The Elephant Man (1980, David Lynch) (Patreon)

65/100

Not logging this as a rewatch because I'd previously only seen it on network TV, interrupted by commercials and presumably edited for content and/or time. That was over 30 years ago, and The Elephant Man might have been my first Lynch experience (otherwise it's, um, Dune); odds are I perceived it then as standard prestige Oscarbait, à la Mask a bit later. No surprise now to find that Lynch and Alan Splet pretty much replicate Eraserhead's industrial soundscape, or that the film concludes with a disembodied head floating in space. Indeed, for a while I was concerned that it's too Lynchian—that this director's penchant for photographing unusual bodies (Michael J. Anderson, Carel Struycken, Richard Pryor toward the end of his life), rendering them uncanny, can't help but undermine any effort to explore Merrick's humanity. This feeling was exacerbated by Lynch's decision to keep Merrick largely unseen for the first half hour or so, as if he were the shark in Jaws or the E.T. in E.T. Even though I remembered that he's plainly seen at length later on, this approach still struck me as misguided showmanship, designed to whet the viewer's appetite for sensation.

I was wrong. Or, rather, it took me a ridiculously long time to recognize that Lynch employs this strategy in order to subvert it—that Merrick's gentle soul makes a greater impact if he's initially treated as monstrous not merely by the public but by the film itself. At the same time, Lynch truly is drawn to deformity, in a way that's at once exploitative and reverential. The Elephant Man thus serves as the rare hybrid of horror and weepie in which both genres prove equally potent. However, Lynch's sensibility leaves him feeling clueless about what to do with Treves, whose mix of compassion and ambition should really be central here. "Am I a good man or am I a bad man?" Treves asks at one point, but the movie ultimately seems uninterested in the answer; the idea that Merrick has merely become a classier sideshow attraction, catering to a much wealthier clientele, gets brief lip service but no real exploration. Instead, the leering riffraff make a climactic reappearance, thereby letting both high society and the Pathological Society off the hook. (To be fair, it does also facilitate some stunning shots that suggest The Night of the Hunter starring the cast of Freaks.) By the end—and isn't this ironic?— I was reminded of those social-media threads that show an abandoned or feral animal (cat or dog, usually) before and after it's been adopted by a loving family. They always make me cry (and I teared up here at the conclusion of the Romeo and Juliet reading), but they're superficially rather than deeply moving. This film could have been much spikier, but it shies away.

Oh yeah: I should probably say something about Hurt's performance, since he was Oscar-nominated and all. Obviously the makeup does a whole lot of work here, as does Merrick's inherent piteousness; had Lynch been able to cast Jack Nance, as he'd wanted to do, it's quite likely that Nance's name would've been called at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But Hurt's voice was always one of his greatest tools, and there's something heartbreakingly metatextual (for those who know how mellifluous he usually sounds) about hearing it distorted like this. Adds yet another layer to the sense of beauty being rendered almost unrecognizable, accessible only to those willing to put in the effort.