The Elephant Man (1980): The Masterpiece That Gets Disability Wrong
When I decided to watch The Elephant Man, I was genuinely excited because almost everyone I spoke to described it as a masterpiece. In many ways, it is a sensitive, carefully crafted work designed to obtain an emotional response from the spectator. David Lynch’s directing style is precise, the performances are moving, and the film holds an important place in cinema history… and it keeps the cruelty of the freak shows alive. But, through my personal perspective, as someone with a visible disability that has experienced staring, prejudice, and assumptions made purely on appearance all my life, this filmic experience made me feel conflicted.
This essay is not about denying the film’s importance nor about criticizing Lynch himself, but about asking a question: how is disability represented, and how can this representation affect viewers, especially those who live with a disability today?
David Lynch is often praised for including disabled bodies in his work. This inclusion brings visibility, especially regarding his influence as a director and his continued impact. But inclusion alone is not the same as agency. Maybe this film's outcome was thought to be emotional, but not about the real effects of how this story would be represented in the long run. Of course, we are talking about a real story; Merrick was a real individual and a freak show performer due to his disability. A question should run through much of Lynch’s filmography, and especially through The Elephant Man: Are disabled characters granted subjectivity, or are they primarily used as symbols, metaphors, or spectacles?
This film exists within a long cinematic tradition in which disabled bodies are rarely allowed to simply be. Especially in the mainstream media, disabled characters need to mean something to the audience, and their disability should be the protagonist, putting them in the background. They become moral lessons, emotional triggers, or philosophical devices. The biggest tension and most noticeable contrast in The Elephant Man is between the freak show and the hospital. The freak show performers are often portrayed humorously, and they are meaningful in some way, even if in a negative way. Between them, there is solidarity, a sense of shared experience of people who understand what it means to live under the gaze of others. But once Merrick enters the hospital, something shifts. Even after proving his intelligence, sensitivity, and emotional depth, he is infantilized. He becomes an object of care rather than a subject with autonomy. His life depends now on scientific authority. Both the freak show and the hospital claim ownership of his body. The spectacle changes form, but the controlling gaze remains.
Near the end of the film, Merrick attends the theater, and his simple appearance draws an overexaggerated ovation from the audience. On a side note, this kind of reminded me of the applause scene in the newer film Wonder (2017), which disgusts me. On the surface, this moment could be framed as acceptance, but if you think about it… Why are they applauding? And why is it so loud? Is it because Merrick is finally being recognized as an equal spectator? Or because his mere presence is framed as brave? He is not performing nor asking for attention. He is simply there. The show shifts to his presence, and it is no longer about the musical they just witnessed. The applause suggests that the fact that he is still living with a disability is an achievement, and especially inspirational because he is exposing himself in public. This is where the film becomes most troubling for me. The ending, paired with the phrase “nothing will die,” transforms Merrick into something less than a full person and more than a symbol. He becomes pure, the is no more suffering, there is transcendence. This reinforces a dangerous narrative: that disabled lives are inherently tragic, and that peace or freedom can only exist outside the social world, with either disappearance or death. Rather than questioning how social structures produce suffering for a person with a disability, the film leans toward an easy way: destiny and inevitability, because the problem resides in the body itself.
To be fair, Lynch’s work does challenge conventional ideas about communication and normality. In his films, the form of expression shifts from speech to the representations of the body. As theorists have noted regarding Twin Peaks, disability in Lynch’s universe often signifies access to alternative modes of knowing, linking it to spirituality or the divine. When disability becomes primarily symbolic, lived experiences are erased as real bodies are condemned into abstraction.
Lynch’s work suggests that art and imagination can function as tools of resistance. But when disability is treated as a consolation prize, especially when it's outside accessibility and inclusion, it leads towards this path of romanticization. Sentimentalized representations seduce us into accepting idealized images, leading to a real person with disability, sometimes even into believing that we ourselves are not enough. When Merrick wishes to be “like everybody else,” the film invites compassion. But it also makes it seem as if the problem is with him rather than with society.
In the end, The Elephant Man teaches us something important, but maybe unintentionally. Better, it proves that disability is not an object nor a metaphor; it is not a tragic destiny. Disability is a social process. The violence does not come from the body itself, but from the systems that decide which bodies are acceptable and worthy of care. This is the core of the social model of disability.
Lynch tries to expose the cruelty of normality, but he never fully escapes it.
