On January 16, we lost David Lynch, at age 78, just shy of his January 20 birthday. That would be January 20, 1946. Lynch was a Baby Boomer. A child of ’50s America. In other words, paradise was his birthright and the loss of paradise the theme of his artistic meditation throughout his life. He loved the decency and cheer of America, but he knew that that is not enough. His art is forever seeking for the cosmic ground of our humanity.
The best introduction to that reflection is The Elephant Man (1980), partly because it was Lynch’s only “Hollywood” film, partly because it is rare for its insistence on faith. That’s a very unusual concatenation of circumstances. Moreover, it was his first studio picture after his independently produced Eraserhead (1977) made him an artist to look out for in that small world, and so has a freshness that only early works possess.
Elephant Man was also a remarkable success. Produced by Mel Brooks (still alive, by the way, and 98), who recruited Lynch to direct and protected him from the studio, this black-and-white Victorian period piece, which owes more to expressionist painters than to Dickens, made $26 million against a $5 million budget. And then it got eight Oscar nominations, including two for Lynch, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and one for John Hurt, who played the titular character, based on the life of the very real Joseph Merrick.
Lynch only ever got two other Oscar nominations, Best Director for Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), never winning in competition, although the Academy gave him an Honorary Award in 2019. That’s another measure of what a misfit he was in Hollywood, given his spiritual concern in his art, and therefore what a strange thing his early success was.
The story of the Elephant Man is very easily told: He was what would have been called in that day a “freak,” found abused in a circus by a doctor (Anthony Hopkins) who brings him to his hospital to study him, but over time learns to protect and then befriend him, under the severe but humane protection of the hospital’s governor (John Gielgud). The Elephant Man is simply called John. He suffers much misery as a celebrity anomaly and dies.
These English actors were celebrities—the actresses, too, Anne Bancroft and Wendy Hiller; in the story, celebrities replace the lower classes as admirers of the Elephant Man, since they can dissemble prurient curiosity as charity. But there are also noble gestures, such as Queen Victoria’s sending the Princess Alexandra (future queen, as wife of Edward VII) to offer the Elephant Man protection, as patroness of the hospital.
Of course, with all this attention, it’s worth asking whether John is even human. He claims he is, but that is in the face of abuse. But there is a rather more moving scene in which it’s the scientists of the day, the doctor and governor of the hospital, who examine his humanity. John, alone in his garret room, recites Psalm 23. That is also where he builds a model of the cathedral he sees from his rooftop window. The suggestion is that to be human is to know God.
Further, the beauty of the cathedral moves him; the beauty of an actress who is kind to him later in the story also moves him; he is capable of longing to be better than he is. The other proof the story offers, the psalm, is stranger still—it’s a beautiful poem, but the evidence consists in its meaning, that John is capable of gratitude, be his life ever so miserable. He is not then simply a creature of his circumstances.
The alternative to man looking up to God might be man lowering himself among the beasts. John is certainly treated in a beastly manner for the most part. The movie’s opening scene shows John’s mother attacked by elephants, run over or ravished. But the putting together in images of a human female and an elephant, the poetic expression of John’s deformity, suggests a problem for all people, be they ever so normal—are they any better than beasts? What makes human beings special? Behavior at least shows us things much uglier than John.
This is the spiritual context for a story that proves a remarkable defense of Victorian society—above all, of its elites. If John’s humanity is somehow a test, it’s primarily the doctors and nurses, as well as the queen and princess, their patrons, who pass it. They defend something about humanity itself in their dealing humanely with suffering, which we were once wont to call the image of God.
In the past, the question Lynch dramatizes would have been called the soul. This is not a category in modern science, not even in modern medicine. The doctor is so important because of the ambiguity of his motives. He certainly is tested, since his initial wonder at John might imply that he doesn’t think John is human. He is curious about deformity, about disease, but one wonders how he thinks about health or what it means to be human.
Since behavior is so ambiguous, we are capable of kindness and cruelty; it seems that neither morality nor politics is entirely sufficient to judge what it means to be human. Lynch invites his viewers to consider the cosmic context of man, as well as the principle of love in the image of John’s mother, in the last scene of the movie. The opening and closing, the frame, are called surrealist. Perhaps the meaning there is supernatural, a concern with the divine.
This question of spirituality is there everywhere in Lynch’s movies, unlike any contemporary director. It’s what made him so interesting, yet repelled audiences. Perhaps he was not exactly a master and could not win over the American audience, but perhaps there is something wrong with us as a society if our art doesn’t involve these deeper questions of humanity and its place in the cosmos.
We should remember Lynch and try to learn from his art what we’re missing in our ordinary reflection on our experience. That’s one of the nobler purposes of art, after all: to restore us to reality.
