The world is full of noise. On David Lynch and Alan Splet’s score for Eraserhead, that noise is the industrial chaos of a blue-collar nightmare.
The score begins with howling winds and a slow, low rumbling like the maw of the earth opening to consume everything in its path. Metal clicks enter. Then, as the jaws widen, an industrial cascade emerges. Whirring engines, blowtorches, factory whistles, and more crawl out in a slowly building morass. A machine falters, a hungry dog barks.
The one constant throughout is a droning roar, noisy and static. No matter what mundane events the film impersonates, the buzzing persists, slowly wearing away at the film’s characters and viewers alike until sanity is completely eroded. Before long, the film’s setting – some crumbling unnamed Rust Belt city – becomes an increasingly surreal and bizarre horror.
At times, the score shows the last dying remnants of a cultured world as its final gasps are enveloped by an overwhelming mundanity. Organ music meanders in and out of the background, dark and muddied, fading and garbled, as if playing from a worn and skipping phonograph in a faraway room. Eventually it coalesces into “In Heaven,” whose lyrics offer an illusion of hope to those listening.
Although “in heaven, everything is fine,” to reach it the inhabitants of Eraserhead must first endure the sonic hell that Lynch and Splet have created.
