Poster for The Elephant Man
(dir. David Lynch, 1980)
I.
Not everybody who saw David Lynch's mawkish and moralising movie The Elephant Man (1980) will remember that the suggestion is given that Joseph Merrick's severe physical deformities may have been caused by his mother having been frightened by a rampaging elephant during her pregnancy [1].
But most people seem to recall Merrick making the anguished cry when surrounded by a hostile crowd at a train station: I am not an animal! I am a human being! [2]
And it's this line - which causes my compassion for his suffering to curdle into irritation at his philosophical capitulation - which I wish to critically examine here. But readers might like to note in advance that this is not merely a defence of animality; it is an intervention in the politics of human disability also.
II.
The phrase I am not an animal is resonant, say the psychologists, because it speaks to our deep fear of losing basic human dignity and being treated like a helpless, unthinking beast.
It's not only an instinctive appeal for compassion, but a demand that we recognise the right of all men to be accorded an exceptional degree of respect and not subject to cruelty, neglect, or marginalisation.
Merrick wants acknowledgement of the fact that he thinks and feels just like other men - including, somewhat ironically, those who mock and torment him - and that he is neither monstrous nor lacking a rational soul and therefore doesn't deserve to be tormented, victimised, or kept in a cage.
III.
So, what's wrong with that, you might ask.
Well, for one thing, it's a negative proposition; one that wholly relies on denigrating animality in order to assert human worth - and I don't like that.
By defining human being strictly by what it is not, the phrase reinforces an artificial boundary between humans and the rest of the living world and for it to be meaningful the concept of the animal must be understood not only as something other, but something vastly inferior; something that can be hunted, farmed, exterminated, eaten and experimented on.
In other words, the phrase posits animality as a baseline of low value against which to measure human exceptionalism [3].
Now, of course, defenders of Merrick will say that when he uses this phrase he is not consciously making a philosophical statement - just asking to be treated with kindness or left alone. However, by making his defensive appeal in this way he is reinforcing a way of thinking that devalues animals and accords him protected status purely on the grounds that he shares humanity with his tormentors.
There is, I suppose, a kind of irony in this - the Elephant Man is a speciesist [4] ...
IV.
For me, it would have been a far more radical philosophical act if - in Lynch's film at least - Merrick had embraced his animality and affirmed his otherness, rather than pleading for acceptance and the right to assimilate into human society.
Instead of desperately begging to be admitted to humanity, Merrick should have put down his Bible, picked up a sticky bun and said: I am not a man! I am an elephant! And you still have no right to abuse me!
That would have been fantastic: Merrick could have subverted the entire logic of oppression by declaring that all life has inherent value, regardless of whether it matches human standards of beauty, speech, or reason.
But, alas, 'twas not to be.
For whatever reason, The Elephant Man is a morally conventional (and boring) movie that reinforces a traditional Hollywood-humanist structure largely based on true events rather than the director's surreal imagination [5].
Thus, the cinematic version of Merrick is all-too-close to the real-life Merrick and we are denied the pleasure of witnessing his becoming-elephant and thereby locating a unique, untamed power in his own body [6].
V.
Some readers will, I know, be asking what becoming-elephant means exactly.
Well, it does not involve Merrick charging round on all fours or trumpeting; it involves, rather, creating a zone of intensity that disrupts the binary of man and beast. To become-elephant is to refuse to play the game of a system built on your exclusion.
By refusing to speak the language of human rights and operating instead on the plane of the animal, Merrick would escape the trap of assimilation. He would no longer be a deformed and disabled human begging for entry into the club of his more shapely, able-bodied oppressors; he would become a radical, untameable force that exposes Man as a constructed, tyrannical fiction.
VI.
In sum: as long as human beings think animals inferior, then human societies will always find a way to label certain marginalised humans as animals in order to justify treating them as inferiors too.
When Merrick cries: I am not an animal! I am a human being! he isn't just capitulating to speciesism; he is validating the neurotypical, able-bodied framework of what constitutes an all-too-human human being.
Liberation for the disabled doesn't come from desperately trying to fit into an oppressive, idealised human standard. Instead, it comes from shattering the standard itself - embracing the radical alterity of the non-conforming body as a site of resistance.
Merrick should not have apologised for his elephantism: he should have packed his trunk and said goodbye to the human circus with a trump, trump, trump!
Notes
[1] I discuss this cinematic fantasy and the myth of maternal impression upon which it rests in a post dated 25 January 2018 - click here - and again in a later post (4 March 2021) with reference to D. H. Lawrence and his Leda poems: click here.
[2] This scene can be watched on YouTube - click here.
[3] There are several posts on Torpedo the Ark in which I oppose the idea of human exceptionalism, i.e., the vile, stupid, and conceited belief that human beings are fundamentally superior to other living creatures and possess a unique moral status or set of capacities (that we are made in God's image).
[4] Speciesism was a term coined in 1970 by psychologist Richard D. Ryder and later popularised by philosopher Peter Singer. As a concept, it describes a human bias or prejudice in favour of their own species against the interests of other species.
[5] Because the tale of Joseph Merrick (played by John Hurt) and his relationship with Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) relies on documented history, Lynch stays closer to a factual narrative than he usually does in his films. This will have pleased the studio bosses who made clear to him that they expected a Victorian melodrama that was accessible to mainstream audiences and made clear the moral divide between compassionate medical professionals and cruel, exploitative sideshow owners.
To be fair to Lynch, he was still regarded as a relatively young and inexperienced filmmaker in 1980, having directed his first feature-length movie only three years before - and Eraserhead was a low-budget, independently financed project produced entirely outside the traditional Hollywood studio system. Thus, he needed to prove (perhaps to himself as much as anyone else) that he could handle a large crew, a traditional script, and a commercial (multi-million dollar) budget.
Afterwards, with nothing to prove - Lynch was Oscar-nominated for his directorial work on The Elephant Man - he felt free to make movies like Blue Velvet (1986), which were perhaps a little more avant-garde shall we say (although it should be noted that Lynch refused to rank his films and was always immensely proud of The Elephant Man).
[6] In Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy, becoming-animal is not about a human literally (or even metaphorically) turning into a beast, nor mimicking an animal. It is, rather, a process of deterritorialisation - i.e., escaping the rigid, violent categories of majoritarian human identity imposed by society and discovering new intensities, etc.
See their jointly written text Mille Plateau (1980), trans. into English by Brian Massumi as A Thusand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
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