David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) is the story of Joseph Merrick — the film calls him John — a man whose congenital deformities made him a sideshow exhibit in 1880s London. He is rescued by a young surgeon, Frederick Treves, and given a room at the London Hospital. The film's most quoted moment is a sentence Merrick shouts as a mob corners him at a railway station: I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!
Lynch films the line without sentimentality. Merrick's voice cracks. The mob freezes. The camera holds on a body almost no one in 1880 was prepared to call a man.
The line is not from the Bible, but the Bible has a verse that argues for it. It comes from the most personal of the psalms, the one that follows the speaker through womb, sleep, dread, and dawn:
"I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well."
A Verse That Refuses Cosmetic Logic
The Hebrew of fearfully and wonderfully made is even stranger than the English. The verb under fearfully is yare — the same word used elsewhere for the awe one feels before lightning, before holiness, before the ocean. The body, the psalm says, belongs in that category of the awe-producing. Not because it is uniformly beautiful — the psalm makes no such claim — but because it was made.
Merrick's body was the kind of body that, in 1880, the medical profession photographed and the public paid pennies to see. The Psalm refuses the logic those photographs were trafficking in. Fearfully made applies to him too. He was knit, in the Psalm's verb, in a place no audience was looking.
What Lynch's Film Does
The film is in black and white. Lynch films Merrick's body in fragments — a hand, a foot, the cape over the head — and only later, when Treves has earned the right to look without horror, does the camera show a face. The decision is moral, not aesthetic. The film withholds the body until it has prepared the viewer to see it the way the Psalm sees it.
Merrick's voice, when it finally arrives, is the verse. He recites the 23rd Psalm by heart — the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want — to Treves' astonishment. The man who is not allowed to walk in public has been keeping company with the Psalter. He has been reading what was written about him before he was born.
What the Film Lets Stand
Toward the end, Merrick is given a small theater outing. The actress Madge Kendal recites Shakespeare and afterwards leans down to him and quotes Romeo. Merrick, in turn, recites the Lord is my shepherd. Two languages of beauty — secular and sacred — meet over a man the city had taken to be neither beautiful nor sacred. The film does not adjudicate between the two. It films them both being given to him.
The closing scene is his choice to lie down on his back to sleep, knowing that his head's weight will likely kill him. I am like the people now, he says. He hears his mother's voice from the Psalter: nothing will die. The film does not call this faith. The Psalm does. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. The body that the world had failed to see is given a maker.
The Forty Seconds
Read Psalm 139:14 once. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. Forty seconds. Forget for that time everything Victorian medicine printed in atlases. Notice that the verse was already in print, and that my soul knoweth right well is the kind of thing one says only when no one else has said it for you.
The mob is the spectacle. The verse is the answer. I am a man is the abbreviation.