by David Lynch, 1980.
Starring: Anne Bancroft, Michael Elphick, Dexter Fletcher, John Gielgud, Hannah Gordon, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Freddie Jones.
Rating: 7/10, 10/10.
Elephant Man is the (fairly) famous story of John Merrick (Hurt), the so-called "elephant man," the horribly deformed man who made a tremendous stir in Victorian society. A Dr. Frederick Treves (Hopkins) comes across him while he is a part of a side-show exhibit run by the cruel Bytes (Jones), and takes an interest in him as an anatomical specimen, not thinking that the Elephant Man is capable of thought. After a while, though, Treves and the rest of the people in his world are convinced of Merrick’s quite formidable intelligence and, once he learns to overcome his handicaps and fears and finally speak, his eloquence. He becomes something of a fixture in high society, entertaining frequent guests like the famous actress Mrs. Kendal (Bancroft...what was her character’s first name?). But of course Bytes and those like him—specifically an exploitative hospital employee (Elphick) can’t leave Merrick alone.
Though Elephant Man was made in 1980, it seems—deliberately—much older. The use of fadeouts at the end of each episode, the black and white, the style of the acting and dialogue, evokes the films of the thirties and forties more than anything else. This is an interesting approach, one that works extraordinarily well, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why Lynch decided to use it.
Another interesting facet of the film is the role of women within it. I had my eye out for this when watching it, because just before I saw it I’d heard a lot of people accuse Lynch of misogyny. It is true that his women tend to have horrible things happen to them, but I would like to point out that that his men tend to be pretty horrible things themselves, which I submit makes quite a difference. Anyway, I had my eye out for women here. Interestingly, though none play as large roles as the men—Merrick, Treves, Bytes—in the film do, the women, each and every single one of them (except for one hospital maid, who seems limited to the stock shrieky maid role, and the screaming extras who are no better or worse than the exploitative and lascivious male extras), shows immense strength and sensibility. Mrs. Kendal treats Merrick with dignity and kindness right from the start of her relationship with him, even though her first impulse—like everyone’s—is to be revolted by his appearance. Dr. Treves’s wife (Gordon) does the same, even weeping with empathy for his plight. And most of all, the (I believe) nameless head nurse at the hospital (Hiller) recognizes immediately not only Merrick’s basic humanity, but his intelligence and all the rest of it. In fact, she deals with Merrick better than Treves himself does. So it’s a strange imbalance—the women tend to show much more strength and decency than the men, in general, and yet they are all delegated to minor, supporting roles. I don’t know quite what to think of it, except that they were probably the strongest women in a Lynch film up until Mulholland Drive, twenty-one years later.
Still, the film is nearly flawless. I say nearly—I have a few problems with it, mostly that it tries to deal with more issues than it has time to. We get the traditional message that those who look at the freaks are more like freaks than the freaks themselves, we get man’s inhumanity to man (my tenth-grade English teacher’s favorite phrase), we get the omnipresence of human dignity (the famous "I am not an animal!"), we get Treves’s moral conflicts—is he any better than Bytes? Is anyone? All this. All important, all well dealt with, but it ends up seeming a little disjointed, maybe over-ambitious. And yet, even this is such a minor problem with such an otherwise impeccable film that I still feel justified giving it a ten out of ten.