Now here’s a bit of civic statuary I wholeheartedly support

July 30th, 2009 at 02:20pm Will Pfeifer

I had this same poster hanging over my bed in college. No kidding.

Juliet Wayne wants to see a statue in Philadelphia that honors a genuine local icon, and she makes a strong case. Here’s the beginning of her impassioned argument:

Philadelphia has a problem with its statuary: we build lavish monuments to to the wrong people while letting the right ones go unmarked. We have statues of people who polarized us (Frank Rizzo), who could have cared less about us (Charles Dickens) or who never existed (Rocky Balboa). Meanwhile, we overlook people who logged real time here and did great things.

This problem has a solution: put a big-ass statue of the title character from the movie ERASERHEAD, directed by former Philadelphia resident David Lynch, at the corner of 13th and Wood.

That’s where Lynch lived for several years in the 1970s as an unhappy undergraduate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But if you’ve seen any of his films, particularly ERASERHEAD, it is obvious that the city deeply inspired him, which he recalls through “vivid images—plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows, walking through the morgue en-route to a hamburger joint.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, if such a statue were erected, I would make a pilgrimage to Philadelphia to see it. Right there, that’s a couple of hundred tourist dollars in the city coffers.

Here’s the rest of Wayne’s essay, which has the straightforward title “David Lynch Must Be Honored in Philadelphia with a Giant Monument to the Guy From Eraserhead. For Real.

That guy, incidentally, was named “Henry.” He was played by the late Jack Nance, who also had roles in other Lynch projects, including TWIN PEAKS and BLUE VELVET.

Entry Filed under: directors, Cult movies, Just plain weird