The Elephant Man: C+

It started with Mulholland Drive. I was hooked from the get-go by this surrealist noir that had moments of enthralling fetish poetry and yet the end result - something, I dare say, that is difficult to "spoil" - left me madly irritated. Next came The Elephant Man and in this faux-empathetic bio-pic of Joseph "John" Merrick, a man horribly afflicted with elephantitis, I suffered the same fate as before: I ended my viewing experience not where was desired (surely that must have been inspiration or hope) but where it wasn't (angered, mildly distraught). After a few moments pause everything finally clicked: David Lynch, with his hypno-dreamy visual style and penchant for shallow stereotypes in a one-note cruel joke world, really bothers me.

People have hailed him as a visionary since his career exploded with the late 80's sadomasochistic thriller Blue Velvet. From then on his dischordant films, celebrating everything from Southern-goth violent rebels to actresses suffering from seeming schizophrenia, have been called onto the stage as "best films of the year" and as the recipient of multiple Oscars. It doesn't do this critic one bit of good to see such things. True Lynch's skill as an ocular technician has some merit and he can coax true performances from his stars but there is an impervious, nagging refusal at the core of his movies that consistently leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth: every whim of a film - story, character, logic - are dictated by his "dream-like" fancies and the results range from the bizarrely watchable (the aforementioned Drive) to the cloyingly sentimental. The Elephant Man, his breakthrough film, lands squarely in the latter category.

The "Elephant Man" is infamous in history as a poor sufferer of a terrible fate. He was horribly disfigured from his back, covered in growths, to one of his arms, useless and floppy, to his head, shaped rather surprisingly, like a large malignant peanut. He was also a real person - Joseph Merrick. As a real person Merrick enjoyed the sympathies of Victorian England while also leading a dark second life as a freak-show attraction. In real life, Merrick eventually died at the young age of 27...a death now suspected as a suicide. Yet, besides enjoying pretty peoples' condolescenes, what did Merrick do with his life? This is a question supposedly answered with Lynch's film. It isn't. Lynch hardly even poses the question. Instead he re-hashes history with a few more dramatic liberties, the fictional Merrick (John Hurt) is victim to a toturous master (Freddie Jones) before being rescued by Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins), while skittering around a most pertinent question by posing one of his own: who cares?

The answer, I'm afraid, is probably no one. When The Elephant Man was first released, people went crazy - it won numerous awards. And watching it almost 30 years later it's easy to see why; the heart-string tugging story, of Merrick learning all the ways of society - from tea parties to model cathedral building - has inherent emotional overtones and Hurt's performance wins sympathy with incredible ease. Emotions are in fact manipulated so well that by the tragic end there isn't a dry eye left in the place. That is a problem though if as one is leaving the theater, or turning off the DVD player, all you can remember is "Gee, I can't believe he learned how to sip Earl Gray!". Shouldn't our hero deserve more to enlighten us as to his humanity than a tidy little box marked "Sympathetic Deformity" with which to put him in? Obviously David Lynch thought not and many agreed. I do not.

I argue instead, and as should be obvious, that the mark of any great film is the ability to build and exemplify the psychic confines of a character. All that the director does is continually deconstruct heart and humanity with great sadism, never leaving us with an honest-to-God shred of decency with which to cling to. The minute Merrick builds up self-confidence, have him kidnapped. The second he learns to be loved everywhere, have him die. These events play out with leaden literal-mindedness and overall, so too does the film. As "The Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick did great things - he learned how to speak for one, an act the film glosses over - and as the actors portraying and surrounding him, they do great things as well. But as a filmmaker David Lynch does one great big mediocre thing, he reduces an act of heroism into "heroism" - from a man overcoming great disease to a man who can socialize with the wealthy and shriveled.