FILM NOTEBOOK

Horror 
has 
always 
been 
a 
genre 
of 
extremes. 
It’s 
something of a self-fulfilling 
prophecy; 
it’s 
difficult 
to 
evoke fear from that which is 
familiar, so horror filmmakers 
find themselves locked in a 
never-ending search for the 
bloodiest, 
the 
goriest 
and 
the scariest. This proverbial 
arms race has led the genre to 
feel a bit oversaturated, with 
many horror films prioritizing 
shock value over quality and 
depth. It’s no slight against 
these films, as they certainly 
have their place in the popular 
entertainment canon, but one 
couldn’t be faulted for hoping 
for an alternative. Enter David 
Lynch.
Lynch 
is 
horror’s 
Andy 
Warhol: 
an 
enigmatic, 
white-haired 
virtuoso 
with 
a penchant for the bizarre. 
Operating on the fringe is 
Lynch’s 
modus 
operandi, 
originally making a name for 
himself on the midnight movie 
circuit that gained cult fame 
in the ’70s. These screenings, 
which started as a place for 
low-budget genre films, would 
eventually become a hotbed for 
some of cinema’s most bizarre 
and inventive films that would 
have never been funded by a 
major studio. Lynch produced 
his directorial debut, 1977’s 
“Eraserhead,” during his time 
studying at the American Film 
Institute, and would go on to 
blow up the midnight circuit, 
running for 99 consecutive 
weeks. 
The film tells the story of 
Henry 
(Jack 
Nance, 
“Lost 
Highway”), 
a 
young 
man 
whose one-night stand leaves 

him forced to raise a grossly 
deformed baby in a hyper-
industrial 
urban 
hellscape. 
It’s not only one of Lynch’s 
most iconic and recognizable 
films, but also a quintessential 
example 
of 
Lynch’s 
iconic 
horror 
style. 
Watch 
“Eraserhead” and you’ll find no 
jump scares, no dissonant string 
quartet; that’s just not Lynch’s 
style, which recognizes fear as 
a deep, complex emotion that 

deserves exploration beyond 
just cheap tricks and gotcha 
moments. 
In 
“Eraserhead”’s 
runtime, audiences are treated 
to a factory that turns brains 
into erasers, a cabaret girl with 
severe facial deformities and a 
limbless, lizard-like baby that 
cries 24/7. 
Most 
horror 
movies 
tell 
stories about scary situations 
happening 
in 
our 
world. 
They’re 
meant 
to 
leave 
audiences with that nagging 
thought 
that 
maybe, 
just 
maybe, this could happen to 
them. Lynch, however, defies 
this convention entirely. The 
world of “Eraserhead” is like 
our world gone insane; Lynch 

isn’t trying to scare you so 
much as he’s trying to make 
you extremely uncomfortable. 
Lynch’s 
cinematography 
purposely defies the typical 
“rhythm” of horror movies, 
forgoing 
the 
short, 
jumpy 
shots meant to build suspense. 
Rather, Lynch’s camera lingers 
on characters as they twitch 
and convulse, often in silence. 
There’s a realness to this style, 
and as a result, “Eraserhead” 
feel 
less 
like 
watching 
a 
scary movie and more like 
accidentally stumbling through 
a portal into a hellish alternate 
reality. 
Lynchian horror is effective 
because 
it 
toys 
with 
our 
expectations. It is at once 
both 
disturbingly 
bizarre 
and 
uncannily 
familiar. 
This dissonance is powerful 
and can make Lynch’s films 
viscerally difficult to watch. 
Lynch’s films upset the most 
basal part of us, the part that 
has observed an order and 
wants to see that order upheld. 
Lynch’s films take this order 
and warp it into deformity; the 
worlds his film occupies are 
like ours gone horribly wrong. 
While fans have long argued 
over Lynch’s messaging, he’s 
refused 
to 
ever 
comment 
publicly about the meaning of 
“Eraserhead,” leaving fans to 
find their own meaning in the 
insanity. Lynch’s penchant for 
secrecy expanded to his props, 
never revealing how he made 
“Eraserhead”’s deformed baby 
prop — even the actors and set 
crew had to close their eyes 
when he moved it onto the 
set. If you’re sick of the cheap 
tricks this Halloween and you 
want a ruin-your-life kind of 
horror experience, then look no 
further than the works of David 
Lynch.

Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ and 
the art of uncomfortable

MAX MICHALSKY
Daily Arts Writer

FLICKR

Lynch is horror’s 

Andy Warhol: an 

enigmatic, white-

haired virtuoso 

with a penchant 

for the bizarre

For as long as I can remember, 
I’ve always loved scary movies. 
When I was a kid, they had a 
distinct and very physical effect on 
me. I would yell. I would toss away 
the blankets, horrified. I would 
jump off the couch and pray in a 
sort of knowing, mischievous way, 
that the boogie man would not get 
me. That feeling of unfiltered, pure 
fear was ambrosiac to me. It’s a 
kind of rawness I chase every time 
I see a movie. It’s why I’ve never 
stopped watching horror.
Nowadays, I pay attention 
to different aspects of horror 
movies, not the jump scares or the 
cheap tricks, but the narratives 
and what they may say about our 
understanding of fear. My favorites 
of the genre are the movies that 
meant one thing when I saw 
them in childhood and express 
a message entirely new when I 
watch them now. The truth is that, 
of the unhealthy heaps of horror 
I have seen, only one filmmaker 
consummately encapsulates the 
duality between my infantile 
adrenaline-seeking and my more 
mature reinspection: Wes Craven. 
Among the most successful 

horror 
directors, 
Craven 
has 
sustained 
his 
mordantly 
brooding impact in the popular 
consciousness because his work 
transcends any single era of horror. 
From his voyeuristic 1977 cult 
classic “The Hills Have Eyes” to 
his decade-defining “A Nightmare 
on Elm Street” seven years later 
to his cinematically reinventive 
“Scream” in the ’90s, the master 
of his craft has engendered a 
revitalized adoration for horror on 
a multigenerational scale.
Sure, on the surface, Wes 
Craven’s 
filmography 
is 
not 
astoundingly iconoclastic. At its 
core, it is a catalogue of slick grimy 
flicks with psychotic killers and 
(mostly) helpless victims awaiting 
their demises. And that’s not 
necessarily a bad thing.
I 
remember 
watching 
the 
opening scene of “Scream” when 
I was 10. At first, all I could do 
was stare wide-eyed in disbelief, 
an indignant refusal to accept 
the bloody insanity I was seeing. 
Looking back, however, it was 
among the first times my reaction 
to a movie was so involved, so 
intensely visceral. 
In hindsight, that is the first 
solid memory I have of a film — any 
film — leaping so violently out of 
the screen and urging me to reflect 

on the medium outside of simply 
watching it. 

It 
was 
a 
pretty 
scarring 
experience 
that 
I 
probably 
shouldn’t have had so young, but 
it also opened my mind to the 
capability of a movie, horror or not, 

Craven, master of horror

ANISH TAMHANEY
For the Daily

FILM NOTEBOOK

to pull a viewer in so completely.
There was always a layer of Wes 
Craven films that escaped me in 
my first viewings, even though I 
knew it was there, lurking in the 
background. 
I have, time and time again, 
revisited “Scream,” because, in 
myriad ways, it is an indictment 
of the genre itself — its lazy 
clichés, its predictability and its 
sanctimonious parables. On top 
of remaining the somewhat silly 
serial killer movie I’ve always 
cherished, the film is layered 
with metatextual messages in 
practically every line. 
Most memorable for me is 
when Jamie Kennedy is watching 
another horror film, “Halloween” 
and urging Jamie Lee Curtis 
to turn around. “Look behind 
you Jamie, look behind you,” he 
desperately mutters just as the 
very real killer looms behind him. 
A moment that had deeply 
frightened me as a kid had turned 
profoundly 
illuminating. 
This 
wasn’t just a scary movie; it was 
a scary movie that could speak 
volumes about the fallacies of its 

own genre. I often laugh at this 
scene now, not just because of the 
general ridiculousness of the movie 
but because the double-entendre is 
strikingly clever. 
Another gem of the series 
comes from “Scream 2,” in which 
a group of college students in film 
class debate at length about the 
validity of movie sequels. The 
conversation is endlessly hilarious 
because of its interactivity; we, 
as viewers, are forced to evaluate 
our own perceptions of second 
installments. Craven openly plays 
with our own expectations of the 
very movie we are seeing now. It’s 
brilliant.
And while it may be too 
generous to similarly laud the 
additional sequels the franchise, 
they too toy with our reality and its 
relationship to film, establishing 
a cartoonish mirror of our world 
in which the fictional “Stab” film 
series suffuses the fervor of horror 
fans.
Of course, it is impossible to 
discuss the ways in which Craven 
interacts with our reality without 
“A Nightmare on Elm Street,” the 

harrowingly astral gorefest that 
gave birth to an equally famous 
razor-handed antagonist: Freddy 
Krueger. 
His particular brand of evil 
always terrified me more than any 
other because he took advantage 
of a necessity of human behavior: 
sleep. How could I find comfort 
in turning off the TV and tucking 
myself in when I knew the movie’s 
dangers were never really gone?
There’s one line from “Scream” 
that embodies Craven, his outlook 
on cinema and his palpable reach: 
“It’s all a movie. It’s all one great 
big movie.”
The truth is that the source of 
my appreciation of Craven years 
ago and today is one and the same: 
His films are a reflection of my 
relationship with cinema. They 
offer this basic lesson regarding 
our involvement with the screen. 
The more you want out of a film, 
the more you will receive. 
With this realization in mind, 
I will never stop watching Wes 
Craven movies. They remind me 
and can remind all of us of the 
reason we turn on the TV at all. 

DIMENSION FILMS 

When I find myself in times 
of 
trouble, 
Rebecca 
Solnit 
comes to me. But her advice is 
never simply to let it be. Quite 
the opposite, the essays in her 
latest collection “Call Them By 
Their True Names: American 
Crises (and Essays)” encourage 
us to fight, in both word and 
action, against the forces of 
injustice, inequality and apathy 
that threaten the integrity of 
American society.

Solnit is perhaps best known 
for writing on feminism in her 
earlier essay collections “Men 
Explain Things to Me” and 
“The Mother of All Questions,” 
but after writing over 20 books 
and countless essays, Solnit 
proves an insightful observer 
in a diverse range of subjects, 
from environmental activism 
to the history of walking to the 
culture of San Francisco. The 
essays in “Call Them By Their 
True Names” are exemplary of 
Solnit’s omnivorous appetite, 
and her ability to weave her own 
obsessions into a vibrant and 
complex image of American life.
In the both grossly and 
charmingly 
titled 
“Armpit 
Wax,” Solnit meditates on how 
the creation myths of different 
cultures tint the lens through 
which we consider questions 
of 
perfection, 
grace 
and 
redemption; in the more somber 
“Death by Gentrification,” Solnit 
does a deep forensic dive into 

the 2014 police killing of Alex 
Nieto to explore how it reflects 
on larger issues of displacement 
and 
inequity 
in 
rapidly 
gentrifying 
San 
Francisco 
neighborhoods; in “The Ideology 
of Isolation,” Solnit connects 
the American “cowboy ethos” 
of 
rough-and-tumble 
self-
sufficiency to the disintegration 
of objective truth. Somewhere 
in 
this 
nimble 
navigation 
between the historical and the 
contemporary, the philosophical 
and the concrete, Solnit offers 
a 
remarkably 
clear-eyed 
understanding 
of 
American 
society, and pulls off the neat 
trick of untangling some wildly 
complicated 
issues 
into 
a 
comprehensible form without 
ever denying their complexity.
Tying together the disparate 
subjects of these essays is 
Solnit’s interest in the power of 
language, both as a diagnostic 
tool for larger social issues 
and a weapon by which those 
issues can be obscured or 
distorted in the public eye, 
which she identifies as “one 
of the crises of this moment.” 
Though Solnit doesn’t shy away 
from the cerebral and abstract, 
her interest in language is 
deeply practical, coming from 
her history as a progressive 
activist. She writes, “Calling 
things by their true names cuts 
through the lies that excuse, 
buffer, 
muddle, 
disguise, 
avoid or encourage inaction, 
indifference, obliviousness. It’s 
not all there is to changing the 
world, but it’s a key step.”
And “changing the world,” as 
grand a claim as that may seem, is 
the explicit goal of these essays. 
While that may seem naive to 
some, Solnit argues that it’s 
absolutely essential in her essay 
on “Naive Cynicism,” which she 
defines as the attitude that the 
world cannot be transformed 
in any substantial or ideal way, 
and therefore there’s no point 
in trying. Solnit argues that we 
must meet naive cynicism with 
practical idealism in the form 
of action: “What we do begins 
with what we believe we can do. 
It begins with being open to the 
possibilities and interested in 

the complexities.”
This 
prevailing 
emphasis 
on hope, even in the face of 
seemingly 
insurmountable 
obstacles, 
makes 
Solnit 
a 
steady and necessary voice of 
the resistance. While her own 
values 
lie 
unapologetically 
on the far-left of the political 
spectrum, her mission applies 

to anyone seeking a more just, 
more progressive social order, 
with a grounding in evidence-
based reform. In a time when 
every week seems to bring a new 
defeat for minorities, for women 
and for the environment, Solnit 
reminds us that our actions 
matter even when they seem 
trivial.
“Actions 
often 
ripple 
far 
beyond 
their 
immediate 
objective, and remembering this 
is a reason to live by principle 
and act in the hope that what you 
do matters, even when results 
are unlikely to be immediate or 
obvious … You do what you can 
do; you do your best; what what 
you do does is not up to you.”

‘Call Them By Their True 
Names’ is a call to action

JULIA MOSS
Daily Arts Writer

BOOK REVIEW

“Call Them 
By Their 
True Names: 
American 
Crises (and 
Essays)”

Rebecca Solnit

Haymarket Books

Sept. 4, 2018

This prevailing 

emphasis on 

hope, even in the 

face of seemingly 

insurmountable 

obstacles, makes 

Solnit a steady and 

necessary voice of 

the resistance
His particular 

brand of evil 

always terrified 

me more than any 

other because he 

took advantage 

of a necessity of 

human behavior: 

sleep

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Thursday, October 18, 2018 — 5