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?

Contact (1997)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt

Have I Seen it Before: Certainly. However, this particular screening came about after the recent news that the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is being decommissioned after suffering recent structural difficulties. Lora mentioned such news was doubly sad, as it was the location for the opening scenes of the film. I insisted that the film actually started with Jodie Foster discovering the Vega signal at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

She was right; I was wrong. I apparently hadn’t remembered the film in much detail. It’s entirely possible that I have clearer memories of the trailer than I did of the film itself. And it wasn’t exactly like I saw it once in the theater and haven’t looked at it since. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least once in the last ten years. The human mind is weird.

Did I Like It: I’m happy to report that my lack of memory for the film had nothing to do with its quality. Far before Zemeckis decided to be content with being the least interesting filmmaker addicted to the WETA workshop, he was able to follow up the cultural permeation of Forrest Gump (1994) and the singular crowd-pleasing qualities of Back to the Future (1985) with the kind of meaty, thoughtful science fiction movie that best recommends the genre. Films that were common in an age of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Planet of the Apes (1968)* and are rare enough now, give or take an Arrival (2016) or two**.

McConaughey may be a member of that breed of movie stars who is almost entirely personality. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially here where Foster is allowed to give the far more nuanced and interesting performance. Had it been another actor portraying her love interest (or, for that matter, a less confident screen presence than Foster herself) Zemeckis and the studio might have been tempted to let the man overpower the woman in the frame. 

How many science fiction films lead one to talk about the performances as the central feature?

*Between those two and the superlative second season of the original Star Trek, sci-fi may not have seen a better tonnage crossed with quality year than the year Apollo 8 finally moved the idea of landing on the moon from the purely theoretical to the imminently possible. 

**You may want to bring up Interstellar (2014), but for my money Inception (2010) was far more thought-provoking.

Alien (1979)

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, and Bolaji Badejo as himself.

Have I Seen it Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: As Brett says, “Right…” 

This is another movie that proves difficult to try and write about critically with any sort of honesty. It’s a great film. You know it’s a great film* because they’ve been trying to remake it about a thousand times in the forty years since it was unleashed. And after you see a great film several times, it’s harder still—if not downright impossible—to unpack the experience. One is more struck by the little things that one may not think about on first blush.

The performances are pitch perfect and so against what would be the obvious direction a film like this could have taken. Ash (Holm) particularly stands out on second watch. He slithers through the movie, fighting down his glee (or as much glee as a robot could muster) that things are about to go down. 

The others are no slouches, either. They don’t particularly like each other—or at the very least, have gotten sick of one another after this much time beyond the frontier—and it shows. They don’t even like being in space, which is unique in both this series, and in science fiction as a whole. 

All of this comes about as subtext as well. Never once does one character turn to another and say, “I don’t like you, and I don’t like having to work in outer space.” This, along with the occasionally insane design gives the entire world a lived-in feel that Star Wars or Trek series often reaches for and comes up wanting.

Another element that never fails to delight—although it is likely less of an intentional choice and more of a reality of the time in which it was made—is the technology that surrounds the characters. Between clicking and clacking, displaying nonsense numbers as comprehensible data, and literally everything about the Mother computer make me long for a time when every piece of tech in a film didn’t look like it was designed by Tony Stark. Eagle-eyed readers of these reviews might detect a hypocrisy in that thought, as I have often extolled the virtue of films resisting looking like they were filmed at the time in which they were, but if films still used computers like this, it’d be impossible to tell when any film is made without consulting IMDB or Wikipedia, and that would make me a very happy camper, indeed.

If a film doesn’t have these little things, maybe it is not all that great in the first place. We are lucky that this one has them in spades. They make them worth coming back to every once in a while.

*While it is a great film, it is a competitive candidate for best trailer of all time. You have to kind of imagine yourself as a person who has no idea what the film is about when watching it, but from that perspective its one of the greats.