Reviewer: Cleolinda
(Images courtesy of a David Lynch site)
It’s an odd confluence that brings me back around to this movie—not only is David Lynch’s newest, the erstwhile TV pilot Mulholland Drive, currently drawing bewildered raves, but the Elephant Man himself appears in the Hughes brothers’ Ripper phantasmagoria From Hell. If you haven’t seen The Elephant Man, it’s definitely worth picking up at the video store. Having seen my share of Lynch films—Wild at Heart, Dune, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the first half of Blue Velvet (it freaked me out so bad I had to stop watching), and, yes, Eraserhead (a classroom captive, I couldn’t stop the tape—and I’m glad I didn’t)—I can tell you that The Elephant Man, alongside The Straight Story, stands as the David Lynch movie for people who don’t like David Lynch movies.
Have no fear, though—if you do relish Lynch’s glorious freakishness, the film has that, too. But as Lynch notes in this week’s (11/2/01) EW, this, his second film, was midwifed by Mel Brooks (!) and his production company, and was one of the few Lynch films that Lynch didn’t write himself. There are some Lynchian (synonym: “damned confusing”) ele- ments—opening and closing dream sequences, for example— but they are not the actual plot, unlike other Lynch films. The result is a straightforward tale infected by nightmare— you think it’s fun being an Elephant Man?— while not being the nightmare itself, which is a pretty good description of the rest of Lynch’s oeuvre.
I was struck by the scene in From Hell (#2) where John Merrick—the man stricken by "elephantiasis" (#1), actually Proteus Syndrome, which continues to afflict a small number of people today—is displayed to a room full of onlookers. It’s unsettling to see the character in full flesh-tone color; I’ve read the book by Frederick Treves that was the basis for The Elephant Man, and both the real-life photographs and the film are in black and white. And it’s interesting how both these films give such a feel for the grit and filth of the fin-de-siècle London underworld, each with a different approach: From Hell uses decadent, high-saturation color streaked with grime (it reminded me a little of Coppola’s approach in Dracula), while Lynch uses the antique blacks, whites, and greys of daguerrotype photography, the thrum of industrial engines and boilers prevading even the quietest of scenes.
These are both films quietly pointing out the class divide after the Industrial Revolution (both Lynch and the Hughes have said as much), but while the Hughes touch on Merrick’s melancholy status—that exhibition made me think they were subtly telling you that the Whitechapel girls weren’t the only ones being pimped out in this film—Lynch actually notes this explicitly in his film. Which brings me to the characters of the film: John Hurt is literally unrecognizable as Merrick; even his voice, lisping rustily from disuse, seems to come from a different being altogether. (And of course he gets to wail the famous lines, “I am not an animal!! I am a human being!!!” There’s a lot of pop culture references you’ll magically get after seeing this movie.) Hurt’s Oscar-nominated portrayal is an astonishing mix of the submissive and the stalwart: a gentle, intelligent creature, Merrick longs to belong and be loved, but he’s also a survivor, despite a truly horrifying tenure with an alcoholic showman (#4).
However, you get the feeling that he isn’t even the real protagonist—even the IMDB plot synopsis starts with, “A Victorian doctor comes to care for a man catastrophically deformed with Proteus Syndrome.” It’s Dr. Treves (#8) who is the uncertain conscience of this film, the character whom that From Hell scene brings to mind. Because that scene is also in The Elephant Man—having first trekked to an underworld carnival (#5) to see Merrick on display, Treves initiates his relationship with the Elephant Man just to study him and lecture on his deformities (#3). But soon he can’t bear to send him back to the abusive Bytes, instead fighting to get permanent quarters in the hospital for Merrick. It’s there that he discovers, to his horror, that Merrick is actually very intelligent—not a creature safely ignorant of his misery—and genteel. And as Merrick is then allowed to indulge his fantasies of being a fashionable gentleman (#6-7), entertaining dozens of rubber-necking socialites in his hospital parlor, Treves begins to wonder if he hasn’t just turned into a showman like Bytes after all: “Am I a good man?” he murmurs one night. “Or a bad man?” I think From Hell might answer differently from what this film ultimately decides, but then, I wasn’t able to catch in the credits whether the lecturer at the exhibition was actually called “Treves” or not. As for The Elephant Man, this is just the first hour of the film; it kicks into high hallucinatory gear after this point, when Bytes returns with the DTs and a major chip on his shoulder, and it’s in his struggle to get back to Treves and his hospital sanctuary that Merrick winds up defying a fearful and discriminatory society.
(Believe it or not, Anthony Hopkins continued to languish in near obscurity for another ten years, known mostly for this film, the ventriloquist in 1978’s Magic, his stage work, and two Emmy-winning performances—one as Bruno Hauptmann, the man convicted in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, and another as Hitler, of all people, in The Bunker. However, Jonathan Demme says on the Criterion Silence of the Lambs commentary that it was, in fact, the Treves role (#6) that convinced him to cast Anthony Hopkins as Lecter—for the counter-intuitive reason that he wanted an actor capable of portraying such compassion to play the role...although Hopkins once said he'd decided that Treves at times hated Merrick.)
This film, in turn, has become one of those pop-culture touchstones that no one actually watches anymore, languishing in its own special obscurity as the David Lynch Film That Time (Or At Least People) Forgot. It doesn’t help that, aside from recent anomaly The Straight Story, it’s the only Lynch film with anything approaching a linear narrative, and people who dig David Lynch are generally seeking a good mindf—k, although I also know an all-too-large number of people are turned off by movies shot in black and white. However, if you’re new to the work of David Lynch, I would definitely recommend this as the first dip of your toe into the pool; if you love everything else David Lynch has done, you have no excuse not to have seen this film, a straight narrative nonetheless shot through with the lyricism of dreams.
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