser and takes out a torn up picture of his ex girlfriend, Mary. She left a message for him, an invitation to dinner.

He goes on over to her house, and I love the exchange that they have.

"You're late, Henry."

"I didn't know if you wanted me to come or not. Where've you been?"

"..."

"You never come around any more."



"... ... Dinner's almost ready."



It sounds campy on paper but the performances really drive it home. The whole script is only something like five pages, the rest comes from Lynch's imagination, which I think is impressive.

Mary's family is even creepier. Women seem to domineer Henry. Her mother doesn't cut him any slack, she chews him out. Mary panics, mother brushes her hair.

The father is sort of a good ol' boy hillbilly. He rants to Henry, a train passes by, shaking the whole house as though the track were overhead. "I LAID EVERY DAMN PIPE IN THIS TOWN!" he yells, and you don't know if he's angry or just excited.

The dinner scene is a money shot in its own. "Try these new chickens, man-made," the father explains. Henry cuts into them and the legs move, blood spurts out between them, it's a little chicken abortion but oh, no egg.




The mother flips out and runs from the table, Mary follows. The two men are left speechless. Minutes of awkward silence pass between Henry and the father. Film makers these days don't drag shots out and let them linger. You can see that as a means of efficiency (the attention span for movie viewers is probably at an all-time low) but the scene feels pregnant to me. Not disturbing, but awkward.

"Well, Henry, what do you know?"

"Oh... I don't know much of anything..."

"..."



The mother returns and asks to speak to Henry alone.

"Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse?"

He tries to bat away the question but the mother tells him it's a baby.

"Mom, they're not even sure it is a baby," Mary sobs.

"It's premature, but it's a baby alright. After the two of you are married which should be very soon, you can see it."



The next scene is them home with the baby. Henry returns and almost tries to be happy, but Mary is frustrated. The baby won't eat. The baby won't stop crying, she can't sleep. She's fed up and leaves.

Henry is tasked of taking care of the baby. More scenes go by that don't make sense, there's a scene with a worm I don't understand. Henry has an affair with the woman next door. He delves down with her into a primordial soup, a kind of "from chaos rises order" symbol. Though he's going down, not rising.

I don't know if the sex was supposed to make him feel whole again but he has a vision. His head drops down and falls onto a street, outside in some alley. A little boy runs up and steals the head before a dying homeless man can stop him. The boy brings the him to the factory. The foreman thanks him and they go to drill inside the head and extract little pencils. Eraserheads.



Is the message that society will grind us down into nothing but tools for the corporate fools, maaaaan? Just a bunch of cogs in the MACHINE? That seems to be the message, and even if sophomoric, Lynch has an eye for showing it visually that's still interesting.

Henry awakens and finds the woman next door with another man, he's crushed, did he think he was replacing Mary or what? They laugh at him and his head becomes that of the baby. Does he feel humiliated for being a single father?

There's lots more to look at, there's the woman in the radiator. I've already typed a lot but that's a weird reoccurring symbol. She seems like a matriarch. She has two large ovaries on her face. "In Heaven, everything is fine," she croons, then she giggles and stomps on more of the little sperm things.



If you had to ascribe a specific meaning, it's as though he wants to regress back into childhood. Perhaps he had a strong relationship with his mother. And she's there, stomping the sperms, the thing that made Henry miserable to begin with.

You see the same woman at the end of the film, which I think is Henry's death. Everything goes white. You see her gentle smile. Henry and her embrace. It's one of the few times you get to see him feel peaceful, then the movie ends in white mist.





I've already typed a lot, but I want to mention how much I love the score to this movie. Lots of ambient noises: electricity buzzing, trains running in the distance, faint carnival type music. It has a rhythm to it all. As a friend put it, "I love the tempo to this movie."

I think it's Lynch's most interesting piece. I like to watch it at night to get the full effect, and it always puts me in a mood. Any film that can keep me in its spell after the reels have ended gets a good grade from me. His films tend to work on a weird sort of dream logic, and it may or may not resonate.



I saw Lost Highway for instance and didn't care much for it. Same with Muholland Drive. I know other Lynch fans love those movies, though. So I would say it's subjective even among his fanbase.

If surreal art isn't your game, he has other straightforward movies. The Elephant Man is excellent. Mel Brooks was so impressed by Eraserhead that he asked Lynch to direct the movie. Blue Velvet is another, a flick about a high school boy who gets in over his head when he witnesses a crime. It starts with him finding an ear in a field. Honestly, it was kind of boring. It's not that Lynch can't do conventional. Twin Peaks is mostly conventional, with moments of surreality thrown in.

I was thinking of typing a Twin Peaks post too, so perhaps some time next week. If you do get into it, let me tell you -- it gets better after the first episode. It's an hour-and-a-half TV premiere. Perhaps if I knew I was getting into a movie-length thing, I wouldn't have bailed. But I got bored and shelved it for months.

Once I got through that, though, I was pretty much hooked by the end of episode 2. It gets only better from there. It climaxes during season two, when the network pressured Lynch to reveal the killer. It gets... bad after that. Very bad. I think they come up with guest writers/directors, other than the David Lynch / Mark Frost partnership that forged the thing. The show doesn't really redeem itself until the last episode, which Lynch stepped back in to direct, and OH THANK YOU for at least giving us a sweet farewell. It made slogging through those last episodes worth it.