‘The Elephant Man’ 45-Year Retrospective: A Deeply Humane, Dreamlike Drama from David Lynch

Last week, the Brattle Theatre screened David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man.” Released in 1980, the Victorian drama tells the story of real-life Joseph Merrick (renamed “John” in the film), a man born with a congenital condition who became famous through the efforts of Dr. Frederick Treves. After 45 years, it remains a powerful, sincere exploration of cruelty and compassion.

“The Elephant Man,” while Lynch’s most restrained, traditional work, still bears his stamp. The movie begins with Treves (Anthony Hopkins) attempting to visit Merrick (John Hurt) at a freak show in London. Treves finds Mr. Bytes (Freddie Jones) — Merrick’s ringmaster — who, after some coercion, allows Treves to see Merrick’s face.

Immediately, viewers can perceive how beautiful “The Elephant Man” is. The deep contrast of black and white creates an atmosphere in which the textures are palpable but the environment as a whole is dreamlike. Only occasionally does Lynch flirt with the full-blown surrealism of his later films, but due to the movie’s masterful visual language, a subtle surrealism permeates throughout.

Treves sees Merrick for the first time as Bytes commands and berates Merrick to “stand up” and “turn around.” As Merrick does this, his strained, rough breath can be heard — a sound that almost acts as a symbol for his existential struggle. Despite his condition, the film, by consistently emphasizing the cruelty of Merrick’s spectators, never encourages its audience to be horrified by his appearance. Instead, the horror of “The Elephant Man” is in London’s populace, who exploit and demean Merrick for their pleasure. In a powerful but disquieting early scene, Treves presents Merrick before a large hall of fellow doctors, stripping him naked and commenting on Merrick’s physical features.

This scene is emblematic of a major theme in “The Elephant Man.” The film repeatedly asks where the line is between compassion and exploitation. This question is exemplified when Dr. Treves’ wife (Hannah Gordon) finds him sitting in the living room, distraught. When she asks what’s wrong, he muses that his behavior bears similarities to Bytes’. Despite letting him live at the hospital instead of being a freak show attraction, Treves has displayed Merrick before colleagues, invited members of the public for visits, and enjoyed glorification by the press for his kind acts. Although his wife reassures him, he is still disturbed, and utters a hokey line to end the scene: “Am I a good man? Or am I a bad man?”

It was moments like this that led critic Roger Ebert to condemn the film as morally childish. Ebert pointed out that underneath the film’s veneer of righteousness, it lacked a deep message. He felt that many of the scenes were purely for sentimental effect. The movie paints Merrick as a hero, but throughout the film, he never makes much of a courageous resistance against his fate.

Ebert has a point. Merrick is a perpetual victim, and the movie occasionally presents us with a superficial framework of good and evil. The pretty, upper-class women are benevolent and emotionally touched by Merrick’s hardships. The dirty, lower-class underbelly of London exploits and abuses Merrick. Lynch does complicate this framework — there is a scene in which Merrick’s fellow freaks help him return to London after he has been rekidnapped by Bytes, and there are scenes in which elegant, upper-class women react with horror to Merrick’s appearance. But there is a moral naivete to the film that is difficult to ignore.

At the same time, Ebert fails to see what makes the movie special. “The Elephant Man” is a Lynchian film in that it manages to achieve moral depth without a morally complex surface because of its sincerity. The scenes are preachy, but they’re rarely manipulative. The moral questions have a surface simplicity, but they are explored with genuine compassion. It is this more intuitive side of “The Elephant Man” that works best. Even when the dialogue is subpar, the performances, music, and shots somehow make it sound authentic. The film doesn’t operate in the real world — it exists in a dream world where its themes can be explored with sincerity, without being fleshed out.

Hurt plays Merrick as full of love and genuineness, and here the simplicity of the dialogue helps bring out the emotion. Ebert was wrong to think that the movie’s hero is uncompelling. Merrick’s courage lies not in physical resistance, but in the fact that in the face of constant wickedness, he manages to keep his good heart — his tortured life hasn’t poisoned his moral character.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, Merrick visits the theater. Lynch displays the performance as a surreal sequence of images that weave together and disappear as beautiful music plays. Occasionally, the shots of the theater are superimposed upon shots of Merrick’s face as he looks upon the stage. It is clear that what we are seeing isn’t the performance, but Merrick’s subjective experience of it. This moment is particularly powerful because it combines Lynch’s sensibility for the abstract with the themes of the film. Through a Lynchian device, we are put in Merrick’s mind, and we are able to empathize with his experience. When the performance is over, the main actress (Anne Bancroft) dedicates it to Merrick, and the whole audience applauds him. It is another moment that can be read as cliche. But the audience is already in a surreal mindstate, and Lynch gets away with moments like this because they feel like intuitive gestures as well as literal events. Few filmmakers can get as close as Lynch to kitsch sentimentalism without crossing the boundary.

The film does have problems besides its naivety. The formal structure is haphazard. The movie straddles the line between being episodic and having a streamlined narrative, which confuses its flow. Certain threads seem as though they will develop, but simply don’t.

Despite these imperfections, “The Elephant Man” is a must-see film. It is a film of stunning aesthetic beauty, and while its moral queries are simplistic, they are addressed with sincerity and compassion. The film asks us to think about exploitation, kindness, and ultimately, what constitutes a human being as opposed to a “freak.” “The Elephant Man” will probably, and should, be watched for many years to come.

—Staff writer Nate H. Cohen can be reached at nate.cohen@thecrimson.com.