DAVID LYNCH AND ‘THE FREAK’: THE STRANGE, SAD SAGA OF THE ELEPHANT MAN

Amidst the many weird and wonderful characters from the late, great David Lynch’s filmography – Dennis Hopper going manically OTT in Blue Velvet, an eyebrow-less Robert Blake being phenomenally terrifying in Lost Highway and Naomi Watts launching herself into the A-list overnight with an unforgettable audition scene in Mulholland Drive – there is an anomaly, and that is the sad, victimised figure of Joseph Merrick.

Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man, based on the real-life story of Joseph Merrick, is unusual in his career for many reasons. It is a period drama based on a true story, set in Victorian Britain and, bar some typically Lynchian surrealist flourishes, it is largely told conventionally, albeit in a wholly different fashion to the usual Merchant-Ivory strictures of polite costume filmmaking.

Against stiff competition, The Elephant Man might be Lynch’s greatest and most enduring film, even if it is his most atypical. It was nominated for eight Oscars (and was unlucky not to win Best Actor for John Hurt, who richly deserved it for playing Merrick) and won Baftas for Best Film and for Hurt. It is heartbreakingly sad, beautifully photographed in luminous black and white and features a fine supporting cast of great actors including Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud and – incongruously but effectively – Anne Bancroft. 

And if you can get to the end without crying your eyes out at the hugely moving, but not remotely sentimental, conclusion, then you’re made of sterner stuff than I. But its enormous success was, as so often, the result of good luck as much as good judgement. The result could easily have been very different.

Merrick lived in the late Victorian era and had a disfiguring illness that has subsequently been categorised as Proteus syndrome, which led his body to develop in unorthodox ways. He spent many years of his life being appallingly treated in freak shows and carnivals, exhibited as a curiosity called “the elephant man”, until he was rescued by the pioneering surgeon Frederick Treves. The doctor took an interest in him and did what he could to make his life not merely bearable but enjoyable, until Merrick died from asphyxia – the result of his sleeping lying down rather than sitting up, as he usually did, which may well have been intentional – at the age of 27 in the London Hospital in Whitechapel.

Treves wrote about Merrick’s life in his 1923 book The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, and the writers Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren believed that Treves’s account would make a compelling film, and turned it into a screenplay. It then came to the attention of none other than Mel Brooks, who was – then as now – best known for his comic masterpieces such as The Producers and Young Frankenstein, but was keen to diversify into more serious filmmaking, albeit as a producer rather than director. Brooks instinctively responded to Merrick’s story, saying to the Guardian in 2008: “My films, even if they’re comic, they’re about: ‘Let’s accept the bizarre. Let’s learn more about these creatures, or these Jews.’ I know the Elephant Man wasn’t Jewish, but, to me, the story had all the aspects of anti-Semitism and Merrick had all the traits of the classic wandering Jew.”

Still, he knew that it was a tall order. As he put it: “How does a guy who is known for the best fart jokes in cinema go on to make The Elephant Man?” The choice of director for the project was crucial, and Brooks’s boldest move was to hire the then-little known Lynch, who had only made one film to date, the low-budget cult picture Eraserhead, which had nonetheless attracted (as most of Lynch’s films did) a fervent and appreciative audience.

This eventually included Brooks, who hit it off with the director when he met Lynch. “His shirt was buttoned – always buttoned – at the top. His look was kind of weird. The man didn’t wear a tie. He said a lot of ‘R’s, like a Midwestern kid. He looked just like a young Charles Lindbergh. I said to him, ‘You’re hired.’ I hired him right there.” Lynch had been worried that his uncompromising previous film would put the producer off – “I was afraid that if Mel Brooks saw Eraserhead, I would never get the job directing The Elephant Man” – but he proved to be the perfect man for a difficult job. As Lynch later said, “[It was] unbelievable that Mel Brooks loved Eraserhead, and he backed me in ways that you can’t imagine.”

With Lynch and Brooks in place, the casting of Merrick would be crucial. The role would require a hugely talented and versatile performer who was comfortable with full immersion in heavy make-up. The chameleonic Dustin Hoffman, then at the peak of his fame, was considered but vetoed on the grounds that, as the producer Jonathan Sanger put it, “We’re always going to be looking to see where the Elephant Man ends and Dustin Hoffman begins”. 

Lynch, always loyal to his regular actors, wanted to cast his Eraserhead star Jack Nance, until he saw Hurt’s Bafta-winning performance as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant. The role convinced him that the actor was fearless enough to take on what would be a considerable challenge.

Other performers soon joined the cast, including Hopkins – then a respected British character actor rather than an Oscar-winning star – and Bancroft, who was married to Brooks. She played the society actress Madge Kendal, who befriends Merrick, and Brooks was amusingly candid about the reasons for her casting: “She was so good in that film. She had already won the Oscar for The Miracle Worker and she was the producer’s wife, so, no, she didn’t have to audition. Are you crazy?”

The major challenge of the film was the make-up that Hurt would have to wear each day. Lynch, who had done everything on Eraserhead from writing and directing it to creating its score and unnerving sound design, initially attempted to design the Merrick prosthetics himself. This was not met with universal approval. The make-up designer Christopher Tucker, who would have liked the job himself, scoffed “Well, this is a fine turnaround – why bother with make-up people at all, the director might as well do the lot! He could light it, direct it, do a Charlie Chaplin, he seemed to be doing pretty much everything!”

Yet even Lynch’s visionary skills had their limitations, and it soon became clear that the sheer complexity of the Merrick make-up – which would eventually need 22 separate pieces in total – would require a specialist expert. Tucker was hurriedly hired, with five weeks to design the inimitable appearance of the elephant man, and took Merrick’s skeleton out of the London Hospital Museum in order to study it. As he told the Telegraph, he had to give it a bath. “It was rather smelly. It was probably the first bath it had had in 100 years or so but it certainly needed it.”

Hurt, who spent several hours each day having the make-up applied – it initially took a punitive twelve hours, although it eventually was reduced to a mere eight – was mostly sanguine about the efforts involved, perhaps because he knew it was a role of a lifetime. As he said of the make-up process, “You could create something that was grotesque, but by the end of the film you wouldn’t find it too heavily difficult to sympathise with him.” 

Nonetheless, it was arduous. The actor famously rang his wife after the first day’s shoot and said, “Well, I think they’ve finally found a way of making me not enjoy film.” But it had almost been a remarkable experience. As Hurt said, “I was brought on to the set to a stunned silence. If anybody had broken that silence with the slightest giggle the film would be finished. There we stood. The freak. John Merrick, as vulnerable as you could be.”

The major difficulty for the untested Lynch on set was not Hurt, who may have been a heavy drinker but was a consummate professional when working, but Hopkins. They had their first disagreement when the actor turned up bearded to play Treves. “I want that beard off”, Lynch said, to which Hopkins refused. The relationship did not improve from there on. Hopkins found the director aloof and unwilling to give him guidance, and said “He wore this big brown trilby, a long black cloak and tennis shoes, and I had the feeling most of his performance as director was going into his hat.”

Although Hopkins allowed that Lynch was “a perfectly pleasant fellow”, he found the working relationship impossible because, as he said, “I became increasingly irritated with what I felt was his rather arrogant lack of communication. We were somehow supposed to understand his thoughts.” That Lynch, a naturally retiring man, may have been shy amongst these experienced, theatre-trained actors did not seem to occur to the actor, who complained to Brooks, but was given short shrift. The producer calmly said “The guy’s a genius. Even I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Hopkins therefore all but directed himself in the role, much of which he played opposite stand-ins due to the difficulty of having Hurt ready on set in make-up, and said “as a result the film became a rather fascinating experience for me, like a very private trip.” Although his initial feeling about Lynch, which he held for years, was that he was “obtuse, obscure and very puzzling”, he later admitted that “in those days I was younger and I was impatient because he liked to do a lot of takes. I said, ‘I don’t want to do all that.’ Many years later I wrote him a letter apologizing for my behaviour because I saw Elephant Man and it was really a terrific movie. Mulholland Drive and all the films that he’s done since then are proof of it.”

If working with one of his lead actors was challenging enough, Lynch – a man of confirmed regular habits, who ate a burger in the same fast-food restaurant every day while filming – faced a challenge when it came to getting the film distributed. When it was screened for Paramount Pictures, they balked at the director’s more surreal flourishes – not a million miles from Eraserhead – and demanded that they be removed before they could even consider putting it out publicly. Brooks was having none of it, and grandly responded, “We screened the film for you to bring you up to date as to the status of that venture. Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives.”

When the film was released – without Brooks’s name on the credits, because he feared audiences would expect a zany comedy if they saw his involvement – it met with both critical and commercial success, making several times its modest $5 million budget and winning many awards. One Oscar that it didn’t win because the category did not then exist was Best Make-Up. The film’s failure to be so honoured led to uproar and the creation of the award the following year, which was appropriately won by Rick Baker for his staggering work on An American Werewolf in London – another film that allows audiences to feel sympathy for the stricken, tragic protagonist.

Lynch’s picture has duly earned a place in cinematic and cultural history, being referenced in everything from Batman Returns to the R.E.M song New Test Leper, which contains a lyric alluding to its most famous line, when Merrick says, “I am not an animal! I am a human being. I am a man.” Although Lynch would go off in far more bizarre and controversial directions in his subsequent films, he continued to speak fondly of his brilliant, deeply affecting second feature all his life. As he said, with characteristic humility and grace, “Mel Brooks took a chance on me. It put me on the map.”

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2025-01-17T10:28:06Z