David Lynch's Most Overlooked Talent: Radical Empathy by Craig Hammill

When watching David Lynch’s two movies based on real people and events-1980’s The Elephant Man and 1999’s The Straight Story-something comes into relief quick: Lynch has a radical well of empathy and concern for his characters.

This is no red hot realization. Fans of David Lynch have known this since they’ve been fans.

But often, the toplines with Lynch tend to emphasize the beautiful strange, eccentric ways he explores his topics and creates his inner and outer worlds.

What doesn’t seem to get written about as much is his clear love, deep emotion, and connection to most of his lead characters.

A quick survey throws a spotlight on this. Along with the horribly misshapen real life Victorian England John Merrick of The Elephant Man, we find this radical emotion and empathy in Lynch’s treatment of Laura Palmer in the Twin Peaks tv show and Fire Walk With Me movie. We see it in the warmth with which he approaches the romantic relationship between Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) in Wild At Heart.

We are caught gobsmacked by Lynch’s commitment to take seriously all the midwestern characters we meet in The Straight Story as 73 year old Alvin Straight rides his John Deere lawnmower 300 miles to visit his estranged brother, Lyle.

We feel a near tragic sadness and want to affirm the worth of the tormented lives of Naomi Watt’s Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn and Laura Dern’s Nikki Grace/Sue Blue in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire respectively.

It’s interesting to note that there is a sub-strain of Lynch movies-often with a male lead- that actually go pretty hard on their main characters. Jack Nance’s Henry from Eraserhead, Kyle Machlachlan’s Jeffrey from Blue Velvet, Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty from Lost Highway, even Machlachlan’s FBI agent Dale Cooper from 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return are examined pretty ruthlessly.

Lynch doesn’t ditch or lose his empathy for these characters, but his approach feels tougher on them. One wonders if these are the Lynch alter-egos and what we’re seeing is a filmmaker who refuses to let himself off the hook. But only Lynch knows that. And maybe I’m totally off base (he has said after all that Lost Highway was really born from his fascination with the O.J. Simpson case).

However, looking at The Elephant Man and The Straight Story is an instructive way to see this empathetic focus at work.

When Mel Brooks agreed to let Lynch direct The Elephant Man in 1979, it was based off of Brooks’ admiration for just how singular and unique Lynch’s debut Eraserhead turned out to be. And while they’re must have been nerves and jitters that Lynch might overly focus on the strange, monstrous, dark external qualities of the story, these were all allayed by the final movie. 1980’s Eraserhead is one of the most emotional, heart wrenching films you will ever see.

It tells the real life story of John Merrick (played with unnerving sincerity and kindness by John Hurt), a poor soul born with horrible skeletal and bodily deformities, who lived a life relegated to exploitation as a circus freak in England until a doctor (played by Anthony Hopkins), sensing the importance of Merrick’s condition, takes him into a hospital.

The movie certainly has all the hallmarks of David Lynch as a filmmaker. It starts with a stunning and strange wordless montage of a woman giving birth, elephants stampeding, and unsettling sound design. John Merrick’s makeup and appearance, while modeled after the real life man, still bear and evoke a sibling relationship to Eraserhead’s deformed baby. 

But scene after scene is committed and driven by a focus to show that Merrick was the victim of exploitation on all sides. That even Hopkins’ Dr. Treves and the well to do English society who take an interest (or is it morbid fascination) in Merrick are treating Merrick more as objectified oddity than human being.

This is brought home powerfully in the now oft-quoted late movie scene where Merrick returns to England after having been abducted by his former abusive alcoholic freak show manager (a committed Freddie Jones). When he is surrounded by a mob in a bathroom scared and ready to do him violence, Merrick screams “I am not an animal. I am a human being.”

The shriek, performance, staging, and scene are almost unbearable in their condemnation of the worst impulses of our human nature.

Lynch ends the movie (as he did in Eraserhead which makes these two movies feel very much like siblings) on a spiritual note. But whereas Eraserhead’s spiritual ending is ambivalent, cataclysmic, and intense, The Elephant Man’s spiritual ending-which shows Merrick dying, dreaming of his mother accepting him, becoming part of the universe-gives Merrick a kind of validation and redemption in cinema he may have been denied often in existence.

In fact, this redemption/acceptance/return to the eternal has echoes in several of Lynch’s most powerful works-specifically Laura Palmer’s redemption at the end of the horrific Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.

Lynch’s radical empathy isn’t confined though to a kind of post-life or fugue state spiritual assumption. We see it play out in the quiet real life “on this earth” reconciliation between seventy something Alvin Straight (a career best performance by Richard Farnsworth) and his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton who always delivers) at the end of The Straight Story. 

In fact, all along Alvin’s journey, Lynch and his writers (for this is one of those rare screenplays that Lynch directed but didn’t write, or at least didn’t take a writing credit) put Alvin in scenes where he communicates with fellow travelers in life who also have heartaches, melancholies, sadnesses, frustrations. Whether it be his differently abled daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek in a first third performance that still makes a deep impression) who was separated from her children by social services, a runaway young woman deciding what to do with a surprise pregnancy, bickering mechanic brothers, families, priests, bartenders, hardware store owners. . .

The Straight Story actually emphasizes what may be Lynch’s most powerful skill, one very few other filmmakers can fully embody: his insistence on giving any character in his movie, no matter how small, their dignity. Yes, Lynch traffics in the weird, strange, uncanny, and outre. But you’ll be hard pressed to find any Lynch movie in which a character is somehow not given some measure of agency, dignity, respect.

Ultimately, what I take from The Elephant Man and The Straight Story and indeed all of Lynch’s work is the importance of making sure you give full humanity and respect to your characters, no matter how flawed. 

Anchoring your cinema this way ALLOWS you many other things. But without this foundational love and respect, all the style in the world is just so much garrish tinsel. 

David Lynch is like Stanley Kubrick in that they make movies utterly their own. Still, we mere mortals can learn from them and their strategies and devices in telling captivating stories cinematically.

Lesson number one from David Lynch is the power of radical empathy to ground even the most out there of stories.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.