Grant/Oeler/Eraserhead

I’m writing a piece about the suburb in crime fiction at the moment, and so today I read the first half of Cathryn Grant’s 2011 debut novel The Demise of the Soccer Moms. Grant specializes in what she calls “suburban noir…where the mundane is menacing” and this is a good description of both the setting and the tone of the novel. Moms set in Sunnyvale, CA and its main characters are a group of mothers whose children all attend the same elementary school and play soccer on the same teams. What most of them also have in common is, to one degree or another, what Brian Massumi has called "everyday fear," which manifests itself in various ways and with varying degrees of justification. Whether it’s a generalized fear of impending disaster, fear of sexual assault and violence, fear of losing one’s husband, fear for one’s children, fear that one is unattractive is isolated, this novel is a virtual compendium of the fears that define life for so many in the contemporary United States. As you read through the novel, any doubt one may have had about suburbia being a good setting for a crime novel is replaced by the following question: how can so many writers have neglected such a promising setting for so long?!

I also read the next fifty pages of Karla Oeler’s A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. In this section of the book, Oeler continues her focus on montage but also turns her attention to acting, partly because of her interest in what the nexus between murder and representation suggests for film’s ability to represent subjectivity: “Murder is an allegory of representation: if murder (legally, axiologically) hinges on the stark negation of an individual, cinema, which must represent the victim with discursive techniques that can never fully comprehend a human being, courts complicity with the murders it depicts. But at the same time, murder can paradoxically endow the victim with a referential fullness…Murder scenes are thus poised between reducing and registering the person implied by the storied victim.” A large part of Oeler’s interest in montage in general and Eisenstein in particular, then, derives from the complex ways in which this technique and this director both erase and suggest individual subjective interiority in both actors and characters. “The promise of montage lies in its power to draw attention to, or scrutinize, reifying signification…Scenes of deadly violence can powerfully index the inadequacy of the victim’s representation, aesthetic and political. But when characters are put to death because of their irrevocable placement in an abstract social category, and the scene of their murder does little to shake the historical identity imposed upon them, montage threatens to squander its promise.”

Have you ever had one of those days where you wake up and feel like watching some David Lynch? This happened to me today and so I decided to revisit Eraserhead, his legendary first full-length feature. I first saw this film in 1980 when I was sixteen years old and needless to say I had never seen anything like it. I’m now fifty years old and I’ve still never seen anything like it. I could summarize what happens in the film, but that would do nothing to convey what it’s like to see Eraserhead, which is one of those rare films that needs to be not only seen but also heard; its sound contributes to its meaning and impact just as much as its images. Two things stood out for me on this particular viewing. Firstly, now that I’m a parent, the film’s obsessive and paranoid examination of reproduction and parenthood has a power I could never have anticipated as a teenager. Secondly, thanks to Lynch’s reputation as an auteur, his actors can often receive short shrift, and nowhere in his oeuvre is this more true than in Eraserhead. And yet Jack Nance’s portrayal of Henry is miraculous. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s one of the greatest performances in film history. Of all the unforgettable things in Eraserhead, Nance is the most indelible.