Swarming Spermatozoa!

Even more than Blue Velvet, when I first saw it in the ’80s on VHS, David Lynch’s nonnarrative 1977 nightmare, Eraserhead, scratched an itch in my imagination. Here were my two favorite genres, horror and science fiction, spied through a murky crevice of the underground, a perv-o-licious perspective that forever altered my taste in movies. Out of similar fissures, the philosophic horror shows of David Cronenberg would strike deeper and sustain me longer, and I would come to find Lynch’s Hollywood Hallucination mode his richest (Inland Empire included). But Eraserhead came first, its swarming spermatozoa impregnating a love of the avant-garde that rapidly metastasized. See film section for other Lynch titles playing this week. Ends Dec. 6.
Fri., Nov. 30, 7 & 9:15 p.m., 2007