The Pachyderminator wrote: ↑Tue Jun 16, 2020 3:39 pm
Well, no, as far as that goes, I didn't suppose I was watching a literal elephant rape, and certainly not that the film is telling us that the historical Merrick's mother was raped by an elephant. I called it that because, as I remember it, that's for all the world what it looks like, and what the audience is meant to think of when they first see it at the beginning of the film.
I've seen this film many, many times, the 40th annniversary of my first viewing being mere months away, and I have never once thought "elephant rape" until this evening. And I'm no stranger to arthouse films featuring implied bestiality, as my contributions to Arrow's
La Bête and
Padre Padrone and Mondo Macabro's
Private Vices Public Virtues rather give away.
It's hard to believe that this was merely a product of my over-fevered imagination. Maybe it is anyway; goodness knows I should have learned by now not to say anything about a film I haven't seen three times.
I've just watched it again, and there's not one single shot that even remotely suggests that
rape is occurring. It's staged entirely in accordance with the legend of Joseph Merrick's origins (which is verbally spelled out for us by Bytes twelve minutes later), and that's clearly how we're meant to interpret it.
I suspect a major problem here is that you so totally misread that scene that it's ended up colouring your impression of the film as a whole. Not least because...
Still, I got the distinct impression that the film was not so much depicting Merrick's exploitation by others as perpetuating that exploitation itself. The story is self-condemning as a macabre spectacle.
I wrote a paragraph contesting this, and then on impulse looked up Pauline Kael's review, and she put it much more eloquently, so...
Pauline Kael wrote:When Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), the doctor who is to become Merrick’s friend, first tracks him down in the illegal, hidden sideshow where he’s being exhibited as the Elephant Man, Treves goes through what seem to be endless slum passageways and alleys into an abyss—the darkness where the monster huddles. Finally, he sees the pathetic deformed creature, but we don’t. We see only Treves’ reaction, and his tears falling. The grace in Lynch’s work comes from care and thought: this is a film about the exhibition and exploitation of a freak, and he must have been determined not to be an exploiter himself. The monster is covered or shadowed from us in the early sequences and we see only parts of him, a little at a time. Lynch builds up our interest in seeing more in a way that seems very natural. When we’re ready to see him clearly, we do. By then, we have become so sympathetic that there’s no disgust about seeing his full deformity. John Hurt has had the screen long enough to make us respond to his wheezing, groaning sounds and his terrified movements, so we don’t see merely the deformations, we see the helpless person locked in the repulsive flesh. Even before Merrick begins to speak to Treves and to recite poetry and to reveal his romantic sensibility, we have become his protectors. He’s a large lumplike mass at first, but as we get to know him, and respond to his helplessness, he begins to seem very slight— almost doll-like. There’s nothing frightening about him, and he’s not repellent, either. His misshapen body and the knobby protuberances on his forehead suggest a work of an Archipenko or one of Picasso’s bulging distortions.
The only horror is in what we experience on his behalf. When a young nurse sees him and screams, it’s his recoil we respond to.
The Pachyderminator wrote:It should have been made by anyone but Lynch.
I couldn't disagree more. Lynch's involvement (and Mel Brooks' as executive producer for letting him have a startling amount of creative freedom for a second-timer making his first professional feature) is what made
The Elephant Man the extraordinary work of art that it is. It's so totally Lynch's film that it's pretty much impossible to imagine what another director would have made of the original Christopher DeVore/Eric Bergren script (which I gather was a fair bit more conventional than the final draft that Lynch contributed to), but I suspect it would have run the risk of being a far more by-the-numbers Victorian melodrama, and possibly one that actually
was as exploitative as you're bizarrely accusing Lynch's film of being.