The Elephant Man
With so much focus paid to the surreal narrative complexities of his work, it’s easy to lose sight of just how much humanity David Lynch can approach his characters with. I’ve revisited a great number of his works in the past couple years, between rewatching “Twin Peaks” for its 2017 revival, as well as for a recent episode of the podcast I did with some friends on his work, and the compassion he has for people like Laura Palmer or Dorothy Vallens or Henry Spencer is potent and right up front to see. It had been about 15 years since I last watched his 1980 follow-up to “Eraserhead,” “The Elephant Man,” and despite internet issues causing a less-than-ideal streaming experience, the film’s emotional hold occurred just as strongly as it did on that initial viewing.
David Lynch is an ideal filmmaker to tell the story of Joseph Merrick (in the film, referred to as John Merrick), a severely deformed man who was taken around the world as a circus freak attraction known as The Elephant Man by the opportunistic Bytes (Freddie Jones) before Merrick was discovered by Frederick Treves, a surgeon in the London Hospital, who takes him away from Bytes after Merrick was abused, and gives him a home in the isolation ward where Treves can study him. Over time, Treves and Merrick form a connection beyond just doctor and patient, and we begin to see the humanity of Merrick beyond the deformity. However, are Treves’s motivations solely from a desire to help Merrick, or is he looking to exploit him like Bytes did?
This is a hauntingly beautiful film to watch, and the images of Victorian London during the industrial revolution are an perfect extension of the surreal world Lynch created in “Eraserhead.” The stark black-and-white cinematography by Freddie Francis illuminates the dark nature of Merrick’s world, and creates a dream-like vision of production designer Stuart Craig’s turn-of-the-century London that finds permanent residence in our memories as Merrick finds himself pulled out of the squalor of London into a hospital that doesn’t look much better, but still gives him a quality of life he did not have before. Lynch begins the film with a hallucinatory image of Merrick’s mother- whom John keeps a picture of- being trampled by elephants, indicative of the tall tale Bytes tells in his introduction of him, but just as maddeningly disturbing from the director are the scenes when a hospital orderly, Jim, sneaks people in to see Merrick, turning him into a sideshow attraction all over again. The lack of recognition on the part of the Oscars of the remarkable makeup work the film did to turn John Hurt into Merrick is one of the things that helped usher in the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar category the next year, and seeing it lensed through Francis and Lynch’s filter is one of the great images of cinema. It’s tempting to put this in the realm of horror cinema because of how dark the film is, but what keeps it from that is the dignity it displays for Merrick. It doesn’t treat him like the monster he looks like, but as a human being whose deformities has marginalized society’s view of him. That’s why the scenes of Jim and Byte’s exploitation of him are so potent- because Lynch and Hurt feel for Merrick, and view him as a tragic figure rather than someone to be scared of. Mission accomplished, on their part.
The film’s central relationship is between Merrick and Treves, and, as played by Anthony Hopkins, Frederick Treves is a compelling main character for the film to follow. His fascination with Merrick, at first, is as a surgeon who wants to study him for research, but one of the tensions in their bond is how much of Treves’s looking after Merrick is for John’s quality of life, and how much of it is Treves using him to further his own career. Look at the way Treves tries to get Merrick to speak, and then his shock when Merrick, in front of Treves’s boss (played by John Gielgud), displays a degree of learnedness he thought unlikely simply based on John’s initial shyness in how he expressed himself. Like the people who see Merrick as a sideshow, he makes an assumption about John based on his look, without taking into consideration that he is a human being. When Treves brings Merrick to his home to meet his wife, John is enraptured by the photos of their children and parents Frederick and his wife have on the mantle, and shares the picture of his mother with them in the first of two key moments of identification with the outside world that show Lynch’s compassion towards Merrick in full bloom. The other is when a London actress (Anne Bancroft) visits John after reading about him in the paper, and she brings Romeo & Juliet for him to read. The scene has a few interesting beats it plays for Bancroft’s character that the actress does beautifully as we see her refuse to recoil from Merrick, even if she wants to. It’s those scenes where Merrick is treated as an equal where Lynch shows his real heart for the John, and “The Elephant Man” hits some of its most conventional notes as a biopic. It matters not, though, because by that point, David Lynch has given us a bold vision of a life filled with darkness. We don’t mind the Hollywood formula that Lynch and his co-writers (Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren) brings into the film because that tension between Lynch’s iconoclastic visual landscape and Hollywood biopic rules is part of what makes “The Elephant Man” one of the best efforts in the genre of all-time.
