The Elephant Man
(David Lynch, 1980)
2 stars
This movie made me sick. And when I say “sick,” I don’t just mean “morally offended;” I mean actually, physically “my-stomach-doesn’t-feel-good” sick. I was so nauseous at one point that I had to leave the room.
I’ve liked other movies that made me feel this way: Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” is just as disgusting, unsettling and hard to sit through, but I gave that movie four stars and put it in my all time top ten list. The difference is that “Straw Dogs” was disgusting for a reason: Peckinpah was making a point about man’s primal savagery and inclination to violence. “The Elephant Man” has no point to its nastiness. It makes us feel bad simply because David Lynch wants us to feel bad.
Honestly, this movie has no point. It has nothing to say about John Merrick, the “Elephant Man” (1862–1890). It has nothing to say about his life or condition (except that he was so hideously disfigured that he had to sleep sitting up, so the weight of his head wouldn’t crush his windpipe). It has nothing to say about how it must have felt to suffer from such a terrible deformity, but still possess the mental capacity to understand misery. The movie has nothing to say about Merrick, period; it just wants to exploit his ugliness.
Merrick isn’t a human being to Lynch, he’s a tool. The movie doesn't want to get to know him as a person, it just wants to use him. Don’t let Lynch fool you with scenes that pretend to “develop” Merrick – they’re just shallow ploys to get him to laugh, cry or quote Shakespeare on cue for instant emotional effect. Look at the scene where Merrick reveals that likes music: Does Lynch tell us that because it’s important information, or because he thinks that using that story is an easy way to make us cry?
But most of the time, Lynch just wants to make us feel queasy – it’s like his trademark (just watch a few clips from “Eraserhead”) – or his favorite sick game. With Merrick, he’s discovered a gold mine. All he has to do is bring him on screen, rub our faces in his deformities, make us listen to his pained, slurred speech and Bam! Instant nausea.
But it’s not Lynch’s insensitivity that really offends me; it’s his pretentious dishonesty. Lynch has nothing to say and he knows it, but instead of coming out and admitting it, he tries to hide behind phony statements and messages condemning “the exploiters.” (One scene has the angry circus manager confront the doctor played by Anthony Hopkins and accuse him of exploiting Merrick for personal gain.) Their shallowness is obvious: they feel very tacked on, like Lynch threw them in at the last minute to give the movie some “noble” reason for existing. It’s unenlightening and hypocritical.
Why did they set the story from the doctor’s perspective, and not Merrick’s? It puts us on the outside. Merrick is a naturally sympathetic character, but we never connect with him because we’re always looking at him from an outsider’s perspective. We’re basically encouraged – encouraged – to look at him like a freak. (I can’t tell if this was intentional, but there’s no denying that it makes it even easier for Lynch to disgust us).
Honestly, Lynch doesn’t know what he’s doing. He makes some very strange storytelling decisions, like showing us the Elephant Man several times during the first twenty minutes, but then trying to build suspense around his appearance when the nurses enter his room. (Are we supposed to forget what he looked like?) That would be like showing us the shark at the beginning of “Jaws,” and then spending the rest of the movie trying to keep it hidden. (He’s also watched a little too much Stanley Kubrick: One scene is eerily reminiscent of “Spartacus,” and the ending is way too similar to the end of “2001.”)
I wasn’t kidding when I said this movie made me sick (I’d hate to watch it if I actually was sick). It wouldn’t bother me if Lynch was doing it for a reason. But he isn’t. Lynch has no good reasons. He made this movie solely to disgust and unsettle us; if I told him that I had to leave the room, he’d probably smile, because he achieved his goal. “The Elephant Man” is an exploitation picture through and through, and watching it is just as bad as going to the circus to stare at the freaks.