PARENTS
With Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Bryan Madorsky, Sandy Dennis, Juno Mills-Cockell, Kathryn Grody, Deborah Rush, and Graham Jarvis.
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One of the clear benefits of this background is his deft handling of actors–not only professionals like Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, and Sandy Dennis, but the inexperienced Bryan Madorsky, who plays the movie’s ten-year-old hero, Michael, and the only partially experienced Juno Mills-Cockell, who plays his best friend. The unexpected, lyrical freshness of Madorsky and Mills-Cockell is effectively set off by the mannerist caricatures of Quaid and Hurt, as the hero’s parents, and by Dennis, who plays a neurotic but sympathetic grammar-school psychologist. Dennis’s character exists halfway between the kids and the parents, sharing the shy awkwardness of the former and the age and size of the latter.
Consider the movie’s extended opening, which deftly establishes Balaban’s unusual approach to atmosphere and narrative continuity. As the credits begin, set to the strains of that nauseating 50s pop instrumental, “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” we see aerial shots of endless reaches of identical ranch-style houses, succeeded by a huge close-up of the front of a moving blue 50s-era Oldsmobile; the film’s title appears over the grille and then breaks apart, like taffy or chewing gum.
It’s not difficult to accept Michael’s parents as metaphorical cannibals whose appetites for food and sex are somehow intertwined. All the other adults in the community–apart from Millie Dew (Sandy Dennis), the school psychologist–including Michael’s teacher and Nick and Lily’s friends, are equally grotesque and sinister, as is the world that they inhabit and the culture they espouse. (Nick is a defoliant expert at a plant called Toxico.) But when Michael’s nightmares prove to be real, and we’re asked to accept Nick and Lily as literal cannibals (unlike their neighbors), the poetic metaphor no longer applies–the clanking machinery of formulaic horror movies takes over, complete with accompanying cliches. Even in a satirical context, the notions of secrecy and paranoia appear a bit displaced: in the late 50s, when the film is set, Nick’s work as a defoliant expert would have been more secret than the movie makes it out to be; instead the movie’s notion of secrecy is restricted to the home–to Nick and Lily’s sexuality and cannibalism, which are treated as being related satirically (if not literally) to Nick’s profession. The problem, in other words, is that the film’s uses of satire and poetic metaphors, its plot and its “program,” aren’t always compatible.
Broadly speaking, in Eraserhead as well as in Blue Velvet, Lynch remains an “apolitical” filmmaker, which in the context of the 70s and 80s means a politically conservative one: resolutely nonanalytical, virtually Manichaean in his treatment of women (all of whom are either “good” girls or “bad”–i.e., sexy), a biological determinist in his view of sex and procreation, a voyeuristic puritan in relation to both sex and violence (which, in Blue Velvet, go together like ham and eggs), and a reactionary in his purely nostalgic relation to the past. The fact that he nonetheless appeals more to liberals than to conservatives can perhaps be explained by the kinkiness of his worldview, a kinkiness that is almost impossible to find in leftist artists.
