The Elephant Man

Just a quick note and a few observations while watching David Lynch's The Elephant Man:

I've read a lot of stuff by Michel Foucault recently, and made it all the way through The Birth of the Clinic and History of Madness.  I first read his stuff on sexuality for my undergraduate degree, and have since had a morbid interest in the Victorian era.

I bought an old compilation of American adverts (circa 1865-1900) from a second hand store store in Aberdare, which is a small town directly north of the Welsh capital, Cardiff.  In the book can be found a range of unfounded superlatives about all and sundry: from storm cameras to invalid hammocks, the objective and universal tone is employed to promote a wide variety of products.  An example is an advert published by Columbia Bicycles claiming that their product is 'A Delight to Everyone', the irony of an advert on the same page promoting bikes aimed at 'Cripples (in large font), Ladies and girls...', was not lost on me.  This ad is less adventurous with its claims, merely saying that it is cheap 'for all'.  The rest of the products range from anachronistic medical devices like liver pads, to the absurd (Solar Horse Bonnet anyone?), many with 'recommendations' from medical authorities who are seldom named.

I'll make this post short, so I'll have to speak in general terms (there will be more on this), but I think the fascination that comes with seeing these sorts of images is the ability to understand exactly what the people who drew up these adverts are trying to do.  I'm sure it's not much more difficult to do the same now: if someone were to compile a series of adverts from this year, then I'm sure their framing within a book would remove them from the environment they normally habituate and disarm them of the power which they usually have over us.  I suppose the power of an advert comes from it pouncing upon you when you least expect it, like someone approaching you upon false pretences, say asking for directions, then asking for a cigarette.

But I don't think that this is all there is to it, and I think Foucault is correct in saying that the language, or the discourse used in a certain epoch enmeshes and binds us to a whole series of statements which are, in mainstream discourse, accepted unquestioningly as objective truths.  It becomes obvious to see the absurd and mendacious statements understood as objective fact in these articles (which I will start posting up here, because they are great reading and, as far as I'm aware, the book has fallen out of print).  It is somewhat impossible to read the William Hill or a Virgin Media advert in the same way it is possible to read these adverts from another age.  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I have no sort of utility for these objects, and I'm really looking, reading and writing about them in a manner that is divorced from the product's utility value, something I cannot dissociate when reading a car advert.  Although I do not, and never plan to, drive, the car advert still has a range of meanings which connect (or don't) in a very immediate sense to my situation in the world, and it is impossible to look at it in the same disinterested way I can an advert with the heading: 'The Mystery of Love-Making Solved (Or an Easy Road to Marriage)'.

Furthermore, I'm able to do this because statements like of this sort, which convey knowledge which is no longer admissible as objective, the 'epistemes' in Foucaultian speak, seems ridiculous and can instantly be seen through, categorised and understood.  The mystery of the advert dissipates immediately, and I do not fall under its spell.  Not that this matters; most of the companies have folded anyway.  However the obsession with physique expressed through the frequent use of human drawings which resemble medical schematics, alongside the techniques used to gain attention, everything from optical illusions to groan inducing puns (imagine a drawing of a scrawny cat, accompanied with text something like: this is not a very big or nice cat, but we will send you a nice and big CAT-alogue...), are easily understood and allow links to be drawn much more quickly.  I suppose everything is easier to taxonify when you believe yourself to be above it in some manner, and I suppose the implicit authority here is that I am more versed than the average Victorian Mad Man in adverts, because I have grown up being surrounded by them, and have probably experienced more by time I was a toddler than he experienced in his whole life.

In short then, part of the fascination with Victorian era media and artefacts is their ability to simultaneously show crude notions, by today's standards, which were still able to seem to an audience as categorically correct.  The fascination for me is that it enables one to exercise judgement in regards to the control modern advertising and media has over my actions and the actions of the institutions which concern me, in a direct and indirect manner.  It enables me try to see past the hype and understand things as being hype machines and fads, and developments in science and medicine which are a big deal and have the potential to change people's lives for the better.  It also enables me to, not fully, for the reasons already noted, but to exercise a degree of critical judgement it's very possible I wouldn't have if it were not for witnessing advertising in its nascent form, as contained in the pages of this book, and in other adverts not from the last decade or so (quick side note -- I think that adverts have their hold on an audience, when it comes to fads and rages, for about ten years, although I have nothing to back that up apart from experience and a hunch, for now).

SO quickly back to Lynch's The Elephant Man.  In the opening stages of the film we see John Merrick swooped from the arms of a sadistic and somewhat homo-erotic relationship with his owner, who profits from him by displaying him in freak shows.  Anthony Hopkin's doctor places him in a medical theatre, and this forms one of the tensions of the film: the changing of environment, but not the principles: he may be in cleaner living conditions and rubbing shoulders with high society, yet Merrick is still the object of grim fascination, at first by the medical community, and once it becomes apparent that he cannot be cured and loses his value as a medical curiosity, then becomes a cultural one, ogled at by Victorian London's glitterati.  This then begs the question: is his life qualitatively different in these more sanitary conditions, for it almost seems an act of cruelty to place him within the sort of company that he can never fully be a part of thanks to his disabilities (this is seen dramatically when he breaks down upon meeting the doctor's wife when in invited to his home for supper, muttering between sobs that he is unaccustomed to being greeted so kindly by a beautiful woman) .  His life with his master was miserable and painful, but looking over the other side of the precipice and seeing bourgeois familial life only served to increase his awareness of his difference, and see the another life which he could only experience as a outsider looking in.

Of the course the answer to this is very, very complex, probably more complex than the question as I have formed it.  However as we see at the end of the film, Merrick gazes at the picture of the small boy sleeping without a mountain of pillows and removes them, thus deciding to destroy himself.  The increased articulation he has gained whilst residing in the hospital has allowed him to put into words, conceptualise and thus recognise the gulf between him and the majority of other people.  This has condemned him to a solitary life as an outsider looking in, and so he decides to have one night, at least, when he can experience life as the people around him do, lying on his back.

I'm not going to go into the implicit problems of this, and the undertones of normalisation the film, produced only in the eighties, blithely carries (I have never fallen asleep on my back!), in this post, however I will say that the medical gaze, and the actions of the doctor, at least, are in a lot of ways similar to the actions of the visitors to the Elephant man attraction at the fair ground.  I think that witnessing medicine in its nascent stage, like advertising, and like psychoanalysis of this period, which practised face and head measuring to make decisions about a subject's moral character and by extension, for they were inextricably linked in Victorian medical discourse, the internal mental realm of an individual, allows for an observer to see highly questionable forms of knowledge which were full believed to be objective fact in mainstream culture.  In the case of The Elephant Man, it is quite easy to equivocate the morbid curiosity of the doctor as an institutionalised version of a similar compulsion which populated fairgrounds of this time.  There's an incredible bit at the beginning of The Birth of Medicine where Foucault compares the language used by a medical practitioner, who describes the thin film of membrane above the brain as being like 'uncooked egg white'.  Another proscribes for a woman with 'hysteria', a condition which is longer included within medical textbooks, a series of baths, for nine hours a day, for six months.  She dies an horrific death, directly due to these baths which the practitioner in questioner must've had scant evidence apart from a hunch to believe would act as a cure.  In light of the distance a modern reader has of such accounts, it enables a sceptical view to be held towards so many forms of medical knowledge which are uncritically accepted as being beyond question.  Like the Victorian adverts, the power of the institutions lies in us being inextricably linked to the same epistemes, and ultimately, the same acceptance of certain facts about the human body and the psyche as being objective and beyond question.  I suppose that's what makes difficult, and I mean this in the difficulty of comprehension (getting to a point where a thinker has the confidence to criticise a doctor) and difficulty of responsibility (that if a person is wrong in criticising the medical establishment, then people's lives are at stake).

(Here is a link to an Al Jazeera opinion piece which discusses big pharmacy and the control which it has over the formation of discourses surrounding mental health.  This is sort of what I am trying to get at: how difficult it is to think outside of a paradigm (ie. put simply, that anti-depressants are the cure for depression) which has been manipulated by private interests and ultimately how future generations may look back and think that current attitudes towards such matters are incredibly naive http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117313948379987.html)