The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Lynch · a film · 1980 · about 124 minutes · written with Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren, from Frederick Treves’s memoir and Ashley Montagu’s study · Brooksfilms
Mode
Victorian period drama and medical melodrama, framed by a dream; biography, case history and passion in one structure
Mythos
The beast who is the most human figure in the story; the child marked by his mother’s fright; a passion of display, mockery and unmasking
Phase
The last years of one man, from a fairground curtain to his death in the London Hospital, framed at both ends by his mother’s face
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, anamorphic widescreen, English dialogue; about 124 minutes; a lead under full makeup who is silent through the first part
Register
From a dream of elephants and a fairground at night to tea in a drawing room; the hospital played with restraint, the showman and the porter broad
Scale
One man, one hospital, and the city that comes to look
Governing Proposition
A surgeon finds a deformed man behind a fairground curtain, brings him into the London Hospital and makes him a gentleman whom society comes to visit. The wager of the film is that the gaze of charity and the gaze of curiosity are hard to tell apart, that the world which rescues the exhibited man goes on exhibiting him, and that the viewer, made to wait for his face, is one of the paying crowd. What it uncovers it also softens, with a saint for its victim and two coarse men for its cruelty.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in a dream. A woman’s face; elephants moving in slow motion through smoke; a woman falling beneath them; a newborn’s cry. The prologue makes literal a belief the Victorians held, that what frightens a mother can mark her child, and it puts the story told about its subject before the subject himself. Then the film is in London, in black and white and a wide frame, and a young surgeon, Frederick Treves, played by Anthony Hopkins, walks through a fairground at night.
Behind a curtain a showman, Bytes, played by Freddie Jones, keeps a man for display. The curtain is drawn back. The camera stays on Treves: his eyes fill, a single tear runs, and the film does not show what he sees. Soon after, Treves stands before the Pathological Society with a pointer, and the man stands behind a screen, seen in silhouette. The fairground and the lecture are one act in two rooms: a man shown behind a curtain for money, then behind a screen for science. The film needs both before it can ask its question, and it sets the showman and the surgeon on either side of the same cloth.
The man is John Merrick, played by John Hurt under Christopher Tucker’s makeup, made from casts of the historical body. The historical man was Joseph Carey Merrick (1862 to 1890); the film calls him John, after Treves’s memoir. Freddie Francis photographs gaslight, fog and steam, and Stuart Craig builds a London of tenements, wards and wharves. Under all of it runs a sound of steam, hissing machinery and drone, carried over from Eraserhead, so that the age’s machinery and Merrick’s body share one roar.
Movement II
Bytes beats Merrick, and Merrick is taken into the London Hospital. For a long stretch the film keeps his face from us. We want to see what the fairground crowd and the doctors wanted to see, and the film makes us wait for it, then shows him in full to a nurse who screams. The viewer’s curiosity is indicted before the story has judged anyone else’s. Through the first part Merrick does not speak, and to the hospital he is a case.
Treves teaches him the Twenty-third Psalm by rote, to recite for Carr Gomm, played by John Gielgud. Then, after the lesson stops, Merrick carries the Psalm on alone, past where Treves taught it. The overshoot is the turn of the film: the patient becomes a person to the hospital, and what had been displayed is now heard. The Psalm also sets the film’s sacred key early, and much of what follows will lean on it.
What Merrick wants is to be ordinary. He keeps a photograph of his mother; he is given a dressing case; he wishes he could sleep lying down, like other people. The film finds his dignity in these small things, through image and gesture, and that is its second truth. Mrs Mothershead, played by Wendy Hiller, is the one who will say aloud what the hospital is doing.
Movement III
Treves takes Merrick home to tea. In the drawing room Merrick shows Anne Treves the photograph of his mother, and she weeps. It is a comedy of manners turned to grief in a few minutes, and it is as far from the prologue’s elephants as the film goes. The same law holds both: to be seen, as a monster or as a gentleman, and the longing to be seen as the mother saw.
Mrs Kendal, an actress, played by Anne Bancroft, comes to visit, and she and Merrick read from Romeo and Juliet. Society callers follow. At night the hospital’s porter, played by Michael Elphick, brings paying visitors to Merrick’s room, and holds a mirror up to his face. The film’s argument is that the callers and the porter’s crowd are kin: the respectable version and the low one, the same looking in better clothes. The porter’s two parties do the same work twice, and the order of these passages matters less than their rhyme.
Mothershead says plainly that Merrick is being shown again. Treves asks his wife whether he is a good man or a bad one. This is the film’s best disclosure, an indictment of the kind, turned on the people who rescued him. But the film does not hold it at that pitch. It gives its open cruelty to two men of the lower orders, played broad, in a register the rest of the film does not share, and it keeps its victim without fault, so that the question put to Treves is put more softly to everyone else.
Movement IV
The hospital’s governors take up the question of his place, and royal favour settles it. Then Bytes takes Merrick from the hospital and carries him off to the Continent, to be shown again at a fair. The episode is invented against the historical order. It adds a second captivity and a second villainy, cruder than the first, and its performers are staged as tableau.
The other performers of the fair release him, and he makes his way back to London. At Liverpool Street station a crowd turns on him. His hood is pulled off, and, cornered, he cries out that he is not an animal. Anne V. Coates cuts the chase and the cornering cleanly. It is the passion the film has been signalling, displayed, mocked and unmasked, and the cry is known beyond the film.
It is also where the film’s central truth is said aloud. What the curtain, the screen and the mirror had shown is now shouted on a platform, and the image is no longer trusted to carry it. The scene is strong, and its strength is the kind that the film’s best passages did without: the withheld face in the first part had made the same point in silence, and had made it against the viewer.
Movement V
Merrick is brought back to the hospital. At the theatre he stands in a box, and the audience turns from the stage to stand for him. It is a height of pity, and it is also the last showing: the civilised world that took him from the fairground ends by exhibiting him at the theatre, and the film lets both senses stand without choosing between them.
In his room he finishes his model of St Philip’s church, with its spire, built from the one corner of the real church he could see from his window and completed by imagining the rest. He takes away the pillows that held him upright. On the wall is a drawing of a sleeping child. He lies down flat, like other people. The film does not say whether this is choice or accident, and the question has stayed open.
The close returns to the frame. The mother’s face appears among the stars, and her voice speaks of nothing dying, over Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The origin myth of the prologue is answered, and the consolation is warmer than the film’s own account of the gaze. What is left open is the question the film raised against its audience in its first part and could not wholly answer against itself: whether a film that makes its subject the object of so much feeling escapes the exhibition it indicts.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and much of the film answers itself. The fairground and the lecture theatre are one act in two rooms, a man shown behind a curtain for money and behind a screen for science, and the film needs both before it can ask its question. The Psalm is required: it is the moment the patient becomes a person to the hospital. The society callers are required as the respectable kin of the night porter’s crowd, and the dream frame is required by the close. But the subtractive test finds real give in the second half. The porter’s two parties do one job twice, and the Continental episode, invented against the historical order, spends a long stretch on a second captivity and a second, cruder villainy whose purpose is to bring him to Liverpool Street.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the gaze of charity and the gaze of curiosity are hard to tell apart, and the civilised world that rescues the exhibited man goes on exhibiting him, in drawing rooms and wards and at last at the theatre. Mothershead says plainly that he is being shown again, and Treves asks his wife whether he is a good man or a bad one. A second truth comes through image and gesture: dignity, to Merrick, is ordinariness. The film softens both. Its victim is a saint, its cruelty is handed to two caricatures of the lower orders, and the central truth is finally shouted on a station platform rather than left to the image. What is uncovered is narrowed by the comfort the film takes care to give.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds, dread and pity. The dread: elephants in slow motion over a falling woman; the curtain drawn back at the fairground on a figure the camera does not show, while Treves’s eyes fill and a single tear runs; the night porter’s mirror held up to Merrick’s face. The pity: the Psalm carried on alone past its lesson; Merrick standing in a theatre box to an audience turned toward him; the model church finished with its spire. But much of the height is lent. John Morris’s score swells where the images would suffice, and the close leans on Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a borrowed piece that carries its own grief and does the most work in the film’s last rise.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The myth is part built and more evoked. Built: the beast who is the most human figure in the story, the old matter of Beauty and the Beast and of Frankenstein’s creature, which bears the structure, since every scene tests who is the animal. Built too is the frame: the Victorian belief that a mother’s fright can mark her child, made literal in the prologue’s elephants and answered at the close by the same mother. The rest is signalled. The descent among the performers on the Continent and the return through a crowd that hunts him make a passion, displayed, mocked, unmasked, but it is shown by Psalm and steeple more than constructed, and the archetype leans on a borrowed Christian iconography that the film summons rather than earns.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the prestige period biography and the medical melodrama, with Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) behind the fairground. The departures are real, and they lie in the texture: black and white in a wide frame for a studio release in 1980; a soundscape of steam, hissing machinery and industrial drone carried over from Eraserhead (1977) into a Victorian drama; a dream prologue and epilogue around a linear film; the face withheld through the first part. The stake was a midnight-film director with one feature handed a costly period picture and a British cast of the first rank. What holds the axis down is the path beneath the texture: the narrative form is classical and the moral arc the most conventional in Lynch’s work. The swerve is laid over a proven road.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The withheld face makes the viewer a paying customer: we want to see what the fairground crowd and the doctors want to see, the film makes us wait, and then it shows him to a nurse’s scream, so that our curiosity is indicted before the story judges anyone else’s. The black and white sets Merrick in the age of the medical photograph, which is how the historical man survives, and the industrial sound puts the hospital and the theatre inside the same machine as the fair. But the test is not sustained. Once Merrick has been seen, the form settles into a well-made melodrama, and for most of its length the film is a biography of a kind man told in the usual way.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Forty-six years of return are evidence, in three streams: writing on Lynch, which reads the film as Eraserhead’s industrial dream made public; the history of Victorian medicine and of the historical Merrick; and disability studies, which has argued sharply that the film reproduces the pitying gaze it criticises and displays its subject at length for an audience’s feeling. That quarrel is a real open question, whether the film escapes the exhibition it indicts. Whether Merrick’s death is choice or accident, and whether the close is consolation or a refusal of one, stay open too, and the rhymes of curtain, screen, mirror and window yield on return. What holds the axis low is the rest: the moral arc is plain on a second viewing, and the sentiment does not deepen.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the demonstration that an avant-garde sense of sound and image could carry a studio prestige picture intact, a period film made in the textures of industrial nightmare. It is a force of fusion, not of reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the protest over its makeup is the usual account of why the Academy introduced a makeup award; the film made Lynch’s career, with Dune and Blue Velvet following from it; the cry at the station passed into common speech and parody; and later films of disfigurement and the exhibited body, Mask (1985) among them, work in its frame. But its successors took its subject, not its means. It redirected little of what filmmakers did, and its grafting was carried further by Lynch than by anyone it touched.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-six years. The film as released survives whole and has been restored; nothing of it is lost. Presence has been continuous and wide for an art-leaning drama: eight Academy nominations at release, steady television and home video, teaching in film and in the medical humanities, and a cry known beyond the film. The surface is not fixed to 1980, since a Victorian story in black and white does not date as a contemporary one does, and Tucker’s makeup still holds under scrutiny. That earns the usual figure for its span. It stops short of the widest because its critical standing has narrowed beside Lynch’s later films, and because the disability critique has made part of its reception uneasy, though it has not removed the film from view.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The making is assured, and in several departments it bears weight. Freddie Francis’s photography gives gaslit interiors, fog and steam, faces lit to model age and grief, and a wide frame that holds a hospital corridor or a station crowd. Stuart Craig builds a London of tenements, wards and wharves. Christopher Tucker’s makeup, from casts of the historical body, lets John Hurt act through a laboured voice and one visible eye and make a whole person, and Anthony Hopkins’s reactions carry the first half. The costs run through much of the film. Freddie Jones’s Bytes and Michael Elphick’s porter are played broad, in a register the rest of the film does not share; Morris’s score swells where it should wait; the Continental performers are staged as tableau.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the prologue, elephants trampling a woman in slow motion through smoke, and tea in the Treves drawing room, where Merrick shows a photograph of his mother and Anne Treves weeps. One law covers both: to be seen, as a monster or as a gentleman, and the longing to be seen as the mother saw. The fairground, the lecture, the porter’s mirror, the theatre box and the stars obey it, and the industrial sound joins the dream register to the realist one. The strain is in temperature, and it is not small. The villains are cruder than the law requires, the rescue by the performers on the Continent is closer to fable than the hospital scenes allow, and the close’s consolation is warmer than the film’s own account of the gaze.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The orders are present: consciousness, in Merrick’s reading, his recitation and his model, and in Treves’s conscience; the family, in an absent mother and a doctor’s household; medicine, in the lecture and a hospital with governors and funds; class, from the fairground and the East End to the theatre and a royal visitor; the sacred, in the Psalm, the church and the mother’s promise; art, in Shakespeare and the stage. One man and the law of the gaze hold them together. What holds the axis lowest is how many are only present: Merrick’s inner life is gentle and largely withheld, labour and industry are atmosphere and never entered, the state appears only as royal favour, and history is setting.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Made at 8.2 and The Sublime at 8.0. A film whole and widely seen for forty-six years, its surface not fixed to its year; a making in which Francis’s light, Craig’s London and Tucker’s makeup, worn by Hurt, bear weight; and heights of dread and pity, from the curtain at the fairground to the Psalm carried on alone.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: medicine, class, the family, the sacred and art are present through one man, but his inner life is withheld, labour is atmosphere, the state is royal favour and history is setting. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.3, a fusion of avant-garde sound and image with the prestige picture whose successors took its subject and not its means; then The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 7.4, a departure laid in texture over a classical path, and a moral arc that is plain on return.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.3 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at Pressure on Tradition, 7.3, The Swerve, 7.4, and The Bottomless Well, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Elephant Man as released in the United States by Paramount in October 1980, about 124 minutes, in black and white and anamorphic widescreen, from the dream prologue to the mother’s face among the stars: directed by David Lynch from a screenplay by Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren and Lynch, drawn from Sir Frederick Treves’s The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923) and Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (1971); produced by Jonathan Sanger for Brooksfilms, with Stuart Cornfeld as executive producer and Mel Brooks, the company’s head, keeping his name off the credits; photographed by Freddie Francis, edited by Anne V. Coates, designed by Stuart Craig, with music by John Morris, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings over the close, and makeup by Christopher Tucker. The film is not an adaptation of Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man (1977), which is not part of the work; nor are Treves’s memoir and Montagu’s study, named only as sources. Restorations bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is described rather than quoted. The order of the hospital’s middle passages is not relied on, and the timings of sequences are approximate. The account that ties the Academy’s makeup award to the film is given as the usual account, not as established. Facts that could not be verified, among them the credit for the sound design, the British awards, and whether any other version of the film exists, are not given.