FREAKS was the undoing of director Tod Browning; it touched a nerve, let's say. THE ELEPHANT MAN, not unlike FREAKS, touches a nerve or two, as well. And it's quintessential David Lynch. I was already a fan by the time THE ELEPHANT MAN saw release: I'd seen ERASERHEAD at several Midnight showings and had hunted down and seen on a college campus two of his shorts, THE ALPHABET and THE GRANDMOTHER. Going in, I was pretty sure I knew what to expect. I was wrong. Eschewing the surrealistic touches that made his previous endeavors so quintessentially quirky, he opted this time around to tell a straightforward tale of the Human Heart. "Abominable things, these machines," Hopkins as Treves says when first we meet him, treating a burn victim: "You can't reason with them." In ERASERHEAD, the dark, industrial landscape through which Jack Nance as Henry moves is every bit as uncompromising as the Industrial England of Merrick's time. This integration of the Industrial with the Human would continue full blown in DUNE and, to a much lesser degree, in TWIN PEAKS- which boasted an "industrial soundtrack." David Cronenberg pioneered Biological Horror; Lynch, a type of Twisted Industrial Surrealism. (I wanted to see a Bernie Wrightson black and white comic book adaptation of THE ELEPHANT MAN, but, alas, 'twas not to be.) Feckless politicos here in these so-called "United" $tate$ could learn a great deal about COMPASSION from the Treves character in THE ELEPHANT MAN.
Review of The Elephant Man
