The Elephant Man (1980)

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?

Dune (1984)

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Brad Dourif, Patrick Stewart

Have I Seen it Before: Never. So here’s what I did that was kind of stupid. When Dune (2021) came out, in one of my book-buying binges, I picked up Frank Herbert’s original novel and told myself that I wasn’t going to watch any of the films until I read the source material. Cut to three years later and I finally got through that thing* and I have a lot catching up to do elsewhere.

That doesn’t really account for the additional thirty-five-plus years I’ve spent avoiding the film.

Did I Like It: In the first few minutes, there was a very real chance I was going to hate the film very, very deeply. Opening with a V.O. narration is usually a way to get me to check out, having it come from a floating head among the cosmos would pretty much seal the deal of my antipathy. That this opening from Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) is so weirdly uncertain that it really felt like I could start writing my review in the first five minutes.

Then again, injecting the character into the film in this way is a pretty faithful adaptation of the book itself. That may be the film’s biggest ambition and ultimate weakness. It is a slavishly faithful adaptation, but feels the need to zip through all of the story points to get things in around two hours. What Herbert does best doesn’t get any time to simmer here, so instead we get a lot of exposition machines flitting in and out of the frame.

And yet, I can’t completely dismiss the film either. It does manage to effectively depict the worlds of the Duneiverse at a time when science fiction films had to often make do with their limitations.

*I didn’t read the appendices. Even I have my limits.