Referred to as "Steampunk"

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2001)

David Lynch's Elephant Man has a cinematic style that has been called Steampunk and compared to the early fantastic fiction of Tom Powers and James Blaylock. Steampunk was coined as a retro analogue to Cyberpunk. The movie itself does not fit in that subgenre label.
Peter Nicholls, in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, in his entry on Steampunk, mentioned the film in this context: "Steampunk is a US phenomenon, often set in London, England, which is envisaged as a once deeply alien and intimately familiar, a kind of foreign body encysted in the US subconscious....not so much the actual 19th century as a 19th century seen through the distorting lens of Charles Dickens, whose congested, pullulating 19th-century landscapes were the foul rag-and-bone shop of history from which the technological world, and hence the world of SF, originally sprang. Somewhere behind most Steampunk visions are filthy coal heaps or driving pistons. It was a vision that also entered the cinema, especially through David Lynch, first in Eraserhead (1976) and then in The Elephant Man (1980), and even -- inappropriately enough -- in much of the mise-en-scene of his movie Dune (1984)."
John Clute and Paul J. McAuley, both themselves accomplished SF writers, in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, gave an entry to Steampunk as a subgenre of fantasy as well as SF, but they do not mention any movies or Lynch. They do differentiate Steampunk from Gaslight Romance, though both share the romanticized 19th-century London setting. Gaslight Romances border on supernatural fiction and fantasies of history, whereas Steampunk is more closely Technofantasy that features anachronism or alternate world settings, and urban fantasy. Dickens is mentioned again, his London a Babylon on the Thames. John Grant, another SF writer, gave David Lynch his own entry plus one on "Twin Peaks" (1990). He mentions Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Dune, but does not connect them to Steampunk. He does give Lynch his importance to fantasy with Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet (1986) and describes both as urban fantasy and surrealism.
Admittedly, both encyclopedias are not very helpful to Lynch's early work. The Elephant Man is not even presented as fiction. But neither as a documentary. Lynch has taken obvious creative liberty in his film's look, sound and narrative. It is more conservative and naturalistic than Eraserhead, its artistic flourishes are kept to a minimum, but flourishes they still are. The several short sequences of dreams and thought dot the film, make waves in the flow of the otherwise straight story. These scenes could not have come from any true source as the main story had. They qualify as fiction and as Steampunk, as they include actual steam, driving pistons and heaps of coal, as well as rampaging bull elephants.
The non-fiction bulk of the film is kept historically real and accurate, no anachronisms and no fantastic technologies. Everything seen here was real, from the medical office officials and the uppper-class personages, complete with opera glasses, down to the bloody operating rooms, dusty specimen labs, squalid streets and alleyways, and the carnival. Every freakshow performer was real and documented, and actual dwarfs, giants and unusual people were among the film's cast. The makeups that recreate that infamous visage perfectly match the actual photographs and plaster casts Merrick himself taken in the 1880's. The entire cast bears the meticulous makeups and costumes that portray the period. Lynch and his crew have done an impeccable job all around.
Yet, there frequently is lots of steam and smoke, and occasionally punk kids on the streets (no trendy "punk rock" look here), and more often adults of the lower classes with their ill manners and nasty attitudes. No telling what types one might bump into downtown. There is that distorting lens, that peculiar conveyance that can easily be mistaken for Steampunk. No one may have thought of inventing a new niche of fantasy, no writers may have borrowed from the film. But when a critic noticed a stylistic similarity between certain novels and certain films, Steampunk was named. Lynch and his Elephant Man were labelled.