The Elephant Man (David Lynch, EMI Films, 1980): An Analysis from a Disabled Perspective

Paul Anthony Darke

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Disability Rights and Representation Cinema History and Criticism Film in Education and Therapy

Abstract

ABSTRACT A paper that uses Foucault's ideas on normalisation and medicalisation to discuss David Lynch's The Elephant Man as a movie that dehumanises and objectifies its subject rather than one that represents abnormality/disability as human or valid in itself, as it is often claimed for the film. I analyse the methods by which the film inadvertently portrays the historical process of medicalisation and reinforces its ideology of normality as ‘common sense’ and abnormality as inhuman and ‘unbearable’ due to its pathological state rather than social construction; with the ‘Freak’/abnormality (as carnivalesque) also being examined. I consequently analyse the ambiguities of the film to show its hidden agenda (through unconscious acceptance) of placing abnormality further and further into the realms of the Other, with eugenic overtones.

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References

1976The History of Sexuality 1984Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century 1988Disease and representation: images of illness from madness to AIDS 1993Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit.1986Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory 1989Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit 1984The politics of disability 1988Feminist Studies/Critical Studies

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2005Understanding curriculum as normalizing text: disability studies meet curriculum theory 2009Placing the ‘mad woman’: troubling cultural representations of being a woman with mental illness in Girl Interrupted 2022Disabling discourses: contemporary cinematic representations of acquired physical disability 2022Disability on Arab screens: cripping class, religion, and gender in Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon

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