"This Immeasurable Kindness"

Rating: Null/10 (11 December 1999)

It is historical fact that in Victorian London a man came to light whose head and body were so appallingly mis-shapen by fibrous growths that he was frightening to behold. This unfortunate man, John Merrick, could never hope to live in society, and was forced to endure a wretched existence as a fairground exhibit - the 'Elephant Man'. Merrick came to the attention of a surgeon, Frederick Treves, who rescued him and helped him reclaim his human dignity. This true story is the subject of David Lynch's astonishingly powerful film.
The 'look' of the film is a tour de force of sheer brilliance. Not only are the images aesthetically resonant and horribly beautiful, but they also reinforce (and even shape) the film's very meaning. In a recent TV interview, Lynch explained his choice of monochrome for "The Elephant Man" by saying, "Some movies cry out for black and white. Black and white removes you from reality and you can drift into another world." It certainly holds true in this case. Veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis has worked miracles, recreating 19th-century London as if old engravings had been brought to life. Lynch and Francis have set about composing an essay on the grotesque. Two whores fight in a pub, their faces distorted by rage and injuries. The operating theatre, with its bizarre stands and clamps, is a parody of a factory, little more than another Victorian processing plant. Lamplight casts tortured, exaggerated shadows. The band of carnival freaks who liberate Merrick constitute a monstrous procession of deformity as they escort him to safety. And the purpose of it all? To descant on Merrick's own distorted form, and to comment on the Victorian psyche, with its morbid interest in the grotesque.
Bytes, the fairground 'owner' of Merrick, gives out a story to the paying public that Merrick's mother was attacked by an elephant during her pregnancy. The film begins with disturbing images of toplit elephants in a black nothingness, a woman in the throes of childbirth, and a close-up of the portrait of his mother which Merrick keeps with him at all times. From this nightmare we move into the organised nightmare of the fairground, where people pay to be frightened. A board near Merrick's cage reads "The Fruit Of The Original Sin", so that revellers can comfort themselves by supposing that what has been visited upon poor Merrick is in some way his own fault, or at least it was 'meant to be'. It is our own moral deformity, not on display as nakedly as this wretch's physical dystrophy, which prompts us to stare and to mock.
The Victorians had a passion for machinery, and the film sustains a brilliant metaphor of human society as being just another apparatus. Fairgrounds are machines of entertainment and profit. The public is circulated around the stalls and its money extracted. The grim streets around the London Hospital form an apparatus for housing the workers, hovels laid out in joyless serried ranks, conveniently close to factories and wharves. Even the hospital is a processing machine, with its regimented lines of beds and its severe architecture. By moving from fairground to hospital, Merrick has left one industrial monster and been swallowed by another. Even the public urinal is a comment on the Victorian obsession with 'order', its troughs arranged as regularly as looms in a cotton mill. Because Merrick's poor distorted body offends against these notions of symmetry, he is despised and vilified.
Steam and flame recur as images throughout the film in endless variations. Steam was the Victorians' power-source, the foundation of their wealth and confidence, quite literally the supplier of their drive. Here, it represents the dark energy of the human psyche, so admirable when harnessed properly, so destructive when it breaks the bounds of social discipline. Fire is the enlightening goodness of science, the Promethean beneficence of Treves and his circle, real Victorians who belie the stereotype of pompous and sinister hypocrisy, and who go to enormous pains to nurture and protect a malformed wretch such as Merrick.

And for all the terrible suffering of Merrick, this is film is a resounding tribute to human kindness. As viewers, our cynical expectations are continually being defeated. Treves does not treat Merrick like an anatomical specimen, but warms to the Elephant Man's innate decency. Carr Gomm does not expel the hideous creature from the hospital, but shows profound compassion. Teenage nurses are afraid of Merrick at first, but grow to love him. We suspect the fashionable actress Mrs. Kendal (played magnificently by Anne Bancroft) of taking a shallow and insincere interest in Merrick, but we are proved wrong yet again. Treves' wife (a deeply affecting performance by Hannah Gordon) is initially dismayed by Merrick's ugliness, but finds herself weeping helplessly at the tragedy of this sweet man's crushing misfortune.
John Hurt, as Merrick, gives a performance which fills the viewer with awe. Hardly recognisable as a human being beneath the latex make-up, he blazons Merrick's humanity across the screen. The gentle wonder with which Merrick beholds the beauty of an ordinary middle-class drawing room is heart-breaking to witness.
Anthony Hopkins and Freddie Jones, as Treves and Bytes respectively, are marvellous. Treves is tormented by a recurring doubt - is he really no better than Bytes, the deranged mountebank who believes that Merrick belongs to him? Are the two of them no more than showmen, seeking to exploit Merrick's misfortune? And flowing from that, are we, the viewers, waiting impatiently to see Merrick's face unveiled, any better than the Victorian gawkers?
The film answers its own question. Decency is better than cruelty, and Treves is nobler than Bytes. We all have both Treves and Bytes within us, in varying proportions. How many of us are capable of Treves' searing self-examination? Merrick, and this magnificent film about him, touch something deep in our inner selves.