Intellectuality, aestheticism caged in a grotesque exterior

‘The Elephant Man’ screened at SAFMA media centre.

ISLAMABAD: ‘Tis true my form is something odd,

But blaming me is blaming God...

If I could reach from pole to pole

Or grasp the ocean with a span,

I would be measured by the soul;

The mind’s the standard of the man

False Greatness, Isaac Watts

Perhaps famously attributed to and alluded by Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”, the couplets above came to be the epigraph of this unfortunate Victorian personality.  Born with severe deformities that almost defied conception, The Elephant Man was a curio to turn of the century Britain.

At first  pilloried among the dregs of carnivals and travelling circuses, being the star attraction among his fellow ‘grotesquries’, he soon became the toast of high society, even being patronised by the royal family. Merrick was a sterling example of a man surmounting his genetic fate; his outward ‘perversion’ was met, almost in defiance, by an intellectuality and an aestheticism that was quite a surprise to his carers and acquaintances. His plight though cliché sounding in its message is profound in what it communicates to the handicapped and physically challenged.

Far from a story of pity or resignation, Merrick’s account was famously dramatised in David Lynch’s (Twin Peaks) academy award-nominated film The Elephant Man (1980), screened on Friday at SAFMA, in its world cinema series.

Chronicling Merrick’s life, the story opens in hallmark Lynch manner, a stampede of elephants knocking a pregnant woman to the ground, the purported reason for Merrick’s abnormalities presented in a dreamlike fugue.

We then are taken to London, where rumour of this ‘most shocking ‘of individuals has caught the ear of surgeon Fredrick Treves (Anthony Hopkins). In top hat and coat tails, Treves discovers the Elephant Man (John Hurt) being paraded before a jeering crowd in the back alleys of London.

Whether it is Merrick’s wretched state or a man of science’s interest, Treves takes Merrick under his wing, presenting him before scientific societies and registering him as a resident of the hospital Treves works at.

At first considered a dumb brute, incapable of speech or comprehension, it is slowly realised that Merrick is quite articulate and urbane, having feigned the act to avoid further notoriety.

Word of this most unusual man begins to get around and soon, Merrick is the talk of high society. Of course, those close to him feel that this sudden celebrity is merely an exchange of one audience for another but Merrick feels that he has found acceptance and understanding. The film does then deviate slightly, with Merrick forcibly returned to the freak show, but keeps to its original theme, of the Elephant Man’s place in the world and his uniqueness in it.

Possibly being Lynch’s most restrained movie, touching sotto voce upon his characteristic surrealistic ethos, the film is a study in expressionism, the deliberate use of black and white, stark yet thematically conscious.

The film is not about sympathy nor as one would expect from Lynch, bizarre fetishism, discomfort and thorough beguile.

It is a steady human drama with flashes of the surreal.

Hopkins, yet in the infancy of his career, is almost clinically aloof, the scientist and the man cool and laconic. Buried under mounds of make-up and prosthetics, John Hurt (1984) is quite true in his depiction, not of a man encumbered by deformity but a sensitive individual, new to a world that had previously ignored or shunned him. Sir John Geilgud also stars as the hospital director.

In summing up the film, it is not to say that it is niche film alone, but the film resounds in its message to the firm and infirm alike, that ‘the mind’s the standard of the man’ not his mere form.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2010.