#frederick treeves

[chuckbbirdsjunk]

[notmuchtoconceal]

the elephant man and the straight story are two works of historical biography which act as intimate works of veiled self-portraiture. one about a young man set in a constructed world across an ocean of space and time, another about an old man grounded in a very recent present, each depicts a headstrong and sensitive gentleman dedicated to making connections despite his infirmities.

emotionally, these films contain lynch's rawest and most tender heart, while intellectually demonstrating at his most categorical how lynch deals with diegesis, memory, the nature of fiction and self-reportage, constituting the most effective key to "unlocking" lynch's more abstract and surreal works, which resist the linear conscious intellect very simply because the past is never truly passed.