Nov 2007

This movie is not one of my favorite ones because it is very sad and the black and white feature makes it scary. John Merrick, or as known by everyone else in the world, the Elephant Man, due to his enormous features, has been treated terribly all his life.

He makes a living by being part of a traveling freak show carnival group. Everyone does not believe that he could possibly be human, so he frightens many people. He would frighten me too because he looked like something – not someone – that’s in my nightmares. One day a surgeon named Frederick Treves realized that John was human and decided to admit him into the hospital where he worked. Once there they learn that John is an intelligent man who can speak, read and write. He even begins to construct a model of a Church that is outside his window.

What really made this movie depressing was how people treated John as an animal and how for him, a simple task like watching a play, was a miracle. Another sad part was to realize that although John loved his mother dearly and thought she was the ‘most beautiful woman in the world,’ she probably hated him for his deformities. This movie gave me a new perspective on life – to know that there are others that suffer a million times worse than we do.