“Dear God, I hate myself / Dear God, I hate myself”
The mirror has two faces but the only one I have lolls to the right a little. The left eye is a touch lazy—maybe the lid is just differently calibrated from the right. An aesthetic of balance eludes me. The eyeballs bug a little, like audio animatronics off-schedule. I never really figured out how to make my mis-blinking face behave, which is to say, look settled and symmetrical. And so whenever someone holds up a camera, I try to keep my face in motion. Maybe the one still frame they capture will improbably mimic all the chiseled jaws and bravado eyes that flip through my head kinetoscope-like, angels and orderly, constellated Adonis. It occurs to me that I aim for taxidermy in front of the shutter, in front of the person on the other side of it.
Is it vulgar to indulge a spell of casual self-loathing? I admit, I try to loathe like I love: as often as possible and in a vain attempt to scratch out what is possible and limited by being a human body. If you follow cruelty all the way around, it becomes generosity again, a crucial anxiety of The Elephant Man (1980). Like Freaks (1932) siphoned through the industrial-dad freakout of Eraserhead (1977) and cooled by Gaslight (1944), David Lynch’s second feature traces the bulges and abscesses of humanity’s endless ballet through beauty and ugliness, often in the same gesture. It is a portrait of totalizing alienation which, having sculpted the ugliest garments humanity clads its lumpen self in, chooses grace instead of despair. Which is to say, it is David Lynch’s most “Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl” film.
That song (by the experimental band Xiu Xiu) and Lynch’s film are both cultural objects that insist on a bright and human love despite drawing from palettes of blue abuse and totalizing American violence. Lynch and Xiu Xiu have met textually before—the latter recorded a series of Twin Peaks covers for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art’s “David Lynch: Between Two Worlds” exhibition. Those renditions were collected on 2016’s Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks. Beyond intersecting at “Falling,” Lynch and Xiu Xiu share an affection for the corroded pop object. Thinking about the balance between pop riff and noise attack in their songwriting, frontperson Jamie Stewart (the only constant member in Xiu Xiu’s morphing lineup and sound) said, in a 2018 Tiny Mix Tapes interview, “[Songs] can be extraordinarily satisfying to work on, but utilize an entirely different part of your brain and organize something that’s narrative, or semi-narrative or semi-linear.” Covering traditional forms in experimental tones, Lynch and Stewart similarly chase ascension in punishing images. “Blacks” subjects a heartbeat to the breaking point, elliptically alluding to Stewart’s father’s own struggles with mental health—“He told his son he wants to kill himself / He said it’s alright, I have had enough of this life”—but in vocals so distorted by space and utterance so as to sound animalistic. “Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl” itself unspools a sequence of unsettling, surrealistic imagery, its chorus a waver, an almost-tear: “I like my neighborhood, I like my gun / Driving my little car, I am a girl and I will protect you.” Stewart has a voice like Blue Velvet (1986)—just when it seems like a timbre that can only operate in screams (either submerged or expunged), softness emerges, emanating in from the edges. This is the innate, instinctual terror-tenderness of Lynch, whose insistence on non-compromise with either capitalistic, moralistic, or nihilistic actors yielded one of the most vital image books in American cinema history. What to do with the angelic and the abusive, those twin-most forces in American consciousness? The most excerpted moment of The Elephant Man occurs when its title character rebuffs a crowd of sooty, suited Victorians in an inoculating self-blessing: “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am…a man,” but the film is otherwise a conveyor-belt of situations that subject that man to nearly unwatchable cruelty.
“And I will never be happy / And I will never feel normal”
Grace is a garment humanity desperately insists is its skin. Occasionally, art convinces us it’s the other way around, that misery is the costume—and, left in our rawest state, we’re closer to the angels. That The Elephant Man dresses up inquiries into genuine, turbulent grace in the historically staid traditions of biopic and period costume drama reveal Lynch’s aspirations to be as formally experimental as they are narratively humanistic. The Elephant Man moves like a Xiu Xiu song—is it avant-garde pop or conceptual art that gets stuck in your head? Like Lynch, Jamie Stewart writes songs not at the intersection of the supposedly-opposite points of the experimental and the accessible, but at their dissolution. When, on 2003’s The Promise, Xiu Xiu cover Tracy Chapman’s perfect folk-rock “Fast Car,” there is no wink of cleverness, a force which, in its cool reticence, is anathema to transformation and the work of art. Even when Stewart shreds their coo into yowling, the desire to only connect remains. Similarly and simultaneously, even when chords morph synchronously towards resolution, there are always punctuations of noise, violence, bodies abused, minds reeling. For Stewart, that sense makes good on the next track, “Ian Curtis Wishlist,” a self-punishment of human voice shoved through machines until it bleeds, overdriving.
The Elephant Man is nominally the story of 21-year-old Englishman Joseph “John” Merrick (just “John” here, played with remarkable but not reducible purity by John Hurt) recipient of the title’s grisly moniker, whose “lamentable deformities of the face” and “mutilations and contortions of the body” made for a kind of skin cinema of attractions in Victorian London, where he was treated variably as a grotesque and a charity case. Merrick died on April 11th, 1890. It was the same year that the inventors William Carr Crofts and Wordsworth Donisthorp made London’s Trafalgar Square, a 3-second actuality film shot on a kinesigraph camera, capturing London’s cinematic image for the first time, at the now-alien rate of 10 frames a second. Lynch’s director of photography, Freddie Francis, notes how The Elephant Man’s Victorian setting marks the beginning of the photographic age, how spectators would “subconsciously accept the atmosphere as original.” The fog of black and white makes the film feel like an indigestion of industry—not a stately reminder of past traditions so much as something besotted. To 2025 eyes more used to smartphone screens and Motion Smoothing, London’s Trafalgar Square seems to mottle more than move, a peculiarly biological glitch of the eye. Early in Lynch’s film, Resident Surgeon and Lecturer on Anatomy Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) demonstrates technique to two medical students over a body that seems to have been swallowed up by industry itself. “It’s a machine accident,” he says, the camera lingering over tracks in flesh left by gears, blood, and oil indistinguishable in the black-and-white photography. “I expect you’ll be seeing a good deal of this.”
Adopted out of freak show squalor by Treves, it’s not long before Merrick is ensconced, pet-like, in spectacle-by-tea-time appointments. If better-dressed, London’s bourgeois class is no less dismissive of John’s humanity than the more-legibly abusive lower classes; some take to invading his hospital room by night to catch a nightmare glimpse. Mannered dehumanization, Lynch slyly suggests, is still violence. The good doctor Treves has better intentions than Merrick’s former freak show “owner” Bytes (Freddie Jones), but those intentions continuously stall out at the eyeline. Lynch’s instinct was always to trust the image and the eye over the protestations of variably moral or immoral society. The tea and sympathy of Treves and Ms. Kendal (Anne Bancroft) doesn’t clash with the outward cruelty of Bytes and the night porter, Jim (Michael Elphick) so much as it rhymes with it. Charity and repulsion become indistinguishable when they meet at the source of fascination—even Lynch decided he couldn’t look away from this story. He had to render Merrick’s body and force us and himself to look. “Let them see you,” Treves urges Merrick near the film’s close, a theater audience clapping in adoration, or maybe obliging patronization. Merrick obliges, maybe touched. Minutes later in the runtime and moments before the film ends, Merrick lays his head down on a pillow like any other human would. The weight of his body suffocates him in this posture and he becomes another angelic image like Laura Palmer, self-destruction via society.
“Don’t ask me is this line about you / What do they do there tonight, tonight?”
Songs, like black-and-white photography, period dramas, or someone else’s life story, dress up our personal feelings in another’s garments. They are portal points, glimpses equally into ear canals and God. I used to connect and cover up with songs even more drastically I do now; getting dressed for concert band concerts in middle school with a mouth of metal and a bowl cut that rendered me even more prone to the soft body-horror of self-loathing, I would face the mirror leaning into air rife with CD riffs, as if The Eagles could save my lank and gawk. All I wanted, I think, was a beamed-in confidence, a man’s voice beyond this department store khaki boy’s body. And could I be brutally handsome, terminally pretty? Here in my little hothouse of rock and roll fantasy, that most boring anxiety of adolescent awkwardness (in no way limited to literally being an adolescent) gives and gave way to my most dependable desire: ease.
“TEEN ANGELS” is what Jamie Stewart’s black tee says in a January 2020 performance of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man.” ZZ Top aren’t The Eagles. The former have all the humility that comes from hearing the Blues as embodied devotionals while the latter has all the Los Angeles misanthropy that assumes a hit requires violence, but a strain of old-fashioned machismo unfolds in both fantasy spaces. The ‘classic’ in ‘classic rock’ is nominally a whistle towards the conservatism of stable adulthood, even as it passes over, honestly or otherwise, the more liberation-minded appetites of youth. In this Xiu Xiu cover, though, even “Sharp Dressed Man” comes down off the hanger folded in ways it may not have seemed possible in the past when it was unspooled from car radio speakers. The tempo drags, its groove removed to mimic stuttering and slurping. Stewart’s vocal attack stabs like the riff does. As a cover strategy, it reveals something essential about the song that you could miss in the slickness of the original: this is a collection of fragments (clean shirt, new shoes, silk suit, black tie) tied together haphazardly with ambivalence (“And I don’t know where I am going to,” “I don’t need a reason why.”) When Stewart lets the chorus drip out of rigid lips, it’s like creamed corn, a stream of unnatural baubles mimicking nutrition. Hearing “Looking sharp, looking for love” has always felt like a joke you could take seriously when you needed to (or, like ‘classic rock’). Now, I’m not so sure I want to look sharp. For the first time in my history of hoping the cool remove of “Sharp Dressed Man” will somehow sonically stick to me, I wonder how the speaker in this song actually feels to be clad in these garments and swaddled in pop.
I wonder how John Merrick actually feels to be shoved through a series of increasingly-civilized suits in The Elephant Man. Can fashion save the body? In a lesser film by crasser artists, these outfits of mounting extravagance might signal the kind of catharsis clothing so infrequently actually grants. Merrick begins the film in rags, traveling publicly with a sack over his head, to shield himself from society’s public repulsion, to shield them from his eyes. Settling into his residency at London Hospital, Merrick becomes the proverbial sharp-dressed man, exhibiting a certain delight—literal stick pins!—in the most elemental pleasure: ease. Crucially, contradictingly, the world of The Elephant Man never lets up. Its calculus of humanity, predicated as it is on the grinding industry of which bodies are and aren’t allowed, chews him up. Maybe there’s no way to read Merrick’s end as literally saintly. He finishes building a model cathedral he’s spent the film constructing, and then dies by suicide, falling asleep like a man does.
I don’t think The Elephant Man is the story of a saint. Lynch believed in humanity, as indicated by his belief in art. The business of sainthood is left to the forces we sing about, not the songs themselves. And the song of The Elephant Man, discombobulating as it is, doesn’t culminate in John Merrick’s martyrdom or wasted life. Instead, there’s a simple scene of his return to London Hospital. He’s suffered more grave injury at the hands of a society that he has every right to despise. Dying in evening wear, John Merrick stands face to face with Treves, the man who doesn’t understand his body or mind. “How do I look?” he asks. “You look absolutely splendid,” Treves says. “You will not look out of place.” As Treves apologizes—for humanity?—Lynch cuts in the familiar, decidedly-comforting tradition of shot-reverse shot between his actors. And as Merrick insists on his essential happiness and Treves looks on, guilty for having looked in the first place, that framing and angle and rhythm begins to mirror what it’s always been, which is the mirror itself. Treves’ and Merrick’s faces, opposite one another, reflect each other, not themselves. This grammar is not hagiography, but camaraderie, which is to say love that must insist upon itself.
At the end of Xiu Xiu’s studio version of that live cover of “Sharp Dressed Man,” the stabbing ceases. Any hopes for hardness fades, and a piano draws the spectator-listener through a kind of postlude. The first few times you hear it, it may sound unplaceable, sticky and assertive as that sharp-dressed riff is. Sitting with it, the shape underneath emerges, tenderly, rawly. “Crying”—or “Llorando.” Over what? You, me, angels all.