not my first go around with eraserhead but the first time, I was too inebriated to soak in anything thematically and tonally other than the generalized sense of anxiety in regards to the world at large and parenthood,
this time around, the barren emptiness of every surface, nook and cranny of the environment aligned itself with the almost alien planet surface quality of some of the more abstracted imagery here and I felt a pang of cosmic dread come together…
i only choose to review this through an explicitly trans(fem) angle right now because that's the bulk of the experience i had watching this and i'd feel sort of neutered talking abt this from any other (completely reasonable) gendered perspective
the developmental body horror present in this movie reminded me of my own male puberty in a disarming way; i didn't go into this with the expectation to feel as vulnerable as this made me feel; sexual desire as mystifying,…
there's this incidental nature to the happenings throughout this movie, a sloppiness and truly electrifying nature to the tonal texture the soundtrack brings about; metal songs blaring in scenes where characters are running for their life, bizarro Gothic synthpop elevating the surrealism of scenes that were already unhinged
it's chaotic and because of that aforementioned incidental and sloppy feeling able to be genuinely nightmarish in a way i can't say abt the previous movies I've described that way; it feels…
could have been much better but
it, at certain scenes, completely froze me in a way that i cannot deny, it instilled fear in me through the portrayal of donnie's gym teacher and jim cunningham and donnie's character himself; one that i find myself relating to and through that there's a really scary element to the movie, but i also think his characterization and portrayal maybe goes in the wrong direction at certain points
