Victorian Bestiary

...Treves speculated that Merrick, instead of going to sleep sitting up, as he normally did, tried lying on his back in "the pathetic but hopeless desire to be 'like other people.'" I suspect the screenwriters' rearranging of the facts was inspired by their sense that the Elephant Man's life was essentially a social drama-a kind of metaphor for the ugliness of society at large...

...For example, in the screenplay (by Christopher DeVore, Eric Bergren and David Lynch), Treves discovers Merrick's intelligence shortly after he happens upon him...

...and speak of characters as though they possessed lives of their own, discussing their plights and predicaments with sincere concern...

...Indeed, the true story is so fascinating that one must wonder why the movie version, despite its claims of authenticity, treats the facts cavalierly...

...From the brow there projected a huge bony mass like a loaf, while from the back of the head hung a bag of spongy, fungous-looking skin...

...But truth and drama are at war in this movie, and neither is done justice by the writing or directing...

...Harassed by magistrates who were cracking down on such displays, Norman sent Merrick on a tour of the Continent under the care of an Austrian manager...

...Once the Elephant Man becomes a celebrity, he is kidnapped by his original exhibitor and again placed on display...

...in the words of Lady Geraldine Somerset, whose journal is quoted by Howell and Ford...

...From the upper jaw there projected another mass of bone...

...He finally died in his sleep when the weight of his skull dislocated his neck...

...There he briefly resumes his privileged life before committing suicide...

...He would describe plots as though they were events which happened recently...

...Brooksfilms, the company run by her husband, Mel Brooks, produced The Elephant Man...

...It was at this point that the doctor and his strange patient established the relationship that was to confirm the Elephant Man's pathetic humanity and make him a celebrity...

...His appela-tion also owed much to the widely circulated tale (actually his own explanation for his affliction) that Merrick's mother, late in her pregnancy, had been knocked over and terrorized by an elephant from a traveling menagerie...

...Strikingly out of place in this British cast is Anne Bancroft, who plays Madge Kendal...

...Merrick's contact with Kendal seems almost certainly to have been limited to the photographs of her that he requested and she gladly supplied...

...It is little wonder that numerous accounts of Merrick's life have already appeared, both nonfiction and fiction-most notably, besides the Howell and Ford work, Ashley Montague's book, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, and Bernard Pomerance's play, The Elephant Man, which opened on Broadway last year...

...Following the Pathological Society appearance, Merrick returned to the freak show and its manager, Tom Norman...

...Howell and Ford make clear, as the movie does not, that the poignancy of Merrick's existence was heightened by the limitations his appearance placed on social contact, no matter how frequent or well-motivat-ted...

...In between these low points there are numerous ominous shadows and flaring gas lamps, all highlighted by the spooky black-and-white cinematography of Freddie Francis, who puts to'dubious use every gimmick he learned at Hammer Films, where he directed horror movies in the 1960s...

...they are drawn to Merrick for their own less than compassionate reasons and see little of the man within the horrible exterior...

...At the time, however, Merrick's condition was tentatively diagnosed as derma-tolysis (a loosened condition of the skin) and pachydermatocoele (a tum-erous overgrowth of skin...

...The real sequence of events was significantly different-and even more dramatic...

...Howell and Ford describe brief walks that Merrick took by himself in the hospital courtyard, under the cover of night, yet not one excursion of this kind is included in the film...

...As a precaution against any obstacles the grotesque specimen might encounter on the way to the meeting, the doctor gave the Elephant Man his calling card...

...Their book notes, too, how reading fiction filled the void in the Elephant Man's experience with the outer world: "He was apt to speak of novels as if they were factual accounts...

...His turning up at Liverpool Street station caused a tumult, but because he still had Treve's card-incredibly, after a year-and-a-half-Merrick was rescued and taken to London Hospital...

...Since the screenwriters tell us even less about Merrick, John Hurt does as well as any actor could while encased in a grotesque fright mask...

...In the movie, there is one brief scene where the Elephant Man is alone in his room, sadly preening in a new suit...

...When Treves pays Norman to have Merrick brought to the hospital, the impres-sario implausibly sneers at the doctor, "We understand each other completely...

...In his 1923 report on the case (reprinted in The True History of the Elephant Man, by Michael Howell and Peter Ford), Treves gave the following description of his patient: "The most striking feature about him was the enormous and misshapen-ed head...

...He abandoned the Elephant Man in Brussels...

...Wendy Hiller, as a nurse, is forced to indulge in a heavy-handed and improbable bit of muscle-bound melodrama (bashing an evil hospital night porter over the head for charging people admission after hours to see the Elephant Man...

...The perspective is manifested in David Lynch's direction and Freddie Francis' cinematography: Both emphasize the horrors of Victorian society in social realist fashion...

...None of this fascinating "surrogate life" is so much as hinted at in the film...

...Thus until his death in 1890, the Elephant Man found a peaceful refuge as a permanent patient at London Hospital...

...The right arm was of enormous size and shapeless...

...Penniless and unable to travel without attracting unwelcome attention, Merrick nevertheless succeeded in making his way across the Channel to London...

...The osseous growth on the forehead almost occluded one eye...

...Today it is generally believed that Merrick suffered from neurofibromatosis, a disease of the central nervous system resulting in the formation of the dense fibrous tissue that was partly responsible for his freak-show name...

...This was not mentioned in her published memoirs and probably never took place...

...Other veterans of the British cinema do somewhat better...

...It protruded from the mouth like a pink stump, turning the upper lip inside out and making the mouth a mere slobbering aperture...

...London Hospital publicized Merrick's plight in an appeal for charity in the Times, and soon high society began trooping to his quarters for a look at, and a talk with, "such a gentle, kindly man, poor thing...

...Anthony Hopkins delivers a restrained performance as Treves, although the doctor's motives are so arbitrary in the script that his behavior is often needlessly opaque...

...Apparently to show the nature of Victorian charity, the script also includes a meeting between the Elephant Man and Madge Kendal, a well-known Victorian actress who was one of his sponsors...

...Instead of giving us hackneyed sociology, the film could have more legitimately used such long-distance arrangements to focus on the Elephant Man's psychology-particularly his fantasy life...

...John Gielgud is cast a bit too close to type as Treve's dignified hospital superior...

...No chance is missed to linger on ugly scenes of early industrialization (workers toiling, chimneys billowing black smoke, machines creaking and groaning), although they are wholly unrelated to the plot...

...more than money has changed hands...

...But for the most part the filmmakers concentrate on his external relationships, rather than finding some way to dramatize his existential alone-ness...

...Discovering Merrick in a shop on Whitechapel Road, Treves arranged to have him presented before the Pathological Society of London...

...Unable or unwilling to confront the psychological drama of the Elephant Man's existence, the filmmakers lapse into expressionistic trickery...

...The back was horrible, because from it hung, as far down as the middle of the thigh, huge, sack-like masses of flesh covered by the same loathsome cauliflower skin...

...This phenomenon of a "normal" man trapped in the body of a beast is a compelling piece of social history and psychology...

...The circumference of the head was no less than that of the-man's waist...

...Nor is any opportunity to equate the doctor with the showman missed...

...The eponymous Merrick was a cruelly misshapen cripple who became famous after he was rescued from a freak show in 1886 by a London physician, Frederick Treves (who subsequently went on to be named surgeon-in-ordinary to the Queen and later received a baronetcy from Edward VII...

...The ending is similarly a sort of science-fiction affair: Moments after Merrick expires on screen we actually see stars, then his mother, her face surrounded by a halo, declares gnomical-ly, "Nothing will die...

...Yet her appearance is not as mysterious as all the missed opportunities here for a serious and illuminating movie...

...In a scene that calls to mind Tod Browning's Freaks, the Elephant Man manages to escape while the show is touring the Continent and with considerable difficulty gets back to the hospital...

...The movie opens with a fantasy sequence that shows the face of a woman (Merrick's mother, we later learn), then-in a disappointing display of literal-minded-ness-a herd of elephants, followed by a shot of the woman writhing on the ground (as if being raped, instead of trampled by the animals), a cloud of smoke, and the sound of a crying baby...

...On Screen VICTORIAN BESTIARY BY ROBERT ASAHINA According to the credits, The Elephant Man is "based upon the true life story of John Merrick . . . and not upon the Broadway play of the same title or any other fictional account...

...When Treves eventually discovered that his deformed patient was not an imbecile, as he had at first thought, but an intellectually competent adult who had completed school through the age of 12, the Elephant Man became the star of a new kind of exhibition...

...In this view Norman, Treves and all the doting upper-class Londoners barely differ from one another...