THE ELEPHANT MAN @ 40

Surgeon and medical academic Fredrick Treves discovers a man, John Merrick, with extraordinary deformities at a carnival. It's Victorian England and that's how John makes his living. Treves's initial interest is the academic version of freak alley but, as time and adversity come into play, he finds much more to Merrick than met the eye. As grand society courts John, gutter society wants to see the freak. This can't end well.

If  you have seen images of the real Merrick (Joseph, changed to John for the film for some reason) you might have no problem with the choice made for the film's director, David Lynch. Lynch was already known for his midnight movie long term hit Eraserhead which centres around a mutant baby. It was Mel Brooks who hired him after seeing Eraserhead. Party time, right? Right, except that the film is a sombre story of a man against the world with a theme of human dignity. David Lynch would forge a reputation that led to his surname itself meaning weird and as Lynchian as The Elephant Man gets, it's the film often left off lists of his work. Like 1999's The Straight Story, it just doesn't seem Lynch enough.

There's no shocking violence, no one swears, most of the performances are restrained and there's nary a note of screwed up jazz coming through the speakers. All true, if those things are all a movie needs to be a Lynchfest. However, there is an affinity glowing from the screen that allows audiences an easy path to the sense of siege within Merrick, surrounded as he is by the best and worst intentions and how they can approach under false pretences. And then, in the end, if there is no cure for this (the condition or the way the world uses it) there is a quite finish that would be schmaltzy if it weren't so eerie. So, it's perfectly Lynchian, just not sensationally so. For all its bizarreness, Eraserhead, Lynch's Ur text, is also pretty subdued. It's Dune and Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart that get the shock and crazy flags flying. 

If anything, it's more poignant to watch how Lynch handles the kind of cast he would never have again. I don't mean high profile (Dune had more of that) but in a very British tradition of suggestion over expression. Anthony Hopkins as Treves shows range from rage to troubled mumbles, always seeming to find his position's need of reserve straightjacketing. As good as he is, he's nothing compared to John Hurt whose haunting eyes peer out of thick prosthetics and whose voice struggles for each syllable he utters. Lynch would seldom return to performances like these and they pass from scene to scene as though sculpted.

The deep grey scale to stark contrast black and white of the pallet keeps the focus on the drama and tragedy of it and builds a world where cells of elegant lifestyles are fashioned by the world of filthy industry as it belches steam clouds and malignant black smoke. And then there's the score. John Morris' theme is a marvel of a blend of profound sadness and outright creepiness. Street piano figures the haunting minor melody over booming celesta. Each reiteration is a baton pass, the first is in the mid and low strings and then recorders to oboe. Then there's an eerie descending figure from the top of the piano and piccolo. It is a masterwork of evocation. Later, Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings is used as it would be for the rest of the decade as a poignancy for hire piece. But Morris' score, apart from making good use of the motifs in the main theme, plays like conventional orchestral cues.

There's that word conventional which is supposedly verbotten to use in conjunction with Lynch's output. The truth is he has no great trouble making conventional cinema when required. An old box set  came with a full disc of Wild At Heart extras including over an hour of outtakes. They were all perfectly functional scenes which would have fit perfectly if left in. Lynch took them out for running time considerations but he chose those because he wanted to make one of his movies, not anyone else's. 

The production of The Elephant Man was under a lot of pressure. Lynch's design for the Merrick prosthetics was taking a lot of time and he couldn't get it the way he wanted it to the point where he hit a wall, exhausted and confused. Eraserhead had taken about four years and he did it as he could fund it but that funding came from jobs as well as grants. This time the pressure was on with a relatively gigantic budget and actors he wasn't entirely confident with. If he wanted a shot as mass distribution, he really had to cut a lot of his big ideas away and work as straight as he could. This is why, when Treves sees Merrick for the first time, Hopkins registers a paralysing shock. The only movement apart from the slowly tracking camera, is from a single tear that forms on his left eye and rolls down his cheek. It's a genuinely moving moment. It's also a genuinely mainstream moment, manipulative and clear. By the time Hopkins is almost fading into the decor for his crucial question of whether he is a good or bad man, Lynch gives him all the time in the world and it's Oscar worthy. There isn't a moment in Eraserhead or Dune that would let you say that.

If I'd heard of David Lynch before seeing the ads for The Elephant Man, I'd forgotten. The images made it look like it was made in the 1940s and that intrigued me. I roped in a gang of old school mates at a pub session and we went. We were all starting Uni and looking forward to big changes as we crossed left our teens. After the interest-free short that they'd play before movies in them days, the feature came on and settled everyone down as the creepy theme music appeared and the weird prologue ran with its black and white slow motion elephants and woman in agony. The build up and delayed reveal disgusted one of us as it struck her as sensationalist and cheap. Then when it happened, we screamed with the nurse who opened the door to his room and saw him. 

All of that was dynamite but then the movie grew up and asked us about what we might do when confronted with such shocking difference, join the yobbos from the pub, pay a visit to say you did and gather social tokens? And then the finale where we are assured by a maternal voice that nothing will die. That would ring trite except that it sounds under distressed nature recordings and images of white smoke imploding and an expansive star field that stretches to infinity.

So, I loved this movie before I knew I should. When I saw Eraserhead years later at the Griffith University cinema I was completely rapt and had found my favourite film of all time. David Lynch had smuggled himself into the mainstream. He'd even got eight Oscar nominations. While he moved on to a gigantic flop he took its lessons and pushed his vision into the mainline until it took and his name was added to the dictionary. That started here.