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The Elephant Man


The Elephant Man





Nominated by @cricket

David Lynch doesn't come off as a guy too concerned with emotion that centres around sympathy or dignity. His world and the films that populate his filmography tend to lean towards abstract emotions and the absurd. The Elephant Man walks a fine line of both, with the story being the emotional core element and Lynch offering his usual "Lynchian" style of the abstract and absurd.

Why did it take me so long to watch the film? I don't really have an answer other than maybe the content didn't interest me enough and I thought I might be bored by it.

I was wrong.

This film captured me from the very beginning. It starts off as a typical Lynch film with cross-faded imagery, in this film we get elephants and the violent distress of a woman. We later find out that the woman is the mother of the deformed John Merrick. The first thing I thought of was how striking the black and white cinematography is and more importantly, how appropriate it was for this film. Seeing Hopkins walk down the smoke-filled alleys trying to find his way to the Elephant Man was beautifully done and not only set the tone of the film but transported me to that time and place. Very few films manage to capture that feeling and this film did it wonderfully.

Here is a film with genuine emotional performances. Hurt does a really good job bringing this character to life, being timid and afraid of people in the beginning and eventually crawling out of his shell. People have pointed, laughed and hit him his whole life and now someone is showing genuine care towards him. He doesn't know how to react at first but eventually sees that he can live a better life. I was utterly gutted when he was captured and whisked away to France to perform for 'Freakshows" I thought to myself, this is going to end depressingly, isn't it? Then he managed to get away, but then we get an angry mob chasing after him and my mind went back to the depressing angle. Are these people going to beat this man to death because he looks like a monster? Then we get that iconic line from him claiming he is not an animal.

The Elephant Man is a depressing look at how our society is willing to shun a brilliant mind due to their exterior complications. This man enjoys books, the theatre, drinking tea and building miniatures...yet all people can see is a monster and they treat him as such. Such is true in life, and if I ever feel bad about how my life is going, I just have to turn to this film to remind myself how truly good I've got it.