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🎙️ EPISODE 152: 01.24.19
Perhaps, The Elephant Man––David Lynch’s second film, from 1980––doesn’t work for me because you can feel, in a sense, that he’s selling his soul. Sure, it’s “good” and was recognized as such in all the ways and by all the metrics that the most mainstream critical pipelines assess and award art that is “good.”
It’s what I couldn’t put my finger on at the time I recorded my initial review, and the truly repulsive thing about it: It’s bad in the way these "good" films often are. It feels older than it is: a 1980 film about the 1920s that feels like it was made in the late 50s. It’s stylistic feel is both confusing and confused. The brief intrusions of Lynchian originality are present and welcome, but they’re all too quickly dispersed by stale set pieces, and performances that are either overwrought or stiffly boring. Only Freddie Jones, in the devious role of the elephant man’s original “handler,” strikes a cord. |
The look and feel of John Hurt’s titular character is effective, because it is grotesque. It is in no way fantastical, even if we’re looking at the height of movie magic, because this person existed. And through this realism, a sickening is induced. With every one of Hurt’s nasally slurps––while that’s surely the point, and it wholly succeeds on that level––the film becomes less re-watchable. Wherein
Eraserhead’s baby is pure fantasy––a goofy, disgusting, horrifying little buddy that the viewer wants to spend time with––the Elephant Man is an abomination. Our horror with him, at him, over him, is both the movie proving its thesis, and shutting itself down.
David Lynch is on record as having been pleased with the film, but what amount of that pleasure has been framed by four decades of opportunity in large part because of its success, isn’t clear.
The Elephant Man was nominated for eight Academy Awards. No other David Lynch feature was nominated for more than one. It is his worst film.
Listen to my 90-minute feature podcast: RANKING DAVID LYNCH.
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