A science-class project, genuinely underground: the ether on which it floats fixates, repulses, ravishes. David Lynch never explains because he doesn't need to, his is the faith of the irrational, disconcertingly childlike in its illusionism -- Jack Nance, the drudge-hero, appears superimposed over a cosmic maquette, a scarred god operates the levers in a shattered silo, sperm floats out of a mouth and into the muddy earth below. Nance is an anxious, hunched Ollie Hardy with a shocked bouffant, the world is a "pipe hell," monochromatic and diseased and lurching with industrial noises; he is "on vacation" yet must care for the mutant offspring of Charlotte Stewart, his Julie Harrisesque girlfriend. Their newborn consists of a bovine larva, continuously wailing, spitting, and, ultimately, malefically chortling; to season the parental panic with sexual disgust, the provocatively greasy slattern next door (Judith Ann Roberts) spends the night, the smooching couple vanishing into the bathtub's white liquid. An entire book might consist of a laundry list of details: the squeak of puppies feeding on their bitch-mom in the living room of the X household; the awkward silence at the dinner table after mother and daughter run out, screaming at the hemorrhaging carved chicken; an eye, sweatily rubbed in close-up; a worm executes a Svankmajer ballet, opens its maw so the camera can track into the darkness inside, a peek into Dune. In between the copious secretions, Nance yearns for escape -- the spotlight falls on the checkerboard stage behind his radiator, a netherworld within a netherworld, where Heaven is sung about by Laurel Near, the songstress with the swollen puffy cheeks, a signifier of kitschy normalcy flattened, deformed, turned impossible. Mel Brooks loved the lyrical grotesquerie, for he understood Lynch's shuddering hallucinations as instinctual gaggery, the cut from eraser crumbs being blown from a desk to pollen seeds magically spreading over a black background -- the abstract artist's trajectory from dark life to blanched death, crude and flowing, offering to link with the viewer's subconscious until you're part of its dreams. With Jeanne Bates, Allen Joseph, and Jack Fisk. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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