The monstrous and the tender in The Elephant Man

“I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!”

With a quivering voice that’s been distorted by his medical condition, the anguish and horror of John Merrick’s cry for dignity feels, to me, like one of the most devastating moments in all of David Lynch’s work. In The Elephant Man, John Hurt’s gentle Merrick finds brief fame and fortune in Victorian-era London. His physical deformity is as much a source of prurient entertainment and shock to a society who pretends to find the carnival ‘freak show’ a moral outrage as it is to the ‘freak show’ punters themselves.

The scene at the train station, where Merrick accidentally knocks over a young girl and is chased by a crowd of angry onlookers, comes late in the film. Merrick has been put into the care of the seemingly magnanimous Dr Treves (Anthony Hopkins) and taken from the brutality of the circus show he was discovered in. Yet the cruelty of the world around him is unrelenting.

Lynch’s work is often characterised for its so-called surrealism, or its fascination with the uncanny, dreams and the unconscious mind; it seems less common that we discuss his deep wells of empathy. He is a filmmaker often preoccupied with characters in intense, sometimes inexplicable psychic pain – people who have been made to suffer and whose suffering or grief he depicts tenderly, even as he also shows the violence which catalyses it. Like many of our great maverick auteurs, his hallmarks have become so distinctive that it’s easy to see any perceived ‘outlier’ in his work.

Assigned to work for hire by a major studio for the first time, on a real historical tale with an all-star ensemble cast, the linearity and relative conventionality of The Elephant Man may feel like an outlier. In 1980, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning none. And yet, maybe even partly because of this mainstream honour, it has sometimes been seen as his most ‘sentimental’ work, certainly one of his less obviously ‘Lynchian’.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Like some strange relic from a bygone age, the dreamy black and white of The Elephant Man emerges into view like its own sort of nightmare. Yet the monstrousness of the film is contained everywhere but within its so-called ‘monster’: this is a cruel, vain world which condemns him to live his life as a freak. Merrick is almost knightly as he suffers so nobly; his gentleness is violated repeatedly and the little dignity he thinks he has gained is lost in this one ghastly scene in the train station.

It’s a harsh view of a hypocritical world and its treatment of the outsider; but Lynch instils it with such anguished feeling for our troubled hero that you can never deny his own enormous tenderness as an artist. That tenderness is as Lynchian as anything in his work. Lynch often demands dignity for his suffering characters; people who for one reason or another are ill-valued or disrespected by mainstream society. Never was that demand so plainspoken – or openly heart-wrenching – as in this scene.

To commemorate the life and creative legacy of the peerless filmmaker David Lynch, Little White Lies has brought together writers and artists who loved him to create ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine‘: a series celebrating his work. We asked participants to respond to a Lynch project however they saw fit – the results were haunting, profound, and illuminating.