David Lynch, as a filmmaker, is known for his work in bizarre and unusual films that are often rather abstract or strange. He’s also a filmmaker I avoided for the longest time for one reason or another. However, given there’s still a pandemic out there and I am home most of the time, this is a good time to find out what I’d missed with a movie that, arguably, could be his most conventional movie, namely the story of John Merrick, the co-called Elephant Man of Victorian-era London.
I’m not sure what is more surprising about this one: that Lynch made such a movie that is rather conventional in many ways, or that it was produced by Mel Brooks’s production company.
Lynch’s The Elephant Man tells the story of the friendship between John Merrick (John Hurt) and Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins). Treves, a surgeon who teaches anatomy, finds Merrick in a circus sideshow. He takes the highly deformed man, someone Treves assumes is an imbecile, off to his office at a nearby hospital to study and show off in one of his anatomy lessons. Merrick’s deformities are so severe that he can’t even lie down on his back without suffocating. As far as Treves knows, Merrick is a simpleton. But at the same time, Treves starts to realize how cruel it is to send Merrick off to be gawked and stared at by the crowds as little more than sort of sideshow freak.
And then Merrick reveals he isn’t a simpleton. He’s a man who has difficulty speaking and little education, but he’s a kind man who has just never been really treated like a human being before. Treves, with help from his hospital superiors, a tough nurse, and an off-screen Queen Victoria, does what he can to show Merrick what he was missing, something that Treves himself is never sure about, noting that allowing the upper class a chance to spend time with Merrick isn’t much better than when Merrick was part of a freak show. Still, the very fact Treves is actually worried about such things shows he is a decent man and he cares very much for Merrick.
You know, considering Lynch’s reputation, it says something that the weirdest moments are a few surreal dream sequences, often showing Merrick dreaming about his mother or actual elephants. But he’s by nature a gentle soul, such that it is all the more heartbreaking when a “ringmaster” bursts into his room with a crowd of normal-looking people, push women onto him, pour liquor down his throat, and generally abuse him for their own entertainment. It’s Lynch’s unsubtle but still effective way of saying that Merrick isn’t the animal in the scene. It really works, setting up the last act of the movie as Merrick is dragged back to sideshow life, makes a stand for his own humanity, and finds a way back to Treves before dying.
Shot in black-and-white with some rather impressive make-up and a fantastic performance by Hurt, there isn’t much I can add about The Elephant Man that other, better writers and film critics haven’t said already. It’s the triumph of the human spirit in a body many didn’t take as fully human while highlighting just how poorly people can be to each other for the most trivial of reasons. Maybe now it’s time to see some more of Lynch’s work. After all, I perhaps had been unknowingly dismissing the man’s movies in much the same way too many people couldn’t see the humanity in a man like John Merrick.
Grade: A
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