The Elephant Man is primarily an anti-David Lynch movie despite the bizarre surrealist sequences bookending the historical drama. How Lynch found his way to this material is as unusual as the combination of his style with that of the movie’s producers and writers. Despite his established background as a comedic writer, director and actor, producer Mel Brooks not only chose a very different script, he also vetted a most unique filmmaker to direct. After screening Lynch’s debut feature, Eraserhead, Brooks ran up to him and said, “I love you, you’re a nut, you’re in.” Brooks’ choice in director is certainly odd on the surface: Lynch’s previous works bear little resemblance to the mawkish, emotionally manipulative themes of The Elephant Man. What could have been his reasoning for hiring Lynch? Whatever the reason, the fact remains that it gave Lynch a mainstream production to oversee for the first time in his career, forcing him to funnel his unique gifts into a type of story he most likely would never have chosen on his own. In short, The Elephant Man‘s place in David Lynch’s career can be summed up as the shortcut to an established status as a successful, publicly-known director with a penchant for meticulous, beautifully crafted movies and a healthy dose of the unconscious.

Despite its unique place in Lynch’s career, the movie raises a number of questions and themes about itself. For example, what does Lynch, the co-writer and director, think about John Merrick, the young Victorian Englishman whose unusual disfigurement made him infamous in late nineteenth century British culture? The short answer is, not sure. The screenplay, initially written by Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren, is based largely on medical memoirs by Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), the surgeon who discovered Merrick working for a freak show and moved him to the Royal London Hospital. Several critics have noted that this basis may explain the tone for much of the movie, as it aims to contrast society’s treatment of Merrick with the personality and intelligence of the human being beneath the mass of tumors and extreme deformities. Only a few scenes deal with Merrick on a medical level, mainly through Treves’ exhibition of him to his colleagues. Otherwise, the film’s focus is on the intrinsic value of a person despite any unusual outer appearances. Though this may seem to be a fairly common social lesson, often taught to children in primary school, the producers and Lynch evidently felt this was a necessary approach to the material, although several other angles would have made for a more interesting picture.

When the basis for the screenplay was the personal journals of one sympathetic medical professional rather than an objective, sober historical approach, there is always the risk that overt sentimentalism will not only creep into the production, but eventually take it over. This is certainly true in The Elephant Man, although it is difficult to know the degree to which Lynch deliberately sought this out. Looking a bit closer into the life of Merrick (whose first name was Joseph, not John), one discovers that he had a relatively stable upbringing. The real-life Merrick made an arrangement with a showman, who paid the disfigured man to be put on display at exhibitions and also offered him protection from the crueler elements of society. Indeed, it was Treves who not only depicted the traveling showman as a sadistic drunk intent on exploiting Merrick, but also mistakenly wrote his name as John. Thus, it is clear that utilizing only one main source for this adaptation hamstrung the project considerably. To follow any of the more mundane aspects of Merrick’s life could have opened up the possibility for a more in-depth psychological understanding of who he was, what he thought of himself and how this identity was formed, both by his own experiences and the influence of others. For all the things that Joseph Merrick was shown to be in The Elephant Man, there were many more elements that went unexplored.

These objections aside, the question as to how the filmmaker who previously made Eraserhead could transition to this is difficult to answer. Looking at his first feature as well as a few of his short works from the 1970s, one could be forgiven for not finding much, if any, sentimental material in David Lynch’s work. This is not to say that he is cold and unfeeling as a director; only that these emotions lie beneath the surface rather than on top. Of all the elements from his earlier work, the meticulous and omnipresent sound design remains as well as the oppressive nature of industrialism and its impact on society both on the individual and collectively. Shadows are everywhere in this movie and as Treves and Merrick are each taken out of their respective comfort zones and confront each other, the cinematography begins to fuse these two very different worlds through diffused light and dark. Such techniques make The Elephant Man more than compelling watching and illustrate just how in control Lynch was over his visual style from the earliest stages of his career. Nevertheless, as important as the visual aspect of a movie is, if what being depicted on-screen is less than compelling, or at the very least maudlin enough to lack subtlety, finding any larger point of meaning in the story can be a moot enterprise.