The Elephant Man

by Anna Pulley

The Elephant Man (David Lynch 1980)

Watching The Elephant Man immediately conjures up two truisms – we fear what we don’t understand and what we don’t understand, we often attribute to genius or follow blindly in lemming-like cultish masses. David Lynch movies often remind me of what it would be like to watch a foreign film without subtitles. There will always be scenes I don’t remotely understand, plot twists that are erratic and a certain nightmarish quality is to be expected, if not anticipated. I’ve come to expect surrealism and inexplicable deformities and repressed mother fantasies from Lynch films (and that my pretentious friends will undoubtedly argue with me about their “meanings”). Nor is it all that surprising that Lynch has his own line of coffee or that he championed a transcendental meditation foundation “for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace.” But The Elephant Man doesn’t have the typical imagistic film fuckery that Lynch champions. Indeed, the story is remarkably linear and easy to follow. It’s based on the true story of Joseph “John” Merrick, (John Hurt) a severely deformed British man in his early twenties who is essentially imprisoned as a sideshow freak until Dr. Richard Treves (Anthony Hopkins) swoops him up and takes him to his hospital where he’s put on display again, albeit in a somewhat more humane way. Treves, while acting out of compassion as well as to advance his career, tries to normalize Merrick by making him acceptable to a society that continually and brutally rejects him based on his hideous appearance.

I’d like to quote Roger Ebert, not only because he’s my Chicago homeboy, but because we had the same reaction, which was this: “I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick and I kept drawing blanks.”

The “moral of the story” that the film seems to convey is sappy and one-dimensional – basically that Merrick is really brave for carrying on despite his unfortunate circumstances. Merrick is no Frankenstein’s monster – he doesn’t take revenge on the society that rejects him. Indeed, Merrick barely reacts at all to the countless injustices thrust upon him by gawking, drunken mobs and bourgeois socialites alike. But the heartstrings that Lynch tries to pull come off as parodic more than anything else, especially in the scene where a famous actress (Anne Bancroft) comes to visit Merrick and gives him a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The pair then begins to enact the scene where Romeo and Juliet meet and share their first kiss, which is about the time I politely leaned over and vomited into my Raisinettes box. Then there’s the scene where Treves and his wife invite Merrick to tea. Merrick is so taken aback by the ounce of civility that Treves and Co. display that he breaks down, which causes Treves’ wife to follow suit. The friendship that blossoms between Merrick and Treves does have its endearing moments but they’re so overshadowed by fluff that it’s difficult to parse.

Perhaps I’m being a trifle heartless here, but when reviewers of the film claim that Merrick triumphed in the face of adversity I have to ask what exactly it is that he accomplished? Throughout the course of the film he built a cathedral out of cardboard, had crumpets with uppity Brits, and went to the theatre once. And it’s also implied that he committed suicide in the final scene. For a man of his intelligence and good nature, THIS is what we’re considering a great triumph? Such a blanketed truism of nobility seems to be a stretch, even for die-hard Lynch fans. So while I appreciated being able to follow The Elephant Man moreso than other Lynch-pins, ultimately it doesn’t succeed as much more than a circus show with a Disney-esque moral.