How Philadelphia shaped David Lynch’s ‘Elephant Man’
The evocative monochrome dreamer David Lynch is one of American cinema’s most singular talents, with no one else in the industry offering anything near as versatile and artistically expressive. Taking to the industry in 1977 with Eraserhead, a seminal midnight movie that set alight a fire in the bellies of burgeoning film students across the globe, Lynch became a spokesperson for cinema’s darkest and most surreal explorations.
Very much a DIY piece of indie cinema, Eraserhead was made on a budget of just $100,000, with Lynch sleeping on the set just to save money on the production. So, you can imagine the director’s surprise when, just three years later, he was given 50x the budget for his following feature, the biographical drama The Elephant Man, adapted from the book The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Sir Frederick Treves.
Quite different from the rest of Lynch’s previous films and the electrifying originality of his debut, The Elephant Man was no less powerful, telling the story of a surgeon in Victorian London who recuses a disfigured man earning his living as a ‘freak’ in a circus sideshow. Where the director so often prefers to deal in the strange world of surrealism, The Elephant Man was an entirely different project, a tender and emotional masterwork that added another string to his bow.
Lynch’s deft direction and stellar co-written script, penned in part by Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren, helped to earn the film eight Academy Award nominations, though this was certainly aided by the lead performances of both John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins. To this day, the film remains at the pinnacle of Lynch’s filmography, rubbing shoulders with 1986’s Blue Velvet and 2001’s Mulholland Drive.
Even though the film may feel far less personal than Lynch’s strange debut feature, it still drew from his own experiences, however, with the director telling Mark Cousins about how his experience with the city of Philadelphia played a part in the development of The Elephant Man, in particular, the street scenes which bustle with panic and capture the dark smog of the city.
“Philadelphia was a city filled with fear,” Lynch stated, with the director moving to the city from California at the age of 19. Continuing, he described how the city played into his imagination, “Filled with twisted behaviour, it’s called the city of brotherly love – the absence of brotherly love was alive and well. There was sort of a sickness in the air, a twisted, infectious sickness in a decaying city, but it was very powerful, and a lot of Philadelphia seeped into me”.
Lynch’s experience of the city would not only feed into The Elephant Man but many of his following movies, too, with this “infectious sickness” as he describes also being visible in such later films as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and even the hills of TV series Twin Peaks. Although it was a terrifying time for his adolescent growth, it was also crucial for his development as an artist, later calling it a “beautiful experience for me”.
Having a dramatic impact on his life as a filmmaker, musician and artist, Lynch speaks in depth about Philadelphia on several other occasions, including below, where he speaks poetically about the city that made him.
