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Disfigured Faces, “Accursed Ugliness”, and Hollywood

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disfigured

Disfigured Faces, “Accursed Ugliness”, and Hollywood

The Author

Patrick Adamson

disfigured

The fourth and final blog in our Halloween series, written by Paddy Adamson, brings together the key themes of Hollywood and disfigured faces. As a researcher in film, and a member of Face Equality International’s Lived Experience Group, Paddy brings a unique perspective to the topic. Don’t miss the rest of the series, starting with Fay Bound Alberti’s introduction, Sara Wasson’s blog on Les yeux sans visage and Lauren Stephenson’s analysis of The Eye. Let us know what you think!

Disfigured Faces, “Accursed Ugliness”, and Hollywood

One of the best-known scenes in all of silent cinema unfolds about halfway through Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Young soprano Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) has been carried down into a suite prepared for her in the cellars under the Paris Opera House by the Phantom (Lon Chaney), a mysterious masked composer who haunts the venue. He promises her a great career, providing she can devote herself to following his orders.

But curiosity about what lies beneath her mentor’s disguise gets the better of her. Stealing up behind him as he plays “Don Juan Triumphant” at his organ, peering over his shoulder as he faces the camera, she snatches the Phantom’s mask away, revealing directly to the audience a cadaverous face of sunken cheeks, protruding teeth, and flared, elongated nostrils. When he turns to look at her, intrigue gives way to screams; the film cuts between the Phantom’s true face and the terror and disgust it inspires in hers.

Said to have led to screaming and even fainting among moviegoers of the day, the Phantom’s unmasking is a shocking spectacle of physical difference and an iconic moment in horror film history – the unveiling of a face that has continued to fascinate in the near-century since. Created by Chaney himself, an actor famed for his extreme transformations, the villain’s look was kept secret until release. Today, his elaborate make-up can be imitated for the price of a high-end Halloween mask.

“Feast your eyes”

Yet, for all that the Phantom’s command as he forcibly turns the cowering Christine’s face toward his – “Feast your eyes – – glut your soul on my accursed ugliness!” – could equally be directed at the film’s audience. There is more to the scene than the thrill of seeing Chaney’s make-up artistry paraded on screen. It provides a revelation vital to the story. Confirmed by the disclosure of his deformed face is the Phantom’s monstrous true nature. The corrupted body of this gruesome physical spectacle befits the corrupted soul of this dangerously deranged outcast from Devil’s Island, his disfigurement the outward expression of the ugliness within.

Film still from The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

For me, as a disfigured viewer, this is the most striking aspect of this iconic moment. Not only is it testament to the longevity and pervasiveness of an all too familiar tendency, unavoidable at this time of year – the imitation of appearance-altering conditions in the name of a “spooky” costume – but it is an uncomfortable reminder of what it means, in the codified world of Hollywood cinema at least, to be facially different.

Physical Appearance as Cinematic Shorthand

Filmmakers have long exploited the meaning-making potential of distinctive physical characteristics, using non-normative appearances as an expedient shorthand for character. The most notorious example of this physiognomic logic is the prevalence of facial scarring among movie villains. Examples range from the monstrous of horror cinema – the burn-scarred Freddy Kreuger foremost among them – to the crime lords and Sith Lords of the latest James Bond and Star Wars blockbusters. Visible evidence of a past gone awry, stated or otherwise, their scars offer a convenient rationale for the malevolent course they now follow.

At the same time, there can be little doubt that the appeal of figures from the Phantom to Kreuger owes also to a fascination with such bodies and the uncomfortable feelings they are supposed to excite. They are the frightful icons behind many a Halloween costume, after all, evidence of a pleasure found in the display or performance of physical difference that can be traced back through the history of film and the freak show. Chaney made something of a career of it, earning the nickname “The Man of a Thousand Faces” for the lengths he went to: strapping his lower legs to his thighs to play a double amputee in The Penalty (1920); labouring under a skin-tight rubber suit and seventy-pound hump as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923); and apparently combining his famed make-up skills with painful wire hooks to create his iconic Phantom.

LOn Chaney

The Man Who Laughs

Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) typifies this marriage of exploitation and empathy, using the non-normative appearance of its protagonist to directly interrogate conventional ideas about the face and the role it plays in how we understand ourselves and others. Originally planned as a Chaney vehicle, this adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel stars Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, a travelling show attraction famous for his wide frozen grin, carved into his face as a child by a Comprachico surgeon under orders from the King of England.

While his condition does not, in theory, preclude his entry into the spaces and pursuits enjoyed by the masses, Gwynplaine’s world is circumscribed by his facial difference. Most welcome on society’s edges, in carnivals and freak shows where difference is a valued commodity, he internalises the daily ridicule and the aesthetic and moral judgements of a callous, grotesquely prejudiced, yet superficially “normal” public; he fears he is unworthy of the woman he loves, Dea (again played by Philbin), for her blindness prevents her perceiving the real him.

To portray a man who can only laugh, Veidt’s wide grin was held in place using a bespoke, and apparently painful, appliance that deprived him of access to normative facial expressions, along with the social cues associated with them. Where the face is conventionally seen as inseparable from selfhood, the foremost means by which we recognise each other, Gwynplaine’s face not only fails to reflect his inner self but seems to contradict it, thanks to the fixity of its lower half; when not covering his mouth via a protective gesture of sorts, he is seen to grin his way through incidents to which such a reaction rarely seems appropriate. His character divorced from his appearance to jarring ends, the result invites audiences to search for an understanding of his agony in his eyes and comportment, and, in the process, perhaps reflect on their assumptions about how a face should react and look.

A Damaging Reliance on Disfigurement

And yet, for all the nuance, or at least ambivalence, that The Man Who Laughs brings to its handling of disfigurement – being, at once, indebted to and critical of the exploitation of facial difference – the film’s enduring place in the popular consciousness again owes overwhelmingly to the unusual look of its protagonist. In 1940, a photograph of Veidt in make-up as Gwynplaine was used by DC Comics artists as a model for a new villain: the Joker – flamboyant nemesis to the noble, honourable Batman.

A staple Halloween costume today, the Joker has gone through numerous incarnations in the intervening eight decades, with the extent and cause of his scarring and famous malevolent grin being repeatedly reimagined. The latest, in 2022’s The Batman, finds him with full-body scarring and a permanent smile attributed to a congenital condition. Director Matt Reeves explains, “…he’s had this very dark reaction to it, and he’s had to spend a life of people looking at him in a certain way…and this is his response.”

Nearly a century on from the unmasking of Chaney’s Phantom, and in a world where media images are routinely decried as a source of body dissatisfaction, Reeves’s comments illustrate the extent to which popular cinema’s damaging reliance on disfigurement as a visible expression of inner corruption or evil continues to go unexamined in many circles. Moreover, they speak to the unique challenges faced by the facial difference community and how these extend beyond the cosmetic and the medical, beyond even the more overt forms of discrimination and abuse to which many of us have grown up accustomed.

Everyday Prejudice

Yet, for all that characters with facial differences are disproportionately given (often lurid) backstories involving some kind of “dark reaction” to what is treated as an inevitable social stigma, the toll such everyday prejudice can have on the life experiences and mental health of those affected by it has rarely been addressed via bespoke legal protections or support. Recent years have, it should be highlighted, seen some more promising signs on this front: the British Film Institute’s 2018 commitment “to stop funding films in which negative characteristics are depicted through scars or facial difference”, and the ongoing efforts of Face Equality International, a global alliance of NGOs working around disfigurement, advocating the overdue recognition of facial difference as a human rights issue in its own right. These are significant steps and, in their being so, reminders of how much remains to be done.

Author Bio

Patrick Adamson is an editor and independent film researcher who lectured at the University of St Andrews from 2021 until 2022, having received his PhD from there in 2020. Specialising in silent Westerns, early popular historical filmmaking, and universalist discourses in 1920s Hollywood, he has been published in journals including Film History and received awards for his research from BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) and SERCIA (Société pour l’Enseignement et la Recherche du Cinéma Anglophone).

He is a member of the Face Equality International Lived Experience Working Group.

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‘Like Changing a Windshield on a Car’ – Transplantation and The Eye (2008)

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‘Like Changing a Windshield on a Car’ – Transplantation and The Eye (2008)

The Author

Dr Lauren Stephenson

This piece on transplantation and The Eye (2008) is the second blog in our series on Halloween, Horror Films, transplantation and the face. In this installment, Lauren Stephenson (York St John) explores the tensions between science and the body, and matters of the soul and the self. Catch up with the other blogs in the series, by Fay Bound Alberti, Sara Wasson and Paddy Adamson. Our final blog in the series, by Paddy Adamson, will be released next week

‘Like Changing a Windshield on a Car’ – Transplantation and The Eye (2008)

The Eye (2008) is a U.S. remake of the earlier Pang Brothers film Jian Gui, released in 2002, which arrived in theatres as the Hollywood penchant for adapting successful (and sometimes notorious) East Asian horror films reached its zenith. As such, it is perhaps most often discussed as part of a debate regarding remake culture in the U.S., within which fans and scholars alike tend to become combative over the superiority of the original texts, and uninhibited in expressing their disappointment with their often cynically marketed remakes.

What becomes lost or minimised during this debate, however, is how both films (original and remake) attempt to re-examine our relationship with our corporeal selves, passing commentary on the ethics of transplantation by focusing not on the procedure itself, but rather the protracted process of adjustment and recovery which follows it. For the purposes of this piece, I’ll be focusing in particular on the U.S. remake of this transplantation narrative, which reveals an ambivalent stance towards medical procedure, but demonstrates tangible anxiety regarding notions of selfhood and identity after transplantation has occurred.

A ‘haunted organ’

The film begins by introducing us to our protagonist, Sydney (Jessica Alba). Sydney has been without sight since she was 5 years old, when an accident with fireworks damaged her eyes. In the opening moments of the film, Sydney monologues about her desire for sight and vision; a musician by profession, Sydney comments; ‘I bet music looks beautiful’ – an interesting comment which seems to suggest that even predominantly auditory experiences are, for Sydney, incomplete without her sight (an ableist narrative which is equal parts challenged and reinforced throughout the unfolding film).

This desire to regain her sight and restore a ‘complete’ experience leads Sydney to attempt a bilateral cornea transplant (the representational accuracy of which is questionable). We learn later that this isn’t the first time she’s undergone the procedure, with her first transplant corneas rejecting during a procedure when she was 12 years old. Following a successful second attempt, the film begins to shift consistently between a conventional third person perspective and Sydney’s first-hand POV, hypothetically placing the audience in the position of a recovering cornea transplant patient. Sydney’s vision is, to begin with, blurred, and it is here where the film’s central conceit – that of the ‘haunted organ’ – begins to exploit the recovering organ and patient as facilitators for horrific ambiguity. Sydney, and by extension the audience, begin to witness blurry figures and unexplainable visions; it quickly becomes clear that Sydney’s eyes have not only given her sight in the conventional sense, but have left her with the ability to see what others can’t: the dead.

Recovery

Sydney’s status as a recovering transplant patient means that her authentic experiences of her new eyes are readily dismissed as hallucination or a failure to adjust post-op. Medical professionals are conspicuously absent from the narrative, with the most consistent representative of the medical field being a Dr Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola), a post-transplant specialist whose behaviour throughout the film vacillates between gaslighting and romantic interest. As Sydney’s sight improves, so too do her supernatural visions become more vivid. Seeking help from Dr. Faulkner, his troubling and flippant response seems to suggest that Sydney’s vision are not only imagined, but a device to maintain her sense of self as ‘special’ following her op:

Faulkner: ‘You just discovered that you’re like the rest of us’

Sydney: ‘You know, when we first met, I didn’t think you were such an ass’

Faulkner: ‘That’s ‘cos you didn’t know how to spot one. See? Progress.’

Denying Subjectivity

The reframing of Sydney’s ongoing trauma as something self-inflicted and self-interested poses an interesting ethical question; Faulkner’s response denies Sydney subjectivity, autonomy and respect in her recovery, delineating her instead as a gothic heroine and hysterical woman (Showalter, 2000: 190). In framing Sydney’s narrative within the confines of transplantation, and with a fixity on eyes and vision, the film makes explicit the conventional use of the unreliable narrator; Sydney’s recovering vision means that what she witnesses can easily be derided or explained away.

The donor’s eyes thereby become a narrative metaphor for the routine marginalisation of women’s voices and experiences. The donor’s death, we learn later, was at the hands of her community who failed to heed her supernatural warnings of an imminent factory fire, later blaming her for the incident once lives had been lost. When these become Sydney’s eyes, the shared vision of donor and recipient combines to present a reasonably compelling account of the systemic dismissal of women’s accounts and experiences. However, this allegory comes at the expense of dramatising and exploiting the very real disorientation, dissociation and loss of selfhood associated with transplant recovery.

Credit: Richard Foreman/Lionsgate

An ‘ideal’ horror heroine

With this in mind, despite the ways in which the film draws upon established conventions of the ghost and the body to create its impact, some of the most unsettling moments within the film come not from scenes of overt horror (though there are several) but from the way in which Sydney, her regained sight and her recovery are treated by her friends, her doctors and colleagues in the first act of the film. In one early scene, Sydney returns to her home post-surgery, only to find it filled with family and friends, hosting her a ‘surprise’ welcome home party. As faces, some of which she’s never seen before, swim before her, we experience a sense of overwhelming claustrophobia – an experience which eventually drives Sydney to retreat into the kitchen, away from the crowds.

In another instance, Sydney’s conductor becomes noticeably agitated and frustrated when it appears she cannot immediately adjust to playing her violin sighted after the operation. It would appear that the timeline for Sydney’s recovery, and indeed the way she processes that recovery, is consistently framed within the expectations of others. Her recovery is either not fast enough, not full enough, or not simple enough, to sustain investment from any of the other principal characters within the film, and this creates an isolation that sustains her as an ‘ideal’ horror heroine.

The Body and the Self

Later in the film, Sydney is shown a photo by her sister, and realises that the woman she is seeing in the mirror isn’t her (this recalls a moment in her opening monologue, where she comments that she doubts she will even recognise herself once her sight is restored). The woman Sydney sees in the mirror is in fact her donor, and the dissociation this speaks to, however clumsily, seems to demonstrate some fear or anxiety surrounding the nature of the body itself, and its relationship with the person, soul or being that inhabits it. This is particularly pronounced in that the organ here is the eye; the ‘window to the soul’.

Notions of ownership and selfhood are explicitly challenged here; Sydney’s eyes work in tandem with her body, yet they show her images, visions and events past and present, not all of which belong to her, and none of which she has control over. Indeed, in the final act of the film, Sydney embraces her role as a kind of ‘custodian’ of her donor’s eyes, allowing to be guided by the premonition she has been seeing in excerpts throughout the film. She saves countless lives in doing so (thereby inferring that this was the correct and heroic thing to do) but also sacrifices her sight once again to ensure the safety of others.

Sacrificial Heroine

In the end, the supernatural and a pseudo-religious belief in the soul and afterlife trump science in The Eye. Unlike many ‘surgical horrors’, which characterise science as ‘the deus ex machina, promising to restore limbs and faces that have been irremediably lost’ (Aldana-Reyes 2014: 147), The Eye, and Sydney as its protagonist, regard science as a means through which to restore something less tangible – Sydney’s relationship with her donor eyes restores justice and peace to her donor and delivers dozens of people from death at the hands of a freak accident.

In its complicated relationship with the ethics and responsibilities of the transplant industry, the film eventually side-lines a consideration of transplantation itself in favour of casting Sydney as saccharine sacrificial heroine; one whose relationship to her new eyes is happily relinquished in the interest of saving others.

That the final scene of the film imagines Sydney as more complete and fulfilled without her donor eyes than with them speaks volumes; transplantation here is seen as a means to a narrative end – in The Eye, matters of science and the body are no match for matters of the soul and self.

Works cited:

Jian Gui (dir. Pang Brothers, 2002)
The Eye (dir. David Moreau & Xavier Palud, 2008)
Reyes, X.A. (2014). Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror
Film. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).
Showalter, E. (2000) ‘Dr. Jekyll’s Closet’ in Ken Gelder (ed.). The Horror Reader. (London: Routledge).
p.190.

Author Bio

Lauren Stephenson is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media & Communications at York St. John University, U.K., where she teaches across the fields of Film, Media, Literature and American Studies. Her research interests include Horror cinema (in particular, British, American and New Zealand Horror), Gender and Horror, and women’s friendship in cinema. She is the co-founder of the Cinema and Social Justice project at YSJ (@cinemajustice) and has most recently written on folk horror, the Fear Street series and its adaptations, and First Ladies in U.S. disaster movies. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenrachel11.

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Reflecting on Reflections

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Reflecting on Reflections

The Author

Barry Gibb

A guest blog from Interface collaborator Barry Gibb, as part of our series of outputs for the Being Human Festival, November 2020.

Reflecting on Reflections

I’m not a fan of the mirror, avoiding them rather than seeking reflections. While my consciousness, how I see and perceive the world, is entirely unique to me, my face, it seems, can only be truly known by others.

The problem with this is that every time I see myself in a mirror, it’s a bit of a jolt, an ‘aha’ moment, as I scrutinise this body part so much of my identity is pinned to. Over time, it’s become an itinerary of failures. My cheekbones are not high enough. One eye is wider and possibly higher than the other. My lips are too thick, nose too wide. I live in constant dread of it getting fat. I do what I can to keep wrinkles at bay, even though, in my heart, I know that ageing is a privilege.

The mirror is a truth that shatters the belief I allow my mind to hold onto of how I appear to others. Like I said, I’m not a fan.

Society’s obsession

Which is why working on the AboutFace project is so utterly beguiling and uplifting – it affords the opportunity to explore society’s obsession with and attitudes towards the ‘boat race’, the mug. But the project delves far deeper than my/our own personal insecurities. We now live in a world in which face transplantation is possible. A world in which, whether through accident, illness or mishap, there are those whose face demands a level of reconstructive surgery that borders on the magical.

This is humbling. At one end of this magical spectrum are the surgical teams pioneering techniques at the forefront of reconstructive surgery. At the other are people whose lives have been dramatically impacted by the significant loss of, or damage to, their face.

But this is a bit like talking about the issues of poverty and limiting one’s understanding of the impact it has on a person to them simply ‘not having money’. For something each of us rarely sees, a face’s impact is largely a reflection of how others react to us – other people are our mirror. The face is such an integral part of human identity, communication and interaction, that the consequences of its ‘absence’ must be far reaching and hugely emotionally complex for those living with facial difference.

But while much of society seems content to accept the replacement of other, internal parts of the body, such as the heart, kidney or liver – when it comes to replacing faces, there is a far more complicated, visceral, often negative, reaction. Clearly then, the face is not just an organ. It is a body part that carries tremendous emotional and psychological weight.

Faical Meaning

Facial meaning and our reaction to ideas of transplantation is what I want to help the AboutFace team tease apart during the upcoming Being Human Festival. As a documentary filmmaker, the only thing that matters to me is what’s in front of the camera. And if there’s one thing that’s become powerfully evident during the many interviews I’ve conducted, a person’s face is just the beginning of the journey of who they are.

Working with the AboutFace team, the general public, invited guests and the wonderful artist, Clare Whistler, I’ll be turning my full attention to this emotionally tangled area where the limits of scientific and human endurance merge. We want to ignite imaginations, stimulate conversations and challenge perceptions – of transplants, faces, you!

Because, maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a peculiarly British response to this subject matter. Despite half the western world intent on capturing a photo of their best self, in the best light and applying a beautifying filter to it, we also seem emotionally reluctant or unable to discuss issues surrounding a less than perfect face, whatever that is.

Author Bio

Patrick Adamson is an editor and independent film researcher who lectured at the University of St Andrews from 2021 until 2022, having received his PhD from there in 2020. Specialising in silent Westerns, early popular historical filmmaking, and universalist discourses in 1920s Hollywood, he has been published in journals including Film History and received awards for his research from BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) and SERCIA (Société pour l’Enseignement et la Recherche du Cinéma Anglophone).

He is a member of the Face Equality International Lived Experience Working Group.

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Visualising Evil: Depictions of Visible Facial Difference in Film Culture

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Visualising Evil: Depictions of Visible Facial Difference in Film Culture

The Author

Dr Sarah Hall

Facial scarring has long been used in the film industry to imply evil or villainy. In this blog, Dr Sarah Hall (University of York) explores the damaging effects of this outdated trope.

Visualising Evil: Depictions of Visible Facial Difference in Film Culture

At a pivotal moment in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the antagonist of the sequel trilogy, Kylo Ren, is healed of the facial scar that he received in The Force Awakens. That scar, which had mysteriously moved across Ren’s face by the time that The Last Jedi was released, was inflicted after the antagonist committed his darkest act in that film. That the scar healed as Ren was brought back to the light side was no afterthought. The appearance and disappearance of the scar represented Ren’s character progression from troubled, to unquestionably, abhorrently and violently evil, and back to redemption.

Visual Clues

It is a familiar trope. There is a long history of popular film culture relying on facial difference, particularly scarring, to denote villainy. Viewers are inundated with visual references to remind us of the immorality of the antagonists that occupy our screens, and the final Star Wars instalment continued to cement the narrative that a wounded face is a signifier of evil. To really bring the point home, we should perhaps remind ourselves that Ren’s redemption story failed to offer up any real reasoning for his change of heart, only that he was moved by protagonist Rey’s decision to heal him. The scar, then, becomes a primary signifier of his redemption. Not only is it a visual clue for the viewer, but its removal forms an emotional foundation for change from bad to good, dark side to light.

Star Wars is set in a galaxy full of archetypes. Good and evil form the balance on which numerous characters teeter in all three trilogies. However, this familiar simplicity should not prevent us from questioning why popular film repeatedly returns to this tired trope.

Scarring and James Bond

I am new to the AboutFace project. I will admit to not having thought critically about this issue in any depth until recently. It is something that I’ve had a background awareness of, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that isn’t, but I’ve been afforded the privilege of not being directly impacted by these issues. Since joining AboutFace in March, I have been thinking about faces, facial difference, facial injury, surgery and their representations more than I ever thought I would. All of a sudden, the presence of villains with facial scarring became excruciatingly apparent. My timing was perhaps partly to blame.

After seeing a trailer for the new Bond film, No Time to Die, I decided to tackle my entrenched dislike of the Bond franchise and watch all of the Daniel Craig films before the release of the latest instalment, which was due in April but has been pushed back to November due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I was surprised. I did enjoy the films, but they also made me uncomfortable.

The Bond series is especially wedded to the trope that scars, burns, and other facial injuries signify evil. Even if you just take the recent releases, you can’t help but notice the trend: Mads Mikkelsen’s La Chiffre in Casino Royale; Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva in Skyfall; Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld in Spectre (back for a second instalment in No Time to Die); and if one scarred villain wasn’t enough for No Time to Die, Rami Malek has also joined the cast to play a terrorist leader with an injured face, partially covered by a mask. That two facially scarred villains were written into a single film might suggest that the 25th Bond instalment may not, as hailed, be the ‘most woke yet.’ It might be fair to say that Bond films are not known for their subtlety or nuance, but these are villains played by talented actors whose abilities need not be augmented by visual scarring. Why, then, do producers continue to rely on this trope?

Credit: MGM/Columbia Pictures

The face, identity and history

The history of this association goes back further than you might imagine. Beauty ideals have long contributed to the notion that beauty equates with goodness and ugliness with evil, stemming from the classical world. While beauty ideals may have shifted over time, there is a consistent connection between the face and identity. In the early modern period, the face also carried deeper suggestions of honour, and severe facial difference or injury often carried dehumanising associations. The connection between villainy and facial scarring or difference is not new, it was not invented by film companies, though it has become their bread and butter.

These cultural and emotional histories have also been influential in contemporary medical intervention. It has been suggested that negative responses to facial difference could have emerged from a cognitive threat detection mechanism. Health professionals working on the human face, whether in psychology, dermatology or surgery, have drawn connections between disgust and facial disfigurement. Perhaps, then, producers and writers in the film industry are just playing on recognised human responses? But the argument that disgust is somehow an evolutionary response does not take into account the fact that disgust sensitivities are far from static throughout history, that ‘disgust’ is subjective, dynamic, and emotionally and culturally influenced. Is it not time to give current cinema audiences the credit that they might be able to work out which character is the villain without facial scarring?

A ‘historical document’?

In an article for The New Yorker, David Owen wrote that over time, the body becomes ‘a kind of historical document.’ Dramatic moments are memorialised in scar tissue. It rings true for scars in film. Scars can be illustrations of a traumatic incident that either marks the point of descent into evil, as with Kylo Ren, or they might signify a past event in a character’s life that has contributed their villainous state. Suggesting stormy lives, filled with pain or violence, think Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, scars are visual clues to a villain’s (sometimes complex) backstory. All too often, however, the scar is little more than a device to make a character appear more sinister, as with the surprisingly superficial Isabel Maru played by Elena Anaya in Wonder Woman (2017). I say surprisingly, because the film was so widely praised for its progressive outlook. The suggestion in this case is that Maru is evil from the outside in.

But while there may sometimes be a rationale for choosing to give facial scars to on-screen villains, this does not negate the significant negative stereotypes that can be associated with visible facial difference as a result. In a video produced by the Guardian, the notion that scars are representative of past trauma is reinforced. However, the speakers remind us of some of the painful reactions people have had to their scars. Whether the scarring serves to reveal the hidden depths of a villain to the audience, or if it solely serves as a visual clue for evil, the association strengthens the notion that a visible facial difference marks the bearer as unfamiliar to many audience members, defining them as ‘other.’

#IAmNotYourVillain

UK charity Changing Faces sought to challenge this tired trope in 2018 and have continued fighting for change on our screens ever since with their #IAmNotYourVillain campaign. Their call for action followed numerous studies that highlighted the negative association between visible facial difference and villainy on-screen. The charity’s CEO, Becky Hewitt, told the Guardian that young people don’t tend to make the association between facial difference and negative traits until they are exposed to popular media representations. This would suggest that the prejudice is learned, and possibly at a young age.

AboutFace hopes to contribute to the efforts set in motion by Changing Faces, challenging prejudice and misconception as part of our research, which will explore cultural systems of conformity, beauty and facial perfection in the age of the selfie both through academic research and public engagement events. Our Lived Experience Advisory Panel supports us in this work. Their involvement at key milestones in the project will ensure the research is relevant and meaningful to those to whom it matters the most.

Representation

Misrepresentation can be incredibly damaging, but so can a lack of representation. Changing Faces has called not only for fewer negative depictions of facial difference, but an increase in positive representations. They encourage the diversification of occasions of facial difference in film, moving away from the most prevalent villainy or vulnerability. The reasons for this have been powerfully articulated by some of the charity’s champions, such as Tulsi Vagjiani, a plane crash survivor who told the Telegraph that she was compared to Freddy Kreuger when she was growing up. The makeup used to transform actor Robert Englund into the notorious horror villain was based on medical photographs of burn victims, directly connecting real scarring to the demonic Kreuger.

The BFI quickly moved to support the Changing Faces campaign in November 2018, making the decision not to fund films in which the villain has scars, marks and burns. Speaking about the decision, deputy CEO Ben Roberts referred to the criteria in the BFI diversity standards, which call for meaningful representations on screen. In 2019, the BFI helped to fund Dirty God, a film about a woman trying to reclaim her life after an acid attack, starring burn survivor Vicky Knight. The film has been hailed as a strong positive representation and has also had a positive transformative effect on Knight’s own outlook.

This might be new ground for film, but it doesn’t appear to be the herald of a new era. While high-budget, high-profile films like No Time to Die, continue to dominate, can we hope to see any meaningful change in the cinematic representation of visible facial difference? The AboutFace project is seeking to explore the social context in which facial transplantation happens. In doing so, we are drawing attention to the social pressures to look a certain way. This theme of the scarred villain is part of our broader discussions of difference in societies fixated by visual appearance.

Author bio

Dr Sarah Hall is Associate Lecturer in Public History at the University of York. She was previously Public Engagement and Events Officer on AboutFace.

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