The Passion of David Lynch by Martha Nochimson

Author:Martha Nochimson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press

43. Merrick’s mother: the presence of energies beyond social forms.

To further complicate our conventional relationship with the film’s narrative, Lynch next shows us the apocryphal story of the Elephant Man’s birth in discontinuous images from diverse angles of vision. Over the final unbound image of the maternal face a lap dissolve of a procession of elephants appears moving from left to right. These images too remind us that we are dealing with human forms when the image freezes, leaving the rump of a large elephant and the head of a smaller elephant—certainly coded as a mother and child—with one superimposed over each of the eyes of the mother’s head (see figure 43). To remind us that we are spectators, Lynch then executes multiple changes in the audience’s perspective of these images; the elephants move toward the audience after which we see the woman stomped by the elephants both from her perspective up at them and from their perspective down at her. These initial frames place the audience in its only relationship in the film that is truly different from that of the looking involved in a freak show, the dominant metaphor of the film. In many ways, The Elephant Man roots the spectator in these frames to suggest that inhumanity is a false habit of seeing.

These first frames create a visceral relationship between the audience and the film that will haunt the structured narrative of Treves’s ensuing quest to free Merrick, whom we first meet as a horribly exploited public display. The alternative flowing, empathic mode of seeing, which precedes “normal” modes of objectification in this film, becomes the call to reality about what is missing from the lives of both Merrick and Treves. The moving eye of the initial frames is always there in the depths of the narrative that follows, a silent contrast to the abusive tendency in the society portrayed by the story to turn “the other” into an object. The mode of looking to which we are first introduced silently abides to bring into bold relief the habitual Victorian domination/submission patterns that doom both Merrick and Treves in different ways.

The entrance of a conventional plot into this film is a highly visible event, a situation that contrasts with the usual operation of the plot as the invisible organizer of the movie experience. In this context, the ordinarily user-friendly plot becomes an invasive presence that appears to eclipse the earlier, freer kind of vision with a dominance/submission pattern of objectifying people that is not only at the heart of the plot conflict but also a troubling, reflexive model of how The Elephant Man’s audience is likely to regard the film’s characters. The conventional plot action begins explosively as Dr. Frederick Treves is searching for the “Elephant Man” at the freak tent of a carnival. A rising jet of flame and a whirling circle of black and white forms force their way onto the screen, illuminating for the spectator a quest undertaken by the quiet, formally dressed, top-hatted Treves.

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