David Lynch (1980)
David Lynch is at his best when his preoccupations and talents are in tension with the material he’s working with, or the format he’s working in. For most of its thirty episodes, Twin Peaks was a fine illustration of Lynch’s exploiting the constraints of an hour-long weekly episode on a mainstream television channel. In comparison, feature films like Wild at Heart and Lost Highway – where he has more freedom – are discursive, lacking in friction as well as coherence. Blue Velvet may be the fullest expression of Lynch’s artistry in a tight dramatic framework (I’ve not seen his most recent movies) but The Elephant Man is one of his best cinema films. Lynch’s obsessive interest in dreams and deformity transforms the story of John Merrick but doesn’t overpower it. There are some fine oneiric sequences but Lynch also suggests that Merrick’s whole existence must have been a series of nightmares and – much less often, when he was on the receiving end of human kindness – improbably sweet dreams. (Joseph Merrick, as he was actually called, died at the age of twenty-seven, in 1890.)
Victorian London is brilliantly realised in the lighting (by Freddie Francis) and production design (by Stuart Craig). We sometimes seem to be looking at photographs of the period (although the images are always kinetic). This impression is echoed in the framed photos on Merrick’s bedside table and on the mantelpiece at the home of Frederick Treves, the London Hospital surgeon who first sees Merrick in a freak show and gets him into hospital and away from the clutches of Merrick’s predatory manager, Bytes. Although the story is set in the 1880s, you naturally think of the time and place as Dickensian and there’s an echo of Oliver Twist in the narrative: just as Oliver, after safe haven with Mr Brownlow, is ambushed by Nancy and Bill Sikes and returned to Fagin’s den, so John Merrick is taken from the room he’s made home at the London Hospital and repatriated to the freak show circuit (indeed expatriated, across the English channel). Lynch makes the relatively new aspect of mechanised industrial London frighteningly dynamic to see and hear (the place really does seem to be ‘the Big Smoke’). The Elephant Man has a sci-fi quality, and this is disorienting for the audience as well as for Merrick, who’s trapped in the alarming immediacy of his surroundings. We’re highly familiar with the Victorian era on screen and have got used to retrospective sci-fi, through Doctor Who, for example, yet we still experience this London as to some extent futuristic.
Lynch delays the exposure of John Merrick’s hugely deformed head in a way that plays off horror film expectations. By the time we see him, though, we’ve already witnessed so many horrified reactions to the sight of Merrick that the viewer has built up sympathy rather than apprehension. This is a horror story but one told from the point of view of the protagonist. And because David Lynch is fascinated by repulsive flesh and capable of drawing out the sensuous aspects of practically anything (like the amputated ear in Blue Velvet), beholding Merrick’s disfigurement is a confounding experience. At the same time, I was aware of feeling reassured that this was all amazing make-up (by Christopher Tucker). The photograph of the real Joseph Merrick on Wikipedia is more alarming (part of the alarm is realising that someone actually had to live with that head).
Watching John Hurt as Merrick reminds you just how good he was at his peak. From inside – and through – the massive prosthesis, he communicates a beguiling mixture of melancholy and wonderstruck politesse: he achieves what might seem the impossible task of giving the character a humorous, dandified quality. Hurt is perfectly complemented by Anthony Hopkins who, as Frederick Treves, gives one of his finest performances – he’s especially good at conveying the combination of scientist’s excitement at the extraordinary specimen he’s come upon and appalled human compassion for Merrick. The actors in the key supporting roles create similarly complete and ambivalent characters, though in very distinct registers: Wendy Hiller is at her emotionally precise best as the matron, Mrs Mothershead, and John Gielgud, as Carr-Gomm, the head of the London Hospital, wins first prize (in a keen competiton) for his immediate reaction to the sight of the Elephant Man. There’s good work too from Hannah Gordon as Treves’s wife and Lesley Dunlop as one of the nurses.
Compared with Gielgud and Hiller, Anne Bancroft as the famous actress Madge Kendal, who helps turn Merrick into a West End society cynosure more benignly than Bytes promoted him in the East End, is disappointingly vague, even though you can see why Merrick finds her grande dame smiliness so appealing. The letdowns in the cast are the baddies. Although he looks dead right as Bytes, Freddie Jones overdoes the sweaty vileness and Lynch doesn’t handle the menacing lowlifes, headed by Michael Elphick, with anything like the subtlety that marks the rest of The Elephant Man: you never get a sense that their blaring taunting of Merrick is fuelled by fear or incomprehension – they just seem nasty brutes. The score by John Morris calls to mind a music box melody but an unusually supple one in terms of its emotional variety. The choice of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ for the beautifully sad climax to the film feels clichéd now although that’s thanks to the likes of Oliver Stone and Terence Davies rather than the fault of David Lynch, who got there years before them.
2 February 2012
