A freak! An abomination! A circus animal! A monster! Sticks and stones, they say, may break your bones but names can never hurt you. It's not a motto you'd imagine John Merrick, the man known as The Elephant Man, would have opted for. The damage these names must have done to him in his short life is unknowable as is much of the pain he must have suffered.
Both the pain of the severe physical deformities that afflicted his mobility, his speech, and even his ability to sleep (he had to do this with his head in his knees as lying on his back would have caused him to asphyxiate) - and the pain of dealing with the insults, the beatings dished out to him, and the stigma of either being shunned from normal society or exhibited as a curiosity.
Two of the most telling moments in David Lynch's 1980 film, The Elephant Man (recently aired on BBC4), come when Merrick (played brilliantly and movingly by the great John Hurt) considers the words 'friends' and 'romance'. They are words he clearly knows the meaning of but, to him, they are merely a concept. Not a reality in his past, his present, or, sadly, his future.
Chewing the words round in his mouth they both puzzle and sadden him because Merrick is not the freak, monster, or abomination some say he is. He is very far from it. He is gentle, intelligent, refined, and artistic, as the model cathedral he's making which sits by the side of his hospital bed demonstrates.
When we first meet Merrick, he is being kept locked up in a darkened room with a sack over his head by the cruel ringmaster, Mr Bytes (Freddie Jones - father of Toby), of a Victorian freak show. Bytes calls Merrick his 'treasure' and he is, no doubt, good for business but none of the takings ever seem to end up in Merrick's pocket.
We're introduced to Merrick at the same time as Frederick Treves (a young(ish) and handsome Anthony Hopkins), a surgeon at Whitechapel's London Hospital and Treves' face, on first encountering the extent of Merrick's deformities, cannot lie. Unlike others, including some of the nurses from the London Hospital, he at least does not scream at the sight of him.
Treves lectures on anatomy and displays Merrick to an audience of fellow surgeons where he describes him as a "perverted and degraded version of a human being" though one, it is observed, that has perfectly normal genitals. Treves, who at first calls Merrick "it" rather than "he" assumes, as he confides in his friend Fox (John Standing) that Merrick must be a "complete idiot", an "imbecile from birth".
Which Merrick's incessant heavy breathing and grunting seems to confirm. The hospital governor Francis Carr Gomm (John Gielgud, then a sprightly seventy-six years old) informs Treves that the hospital does not accept 'incurables' so that Merrick will need to be moved on. Unless Treves can provide a reason otherwise.
When Treves attempts a ruse by teaching Merrick a few basic English phrases, Carr Gomm sees through it immediately. But it is soon revealed that Merrick can already talk, and read, perfectly well. He has simply been scared to reveal this. Another indication of how desperate his experience of human behaviour towards him has been.
Soon, a parade of well meaning and curious visitors are swinging by to be introduced to the now nattily attired John Merrick. The actress Madge Kendal (Anne Bancroft) flatters Merrick with a personalised photo and Alexandra, Princess of Wales (Helen Ryan), future queen consort of Edward VII, brings a message from Queen Victoria that Merrick must not be moved on from the London.
But has Merrick, in the words of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, exchanged a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? Has Treves, unintentionally, simply moved Merrick from one freak show to another? Merrick's chief nurse, the formidable Mrs Mothershead (Wendy Hiller), seems to think so, and Treves himself reveals to his wife Ann (Hannah Gordon) his own concerns on the subject and comes to question his own motivations regarding Merrick.
For his part, Merrick has come to love Treves and his wife and is happier than he has ever been in his life. A theatre visit, particularly, when Merrick, sat in the royal box, receives a standing ovation fills him with a joy the like of which he has never experienced before. Merrick is not worried about becoming a fixture on some kind of high society Grand Tour.
A living breathing Venice or Florence for the chattering classes to tick off their to-do list. The life he has had before had been so unbearable this can only be an improvement. But, of course, there are elements that wish to drag him back into that life. There are people out there who see Merrick purely as a machine for making money.
One of these is hospital porter Jim (Michael 'Boon' Elphick) who takes women, including the young Pauline Quirke playing an unnamed sex worker, to gawp at Merrick, forcing them to kiss him, and forcing booze down Merrick's throat. When Jim first meets Merrick his question, at least, is honest:- "what the bleedin' 'ell happened to you?"
Merrick's encounter with Jim leads the film into a final quarter which I shall not spoil for those of you who, remarkably, have still not seen it. But, needless to say, this being Victorian England, does involve a lot of top hats, horses and carriages, the sound of Wurlitzers, chimneys belching out soot, and some very crude and insanitary looking, by today's standards, surgery.
Filmed in black and white to evoke even more of that era's griminess, certainly in the East End of London, The Elephant Man is a remarkably moving, if not entirely factual, portrait of the life of John Merrick. David Lynch keeps his trademark surreal flights of fancy to a bare minimum and when he does indulge, an eerie opening montage of Merrick's mother being trampled by a rogue herd of elephants, it is to the film's service rather than its detriment.
It's interesting to see a young Dexter Fletcher (who had already been in Bugsy Malone and The Long Good Friday by then - though Press Gang was still nearly a decade in the coming) as Bytes' boy and Kenny Baker (R2-D2) playing, you guessed it, a dwarf at the freak show (Kenny, typecast? - never) but these are mere distractions in a film that is loaded with powerful, and moving, scenes.
Merrick reciting the 23rd Psalm, 'The Lord is my Shepherd', being told by Treves that he can be cared for but he cannot be cured, being told by Kendal that he is not an elephant man but a 'romeo', breaking down in tears of joy at the pleasure of making new, and kind, friends, and worrying that he would have been a disappointment to his beloved mother.
My friend Ian will make a joke about almost every subject under the sun, no matter how dark, but I recall many many years ago he told me he considered The Elephant Man to be off the menu when it comes to taking the piss. It's just too sad. I hadn't watched it for about thirty years, myself, and I, too, recalled it being tremendously sad. I wondered if it would still have the same power and it did. But what surprised me most about revisiting it after all this time was how the tears of sadness were balanced out with those of joy. John Merrick was not an elephant and he was not an animal. He was a human being.
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