The Elephant Man (1980)

What’s incredible about The Elephant Man, truly, is that it would have worked equally as well as a silent film. You’d lose some astonishing line reads, I suppose, but given how physical this movie is, how much of it is about perception and the act of looking at a person, and how flat-out great the performances are in that regard, this would have worked without Anthony Hopkins’ sonorous voice, or John Hurt’s. 

It’s such a tactile experience, every frame teeming with life and detail. A lot of city-based period pieces have a kind of lifelessness to them, like everyone is afraid of getting soot on their costumes or breaking something, but The Elephant Man feels very grounded, its London a smoked out, damp pit of despair where one can eke out a life in the workhouses or in the freakshows but only very rarely in anything resembling high society, which is something John Merrick is admitted into here, I suppose out of a sense of pity on the part of the royal family, famed actresses and the like, but not by Frederick Treves, at least not in this telling of the story.

There’s a part where Treves interrogates his motives for taking Merrick into his care where, noting the benefits he has received from the notoriety of the case, he asks whether he is a good person or a bad person. Despite his wife’s assurance that what he’s done is good, her rationale being that Merrick has some small amount of joy in his life as a consequence of their meeting, the film does not move to answer his question, nor should it. The Elephant Man isn’t a movie about how a man was granted dignity by others, but in how he always had it, intrinsically, how his lot in life — to be born, to live life wondering why one was born, and to die with our experiences, which take the vague shape of an answer without really saying anything — is the same as ours. It isn’t that he’s especially brave, but that other people are especially cowardly or cruel, except the ones who aren’t. Even in outrageous pain, Merrick keeps finding people who aren’t, as do we. That David Lynch fella, y’all. A real poet of the kicked dog.