yea its not what you'd expect, someone that could put the betrayal and despair of mulholland drive and the bewildering fear of eraserhead so beautifully on screen is pretty much the nicest dude ever lol
Best correction ever. Elephant man&The straight story are 2 of the most human and delicately touched films of the cinema, and they have been made by the master of mistery...!!
Thank you Mr. Lynch for your madness, unique sensitivity and great perception of what Cinema is about. Today, we all whisper sweetly "good-bye" to a great man, a great actor, who, as Mel Gibson wrote: "no one could have played The Elephant Man more memorably..." Sir John Hurt. He added in his tweet: "...He carried that film into cinematic immortality." John Hurt. RIP
"The Elephant Man" reminds me of Very Special People...a compendium of deformed outcasts published in mass market paperback in the early 70's, full of photos and short non sensationalistic biographies of "circus freaks" with The Elephant Man included. Probably the origin for the movie. There was a movement in that decade or two old Giganta Corp American Media AWAY from nationalistic characters, a rejection of the Imperial "Divine Manifest Destiny", mostly depicted through "the cowboy", to the quirky, odd, and perhaps the best word of all for those times, divergent subjects. This continued to dying gasps sometime in the ninties, and then computers and computer worlds and interactivity took over. It did not include mental illness pictures...for those had been fairly well dramatized in the 50's. Yet there was a lot of personal symbolism in productions...that were never popular, than emerged from Boomers now possessing hand held portable camera and nagra's. It has something to do with the Post MILITANT America, a lot swaggering macho arrogance when...things were not that great. Materially yes, but the victor of a War...the generations after that, in History, can be the beginning of a cultural decline in Militant Mythologies of Supreme Identity. It was not just the pending Nuclear War but this culture that a great deal of the next generation...the Boomers as tutored by the Silent Generation, neither of whom fought in the Big One although members of the Silent Generation had been children during 40's. The body blows movies had endured from the installation of TV's into every home...and by the late sixties the new tvs replaced the old tv's, which were moved into bedrooms. The breakdown is part of a more vast view of American Culture, to which there as a passion to redefine "being American". The pressure was coming from the future too....and I get McLean's...Don Mcleans line "a Generation Lost in Space"...for the Boomers could see a world beyond which an overpowered militant culture promised normality, and such portentiousness as the end of industrial civilization. This was cocooned in a greater globally expanding sense of things...and nuclear war. It was talked about with great gusto with many, many books and academic programs wrestled with what was anticipated, while the past they probably ignored for their Parents were stuck on winning the war and being victorious Americans in a big global fight. This mirrored, or came from the same instincts as Romanticism...the early 1800's movement I remember mostly through Blake but many others would cite Wordsworth...with the Hippy movement more a notation of a larger shift in consciousness. David Lynch, and many other filmmakers emerging from the seventies and eighties, belong to that kind of sentiment...the Romantic, but we go to fast for, that span, from 1820 to 1880, had three movements, Romanticism 1820's+...then Poe and Baudalaire 1840-1860, then Symbolism, 1865-1885. Symbolism was a dark turn for what was actually dark about Romanticism, but was three-four generations after Romanticism, and that new world had been comprehended, hopeful feelings had grown cold, the darkness of Romanticism remained. However, David Lynch has a stronger distance than those other filmmakers. The horror is...deeper in a context of not just sensationalism but addressing personal demons. Surrealism and Dreamlike are the average vocab we use to get a handle and compress those movies...Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet but they have broken through, as artists do often, into newer ground that I dont feel I have completely understood. Its more than surrealism, its more than horror, its not really dreamy or nightmarish...although I would grant Eraserhead is more non linear and dreamlike than the rest of Lynch's work. The fact that an entire 200 years of ways and means and conventions and cosmology has ended is shocking and it is hard for us to see what the future will hold. Its not public libraries and motion pictures and even public education anymore.
It had a great director at the helm: Richard Stanley, but he was bullied away. Frankenheimer wasn’t a bad director either, but the producers and the star cast messed up.
The brilliance of Lynch's Elephant Man is dimmed to me by the reminder that he's NEVER been in a Power Couple that I know of. Or the Discord Filmbros decided not to inform me of that when I was in my Elephant Man feels.
