The alcoholic actor Jack Nance (born 21 Dec 1943) gained world-wide fame from his starring role as Henry Spencer in David Lynch's 1978 anti-industrial manifesto Eraserhead. Nance brilliantly portrayed a despairing Ultimate Everyman driven to infanticide in a mercilessly bleak parallel world built from the rusting carcass of our industrial civilization. Nance's character is a repressed, frightened little man who is unable to sustain relationships with women. Henry is sexually dysfunctional, as evidenced by his near-continual leaking of individual worm-size genetically mutated sperm. However, Henry has *fathered* a child with his sometimes-girlfriend (the virging?) Mary. Their baby, the film suggests, was conceived when Mary came into contact with one of Henry's leaked sperm while she lay writhing in an orgasmic masturbatory frenzy on a bed she shared with the impotent Henry. Hence, in an inversion of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, Henry is shown to be the *spiritual father* of the messiah of the dying industrial world.
But Henry's savior child turns out to be a hideous genetic freak—perhaps symbolic of Lynch's belief that techno-industrial man is no longer a fit vessel for the Spirit of God. In any event, Henry is abandoned by Mary and left to care for the deformed infant. The infant cries continuously, but Henry is unable to respond in any meaningful way and he grows increasingly anxious and panicked—again, perhaps representing Lynch's belief that the frenetic nature of techno-industrial life is the result of man distancing himself from nature and God. In the end, unable to recognize the infant's cries as anything other than a threat to his own feeble existence, Henry pierces the baby's side with a pair of scissors—thus in the hyper-speed of techno-industrial life, the savior is executed just days after birth.
Jack Nance was murdered on 31 December 1996, just one day after sustaining a head injury in an alcohol-fueled doughnut shop brawl. Oddly, in a case of truly Lynchian weirdness, Nance's Eraserhead character may have been the spiritual father of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Eraserhead was released shortly before Kaczynski's first amateurish attack in 1978. Did Kaczynski see Eraserhead? Kaczynski, like Eraserhead's Henry Spencer, was never able to sustain a relationship with a woman. What did Kaczynski make of the the bizarre pencil eraser experiments made on Henry's brain, did they remind him of the own psychological experiments performed on him while he was a student at Harvard? Significantly, while working in a machine shop in Chicago (a microcosm of Eraserhead's techno-industrial world), Kaczynski's awkward sexual advances were rebuffed by a female co-worker. Humiliated, Kaczynski fled to the pre-industrial wilderness of Montana.
Did Kaczynski ponder the anti-industrial imagery of Eraserhead? Did Lynch's cry for a redeemer of the techno-industrial world resonate deep within Kaczynski's own soul? Did Kaczynski identify with the sexually feeble Henry? Did he identify with Henry's impulse to murder? We will never know the answers to these questions.
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