The Killing of the Unicorn

Rating: Null/10 (9 March 2009)

In 1980, Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten was killed by Paul Snider, a Canadian pimp. Snider tortured and disfigured Dorothy's body, before shooting her in the face with a shotgun. Prior to her death, film director Peter Bogdanovich had planned to marry Stratten. As a tribute to his dead lover he published "The Killing of the Unicorn", a book in which he holds not just Snider responsible for Dorothy's death, but the entire Playboy empire, and states that, far from a dopey sex object, Dorothy was an intelligent and scholarly woman who had a fondness for the biography of John Merrick, otherwise known as The Elephant Man.
Bogdanovich believed that Dorothy identified with Merrick precisely because they were both judged primarily on externals: Dorothy as a one dimensional sex object, Merrick as a hideous beast. Both their inner selves were buried beneath society's perceptions of their physicality.
It is this event which lead to Bogdanovich directing "Mask", a film about a boy called Rocky Dennis. Rocky suffered from a sclerotic bone disorder, an ailment which caused severe deformations of his skull. Like David Lynch's "The Elephant Man", Bogdanovich's film thus attempts to portray the inner beauty of a character who is hideous on the outside.
But what makes "Mask" important is that Bogdanovich has inserted into his film all the historical episodes that were missing from Lynch's. Merrick's desire to visit a home for the blind, a real-life subplot missing from "The Elephant Man", is turned into Rocky's budding sexuality and romance with a blind girl. Lynch's omittance of Merrick's father (a man who abandoned Merrick due to the ordeal of raising such an ill boy), becomes the caring but often absent father of "Mask". Similarly, while the "outcasts" of Elephant Man were all nasty circus owners and ridiculously caricatural thugs, Bogdanovich surrounds Rocky with gangs of bikers and drug users who, because they are outcasts themselves, are able to identify, empathise and care for Rocky.
The result is that, through these reversals, Rocky Dennis slowly emerges as a believable three-dimensional character, whilst Lynch's John Merrick never develops beyond a superficial object designed to illicit our pity. Scene after scene, like Jesus in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ", we watch as Merrick is abused by cartoonish villains who exist solely to beat him up. Such bullying is the cheapest way to garner pity.
Taunted by crowds at a train station, abused by his circus owner, and constantly harassed by a lecherous mob of ugly lower class rascals, "The Elephant Man" amounts to nothing more than one of those slick advertisements by UNICEF or PETA. Look at these starving Somalian children, why not donate a dollar? Look at those abused and abandoned pets, why not offer your support? Look at John Merrick being beaten, why not shed a tear?
While Rocky goes out into the world every day, struggling to survive, Merrick is an entirely passive character, hidden in a hospital room. While Rocky uses wit, humour and perseverance to overcome his handicaps, Merrick seems to magically acquire his intellectual and artistic abilities from nowhere. In short, Rocky actively schemes to obtain a life whilst Merrick is entirely passive, always accepting gifts and donations from others. Rocky is a fighter, Merrick is a charity case who just wants to be tolerated for who he is.
But the true connection between all men is one of empathy born of mutual suffering, rather than a compassion born of freedom from the virtual hold of an absolute Other. Why then are so many problems perceived as problems of intolerance and not as problems of inequality, exploitation and injustice? Why is the proposed remedy always tolerance and sympathy, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? Tolerance, by definition, builds walls between people. The act of tolerating is itself an act of admittance that there is some difference, some wrongness, present, which is why modern life is increasingly compartmentalised. In contrast, compassion borne of mutual struggle is an act of deep connection. Of tearing down walls.
Actual universality is not the feeling that, above all differences, different people share the same basic values, rather, actual universality appears as the experience of negativity, of the inadequacy of a particular identity. A better formula would thus be: in spite of our differences, we can identify the basic antagonism or antagonistic struggle in which we are both caught, so let us share our intolerance and join forces in the same struggle.
By removing the personal struggle, Lynch has turned Merrick into a unicorn: a beautiful myth. Lynch overstates Merrick's inner beauty, treating him as a metaphysical object (he memorises the Bible, builds model cathedrals, is polite, well spoken and absorbed into heaven when he dies), refusing to show how he thinks, how he copes, what motivates him or why he behaves the way he does. Merrick is a one-dimensional character, almost like Jesus, floating through the film, absorbing the sins of all the nasty humans and then dying. The real "Elephant Man" committed suicide. Why reduce all these interesting existential struggles down to run ins with gangs of ugly thugs?
The differences between "Mask" and "Man" can best be seen in how the "caretakers" are treated in each film. Rocky is cared for by his mother, a woman who is viewed as a slut, druggie and whore by both family and society, but who is revealed to be beautiful through her struggles. In contrast, see how Lynch has Hopkins identify with the gangs and circus owners who prey on Merrick; one film mythologizes, the other demythologises.
7.5/10 - Pure sentimentalism. Despite its beautiful cinematography "The Elephant Man" is a predictable film which telegraphs its intentions, emotions and plot at every turn. It's a middlebrow "it's what's inside that counts" message movie with nothing narrative-wise to separate it from similar fare like "The Mighty" or "Simon Birch". Watch "The Wild Child" or Bogdanovich's "Mask" instead.