It’s strange to think that I
was introduced to the dark and surreal cinematic underworld of David Lynch only
at the age of ten, yet with the master auteur’s first foray into the Hollywood
mainstream, that’s precisely what happened.
I remember first hearing about Joseph Merrick (renamed John Merrick for
the film), aka The Elephant Man through
siblings and his legendarily extreme physical deformities.
Finally the film appeared on
television one night and even only as a pre-teenager, Lynch’s flickering
abstract black-and-white images of elephants interspersed with fog emerging
from a baby’s cry instantly seared themselves into my psyche for all time. Though years would pass before finally
discovering arguably America’s greatest film director since Stanley Kubrick
(who himself was an early champion of Lynch’s Eraserhead), up to this point The
Elephant Man was the closest a film had come to representing a real
nightmare onscreen for me.
Loosely based on doctor
Frederick Treves’ (Anthony Hopkins) memoirs The
Elephant Man and Other Reminisces as well as Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity,
Lynch’s first studio production is known in the industry as the first
Brooksfilms release, a production company created by comedian Mel Brooks with
the intention of producing serious minded pictures.
The American director’s
first and only Victorian period drama with an entirely British cast despite
being an American production, The
Elephant Man while taking a fair amount of artistic liberties with the
material including changing the name to John Merrick (John Hurt) as well as the
nature of Merrick’s exhibition as a circus freak is among the director’s most
straightforward and oddly compassionate pictures to date.
Rivaling the sympathetic
human warmth of his 1999 Disney film The
Straight Story, The Elephant Man begins
as a surreal body horror movie/historical biopic of sorts before gradually
transforming into a heartfelt and sincere testament to human dignity and the
beauty of a gentle soul trapped in a broken body. One of the wonders of the
picture is how the black-and-white photography utilizes deep shadows to hide
John Merrick from view so when we finally first see him out in the open we’re
as shocked as the nurses in the London hospital.
Over time as we come to know Merrick as a
human being with a gentle soul, the film achieves the remarkable feat of pitting
the kind and friendly man against cruel spectators with ordinary physique whose
spiritual ugliness registers loud and clear to the viewer. Not many films save for that other
Brooksfilms production The Fly have
the ability to elicit empathy for the “monster” while contrasting the poor man’s
physical grotesquerie with the appallingly debasing actions of Merrick’s fellow
ordinary men.
For Lynch’s first Hollywood
production, the director elicits the extraordinary talents of Anthony Hopkins,
Sir John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft and John Hurt and comes away with splendid
performances across the board. Most
striking of all is Hurt as the deformed Merrick who underwent eight hours of
makeup application daily before another two following the removal, made from a
body cast of the real Joseph Merrick.
What stands out is Hurt’s
ability to channel a wide variety of emotions despite a near disability to
speak or move his mouth and lips, bringing viewers remarkably close to how the
real man would have looked and sounded.
This was made well before Best Makeup was a category in the Academy
Awards, prompting the inclusion after wide protests within the industry before An American Werewolf in London became
the first recipient.
The film would go on to
garner a total of eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and
Best Director David Lynch, making the underground director of Eraserhead an instant sensation, drawing
offers to direct Return of the Jedi and
Dune in addition to helping to
establish the director as one of the most skillful in terms of creating a dense
audiovisual atmosphere onscreen.
For some viewers, The Elephant Man seen against what would
later become his signature surrealist narrative style in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and
Mulholland Drive is often regarded as
starter pack David Lynch. The images are
of course breathtaking and some motifs would indeed find their way into his
later works, including a notable silhouette of Merrick’s deformed figure
influencing a still haunting introductory shot of Grace Zabriskie’s ritualistic
killer in Wild at Heart.
And yet the narrative is
straightforward and decidedly humorless, a tragically absent characteristic
that would help balance Lynch’s offbeat mixture of sardonic absurdity and
unblinking horrors. Part of the power of
Lynch’s subsequent works is the unmeasurable skill of playing for laughs and
screams from one scene to the next or simultaneously, leaving viewers uncertain
precisely how to process the events unfolding.
With The Elephant Man beyond
the dream sequences and origins of Merrick himself, there’s little mystery in a
film by the director who built his filmmaking career around mystery.
Still, while some have
written The Elephant Man off as an
opulent director-for-hire effort while others still prefer the film’s straightforward
unpretentious attitude over his more abstract incongruence found in his later
works, the film still stands as an indelible stepping stone for a soon-to-be
towering master of cinema. If nothing
else, The Elephant Man functions as
the more user-friendly kid cousin to Eraserhead
with emphasis on a deformed innocent child born into a world that all but
instantly rejects it.
The
Elephant Man shows Lynch playing ball in the big leagues
still figuring out his niche before striking his first home run with Blue Velvet and as such it remains an
impeccably crafted and timeless tale of love and kindness shining through
physical aberration. As a David Lynch
film, when compared to films like Mulholland
Drive or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with
Me, The Elephant Man falls short. As an introduction to who would soon become
one of the greatest film directors of all time, The Elephant Man is as good a place to start as any!
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki