Director: David Lynch
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, Freddie Jones
Have I Seen it Before: I think so? It would have to have been long enough ago that I spent most of my time watching it not remembering large swaths of what I was seeing.
Did I Like It: It may be a controversial opinion, but I tend to think that Lynch is at his best when he’s a little pinned in by the constraints of commercial filmmaking*. Eraserhead (1977) is—is admittedly intentionally—sort of hard to watch and love. The Straight Story (1999) is probably his best movie**.
So it is here that things are the best of all possible worlds, where Lynch is forced to make a movie a wide audience might see, but is allowed to indulge his instincts a little bit, as a treat. When I’m talking about Lynch’s instincts, I’m not even referring to the makeup job that transformed John Hurt*** into John Merrick. That’s the part that tries to relate to the audience on their own terms. The entire film is an empathy sandwich, real human emotions nestled in between two thin amounts of absurdism****. Where Eraserhead’s symphony of absurdism is directed toward discomfort, The Elephant Man is aimed towards our compassion.
And it works.
The weirdness comes in only at the beginning and the end, where we are treated to an abstract view of Merrick’s conception (I think; we are dealing with Lynch here) and his death. But even that last part is life-affirming.
*You and I both are immediately thinking of a notable exception in Dune (1984), but what is a hot take without an obvious, glaring exception?
**At this point, I should probably just launch a “hot takes about the career of David Lynch” blog, no?
***Completely off topic, but could you imagine what it would have been like if Hopkins had played the War Doctor? The things my mind will drift towards…
****Maybe it’s more of an emotional panini?