Hacker Cinema
The Elephant Man
1980 · Film · 124 min
Directed by David Lynch
A Victorian surgeon rescues a heavily disfigured man being mistreated by his "owner" as a side-show freak. Behind his monstrous façade, there is revealed a person of great intelligence and sensitivity.
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13 comments on Hacker News
David Lynch's "Elephant Man" was considered a good kids' movie for my 5th-grade class.
Put it this way: My dad used to beat me, and that was less traumatic than that movie.
Every once and a while you see an auteur get coaxed out of their genre. Lynch did Dune in '84 right off the back of The Elephant Man. And while he hated the entire experience I know that I'm not the only person that enjoyed the particularly lynchian facets of the story that he brought into the light. His film is much more concerned with exploring the more psychedelic aspects. The divination that comes with being the Kwisatz Haderach, the grotesqueness of the Harkonen house, the psychedelic experience of the spice.. which are all present in the source material. Whereas the Villeneuve take is much more concerned with other aspects colonialism primarily, and those things that Lynch leaned into he certainly acknowledged but spent more time in other places. I love both and I love when we get to see multiple adaptations of the same source material, even if some aren't so great, just because we do get to see these different aspects of the original work.
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
Just start with the pilot first -- as it is, the US pilot is basically a feature-length film (it runs 1h25m), and features enough of Lynch's trademark juxtaposition of horrible and mundane, and piles on the warmth and love for his characters that set his works apart. The European cut of the pilot adds a few minutes to the end and originally aired as a TV movie, and may be worth it if you're not otherwise hooked by the show, since it features a definitive ending as well as the first appearance of the show's trademark "red room" (footage from the sequence was included in a later episode in the US).
For me, the second step would either be The Elephant Man or Mulholland Dr. -- many of his works tackle very dark subject matter and include sexualized violence that can be downright disturbing to watch, but those two omit those elements. The Straight Story is much lighter, but largely lacks the surrealism Lynch is known for.
Elephant Man is perhaps the most approachable. Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt are at the apex of their acting careers in this film.
After that Mullholland Drive is absolutely brilliant and has that unforgettable masterpiece diner scene: https://youtu.be/UozhOo0Dt4o?si=GedzAdMh0KIXoHz4
The Elephant Man is great, but does have a surreal sequence, and is entirely in black and white. I'd vote for the The Straight Story, which is literally a Disney movie, being more mainstream.
Regardless of how his films come together as a whole, Lynch is without a doubt the most prolific producer of haunting and unforgettable imagery that inhabits my mind. A few months ago I rewatched, on Youtube a scene from the Elephant Man, a film I saw once 30 years ago. The scene was just like I remember it, I only to watch it that one time and it was etched into my mind forever, crystalline.
Dune is more fun to watch and seems to have emerged as my all-time favorite film. In spite of it's flaws and Lynch's own disdain for it, the orphaned film is no less visionary, and is as strikingly original as anything Lynch has made.
It's amazing how some of the smaller, passing shots from his films stick with you. I haven't seen Elephant Man for decades but the scene at the beginning when he's at a freak show and his handler is forcing him to turn around for the audience still haunts me. Same for many of the scenes in Wild At Heart.
> Yet would be entirely baffled at the concept of a British panto.
Monty Python, and in particular Terry Gilliam's animation style, were both heavily panto influenced.
It was also a nerd rite-of-passage to watch Eraserhead which was directed by David Lynch, who then got to direct the Elephant Man.
The panto scene at the end of Elephant Man is one of the few scenes in a movie that wrecks me every time I watch it. Unfortunately it gets scrubbed every time someone posts it online.
> known for cult films like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Wild at Heart
Really? No, really? Not Twin Peaks? Not Lost Highway? Not Eraserhead, not The Elephant Man? Not Dune?!
Exactly this. Lynch would be the first to say that his "Dune" is a failure. The movie is pretty much incomprehensible if you don't know the book. Famously, the first cut was 5 hours long, and he never had a plan how to get the runtime down. I mean, just watch the prologue with the woman talking for 90+ seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqvSJp-6qT4
and tell me with a straight face that someone not knowing the book would be able to understand this. It's pure desperation. Don't get me wrong: it's beautifully shot, especially with the in&out-fading of the face, but it does not work to convey the setting of the story. It's simply too much information.
Quite famously, and also in this case, he refuses to even discuss it because this is a place in time he would rather not go to. It must have been traumatic for him. But this failure was a blessing in disguise, as he did this little movie "Blue Velvet" afterwards, and the rest is history. Lynch would not be where he is today without this failure. After "Elephant Man", he was destined to be the next Lucas, but instead, he pretty much defined a new genre.
I’m also a huge fan of Lynch’s Dune. Lynch, I would say, probably hates the movie because of memories of industry drama and studio pressure- more to do with having had a bad experience than the movie being actually terrible. It also almost killed his career in a way. I wonder if he had a desire to work on more big budget films in the mainstream like Spielberg throughout his career and perhaps Dune was the film which ended those dreams. Guy has like three of four legit towering masterpieces (not including twin Peaks)so his career was great despite things but I do wonder what kinds of movies he’d have ended up making if Dune was a success or if he never made Dune after The (very nearly perfect film) Elephant Man.
High concept sci-fi is consistent box office poison and while this new version of Dune looks good, and I want to see it, I don’t think it will set the world on fire. It seems to feel like YA fiction more than I’d like it to be and borrows heavily, stylistically, from Lynch’s Dune but doesn’t seem to have the same design impact as the original. The YA tone in the trailer for me feels like studio meddling. But we’ll see how good the actual movie is. Blade Runner 2 was a fine film but not quite a home run and I expect the same from Dune.
Dune is a beautiful film by Lynch, but the story pacing and deadpan-ish acting really hurts it. Lynch sometimes needs to be reined in. A reined in Lynch can make the difference between an amazing "Elephant Man" or weird as hell "Rabbits."