There’s a quite forthright and uncomplicated emotionalism here that marks The Elephant Man a bit of an outlier in Lynch’s canon. But in no way, shape or form is the movie mawkish or boringly one-note in its tenderness. If it’s true that Merrick is presented as a somewhat sainted figure, a magnet and vessel for incredible pain who refuses to reflect it back out in the world, that is because the film works both on its own terms as a highly affecting drama and also as a planted marker of an emotional worldview that Lynch would explore, from different angles, for the rest of his career. Its depth emanates from the screen.
An emotional bookend of sorts with The Straight Story, in large part but not merely for their respective final scenes, the film’s themes and indeed subject have deep resonance and a surprisingly personal connection to Lynch — something daughter Jennifer Lynch, incidentally, confirmed with me in an interview for my book The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks and David Lynch the Actor, by way of a candid anecdote about her father’s body dysmorphia.
Criterion’s new release is an attractively packaged, two-disc, 4K UHD and Blu-ray Digipack-housed combo pack stored in a cardboard slipcase, with the former disc being region-free and the latter Region A-locked. The release’s menu screen favors sparsity, with the backdrop presented as floating through a starry sky, and only the slightest hints of music box-type orchestration from composer John Morris in the background, under the sound of a blowing wind. There are, per Lynch’s longstanding preference, no chapter stops on the movie. The film’s aural presentation, which makes characteristically wonderful use of industrialized ambience in especially some of its jostling, outdoor crowd scenes, comes by way of an uncompressed English 2.0 stereo DTS-HD master audio mix, with optional English SDH subtitles.
Lynch was, of course, famously averse to the idea of feature-length audio commentary tracks, and never participated in one; there’s also no historian-anchored track here, for those who live or die with such offerings. Lynch was additionally hesitant to sit for deep-dive retrospective interviews that wandered too far into thematic explication (even on something as seemingly air-quote conventional as The Elephant Man), preferring instead to retain some sense of control over telling what he often referred to as “certain stories” related to a given movie’s production. To that end, bonus features here consist of a quartet of interviews and a clutch of archival materials ported over from Criterion’s 2020 Blu-ray release, each worthy and interesting in their own way, but also offering a generous amount of overlap in terms of some of the anecdotes and details shared.
The first of the four interviews, with John Hurt, was recorded in 2009, and runs 20 minutes. In it, he talks about his vision of the physicality of his portrayal of Merrick being based on a corkscrew, the delay in the film’s make-up working to its advantage (including him cannily but surreptitiously telling make-up artist Christopher Tucker, “Don’t get it ready too quickly”), the movie’s day-on/day-off shooting schedule, and being initially terrified of working with Gielgud, his childhood hero. Hurt chuckles at recollecting the 14-week shoot for The Elephant Man coming after wrapping principal production on Heaven’s Gate, then heading back to Michael Cimino’s infamously bloated Western epic for a five-day prologue that he says cost the same as all of The Elephant Man.
