Henry lives an extraordinarily dismal life and there's pure desolation everywhere he looks. He gets a message one day from a recent ex-girlfriend that she and Henry now have a baby. Henry is forced to wed Mary by her parents. Oh yeah, there's a really big hitch to it. The baby is badly deformed and looks more like an overgrown sperm cell completely wrapped in bandages up to its head. Gee, no apparent symbolism there. Anyway, the girlfriend splits and dumps Henry with the baby who then becomes very sick.
As Henry nurses this sick sperm cell, he has visions of a weird woman in a radiator who sings about how in Heaven, everything is "just fine" and (symbolically depicted) his head is now being used to make pencil erasers. Yeah.
Personally, my take on it... (silence please) I think Henry has a brain tumor, losing his memory, and is dying. The desolation, holes in the roof, the title (duh), and a woman with bloated cheeks singing about how great Heaven is. Go figure. A very dark and moody movie that can be endlessly speculated about.
A great bit of trivia about this film is that it took David Lynch forever to finish it, either he had time constraints, was running low on funds, etc. So it was filmed over quite a long time. There's actually a scene where Henry walks through a door and an entire year has passed when he comes out on the other side. Quite unfortunate for the actor playing Henry who had to keep the strange hairdo he sports in the film for that long of a time, just for a movie. Now, that's a serious dedication to your craft. A true cult classic.
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