Whether I should add Joseph Merrick's life story or Finding Nemo to my list is debatable. Animation has its own subculture, and seems divided between Walt Disney's pedophiliac psyche and Japanese penile envy. We recognize in scientific terms that spiny damaged fish get eaten, not accommodated. But as to the flick that cemented Anthony Hopkins as the next Olivier, it is not easy to keep The Elephant Man in its period, not from a revisionist perspective. Animus toward clinical specification is a valid activist point of contention, which is probably why death as escape did not involve protests when it came to the earlier Victorian rendition of empowerment, compared to Clint's masterwork, but each film is about the victory and freedom of dying well. Does it make Merrick's life and exploitation a great movie, excusing artistic license? The narrative is a progressive orgasm, perfectly plotted out so the audience learns about dignity, acceptance, and the medical scientist as Frankenstein is necessary as a villainous redeemer. Ambivalence seems warranted, because we do not see Merrick in the less than gauzy terms of actually living his life as an astute capitalist.
The other film in the same time frame which I could not accurately recall was the Dreyfuss vehicle Whose Life Is It Anyway? An appropriation which leaves me ambivalent because it exploits suffering for profit. If it was Richard Corliss, the esteemed movie critic rightly chastised the casting directors for putting the vivacious Dreyfuss in Harrison's shoes. One wonders what drives extraordinary empaths like Dreyfuss to chemical dependency, and I can imagine the demands of such habitation has something to do with it.
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