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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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Silence, surgery and strangeness: face transplant and the film Eyes without a Face/Les yeux sans visage (1960)

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Silence, surgery and strangeness: face transplant and the film Eyes without a Face/Les yeux sans visage (1960)

The Author

Sara Wasson

Interface

This is the first blog in our series on horror, Halloween, transplant and facial surgery. It explores the 1960 French-language horror film Les yeux sans visage or Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju. Based on the novel of the same name by Jean Redon, it revolves around a plastic surgeon who is determined to perform a face transplant on his daughter, who was injured in a car accident. Catch up with AboutFace PI Fay Bound Alberti’s introduction to the series, and keep an eye out for next week’s installment from Lauren Stephenson. 

Silence, surgery and strangeness: face transplant and the film Eyes without a Face/Les yeux sans visage (1960)

Silence … unbearable tension … and seven people faint, overcome by what they see on the screen. So the tale goes of the screening of Georges Franju’s film Les yeux sans visage at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1960. Although that story might be apocryphal, there is no denying that Franju’s melancholy, ponderous film invites viewers into a compelling and claustrophobic contemplation of a face transplant gone awry. 

Yet the film does many things beyond shocking an audience. Like all ‘horror’, whether film, book or game, Les yeux does cultural work. It can show us prevailing anxieties, but it can also be ‘speculative.’ As critic Kelly Hurley says of earlier Gothic work: it can help us consider things which might be hard to contemplate in other cultural arenas. Les yeux is a haunting example of a film which invites us to contemplate unbearable and unspeakable things: guilt, family dysfunction, despair, as well as thinking about the mysterious practices of surgery and face transplant.

Surgery

First: surgery. After chloroform and other general anaesthetics entered use in the 19th century, surgery underwent a dramatic shift in the way it has been thought of and represented. Prior to the emergence of sweet analgesic oblivion, surgery was an act of violence and pain; in the moment of surgery, the experience could evoke butchery or vivisection. General anaesthesia mercifully removed much of the pain, and also crucially changed the surgical context, both in practice and in popular imagination. 

Surgeons became a kind of secular priest, leading within a  quiet and fundamentally unknowable space, a place which lay people could not enter. The person at the centre of the event —the patient—is mercifully unconscious of what occurs there. The poet Karen Fiser speaks of the ‘white space’ of anaesthetised surgery, for if it works as planned, the lapse of time is blessedly blank. The patient hopes to be spared their own body’s suffering under a blade.

The famous surgical scene of Les yeux takes us into that ‘white space’ of surgery, while relentlessly withholding any distractions or solace. Without music, the camera focuses on the shining tables and instruments, the movements of the scalpel, and profound stillness and attention. The shock of the scene stems not from gore, but from the extended, silent, meticulous attention and precision of the surgical act. Scalpels, silence, and stamina.

Emotionally Charged

In addition to its fascinating representation of surgery, the film offers many other provocations for reflection. Any form of tissue transplantation may become emotionally charged for the receiver, the family of the donor, or the donor themselves, and face transplant is consistently a form of tissue transfer which garners particularly intense emotion. Indeed, long before transplantation became medically viable with the pharmaceutical launch of cyclosporine in the 1980s, face transplant inspired a vast range of creative work and discussion. Nowhere was this more true than in France. Gaston Leroux’s novel 1909-1910 Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera), serialised in 1910, and Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel L’Homme qui rit (The Laughing Man) published in 1869, are just two of many French works which contemplate the emotional challenges of facial injury.

The critic Stefanos Geroulanos has discussed how, during the twentieth century, the horrors of World War I trench warfare intensified awareness of the subjective burdens of facial wounding due to the deep suffering of the gueles cassees, soldiers facially mutilated during the nightmare of trench warfare. The face was explored in philosophical writing, too, with philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes and Emmanuel Levinas reflecting on the cultural significance of faces and the way they mediate social connection. Given this wealth of interest in the trope of facial surgery and transplant, it is perhaps fitting that France was the first country to achieve a successful face transplant in 2005.

Tissue Rejection

es yeux draws attention to another historical reality, too: tissue rejection. Until pharmaceutical immunosuppression was developed at the end of the twentieth century, any transplant led to acute rejection (except between identical twins). Unless immune-suppressed, the body recognises transplant tissue as genetically ‘other’ and attacks it, killing the tissue, and the recipient then succumbed to both the loss of the transferred organ and the poison of the decaying transferred tissue 

Some of the most haunting images of the film are from the sequence of still photographs in which Christine, the transplant recipient, stares miserably at the camera while it records the failure of the graft. Since the time the film emerged, immunosuppression has transformed the arena of transplantation, and tissue recipients are no longer so inevitably afflicted. 

Rejection remains, however, an inevitability in face transplant, although many periods of rejection can be treated. Yet through these emotive, silent images, the film gives the viewer a vivid sense of the suspense, dread and disillusionment that accompanied the decades of experimental failures. Scientific writing has to be detached, but nonetheless the 1960s and 1970s saw emotional language used by scientists and surgeons, describing ‘dark days’, ‘black years’, and ‘clinical heartbreaks’, as acknowledged in analysis by Reneé Fox, Judith Swazey and J. Dosselor. Cinematic moments such as this—albeit in a fantastical film—can help us feel the emotion inside surgical history. 

Inspiring work like the AboutFace project, led by Professor Prof Fay Bound Alberti, explores the many facets of tissue transplantation. In addition to surgical scenes, there are so many human elements to transplantation practice, including the experiences of donors, donor kin, recipients, caregivers, surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, physiotherapists, and more. In addition, one can consider the administrative apparatus of tissue allocation and management nationally: the algorithms of waiting lists, the icebox, the management of donor death, and more.

Horror and Transplantation

I haven’t described the film’s plot, and that’s not accidental. Any summary of the film’s plot makes it sound like it must appear on screen as a frantic bloodbath, scarlet splashed on celluloid. So many murders. So much death. But reducing the film to the plot would miss the most powerful thing about it: the soporific, restrained delivery, remarkable silences, and the lost, drifting quality of the protagonist, Christine. Iain Sinclair has critiqued the film’s ‘funereal’ pacing—‘all that plodding up staircases’, but as I suggest elsewhere, the plodding is perhaps the point: the film has a dream-like melancholy, confronting the viewer with Christine’s sadness guilt, and exhaustion. 

Films such as Les yeux do not offer realistic representations of contemporary transplantation, but they do give us an opportunity to dwell with, and think through, surgical histories of transfer and our own cultural imagining around it. Transplantation is an extraordinary feat. Yet, like any human practice, it may also at times involve elements of grief, pain, inequalities of access, and other difficult histories both personal and social. Even today, there can be challenging emotions around transplantation for recipients, donors, donor kin and caregivers, and these emotions deserve compassion. The Process of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart (PITH) project in Toronto, Canada, explores some of the emotional and conceptual challenges that can attend tissue transfer. Works such as Sheryl Hamdy’s Our Bodies Belong to God, Megan Crowley-Matoka’s Domesticating Organ Transplant and Lesley Sharp’s Strange Harvest all invite us to recognise some of the complex mixture of emotions around these processes. 

In the service of such nuance, horror film and fiction can be a surprising, but useful, ally to imagination. Horror may help us listen to histories that are hard to hear.

References

Crowley-Matoka, Megan, Domesticating Organ Transplant (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)

Dosselor, J., ‘Transplantation’, in P. Terasaki (ed.), History of Transplantation (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1971), pp. 295-306 

Fiser, Karen, Losing and Finding (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2003)

Fox, Renée and Judith Swazey, Spare Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Fox, Renée and Judith Swazey, The Courage to Fail (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)

Geroulanos, Stefanos, ‘Postwar facial reconstruction’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 31:2 (2013), 15-33 

Hamdy, Sherine, Our Bodies Belong to God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)

Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Les yeux sans visage, dir. by Georges Franju (Champs-Élysées Productions, 1958; US release 1960).

Sharp, Lesley, Strange Harvest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

Shildrick, M., A. Carnie, A. Wright, P. McKeever, E. Huan-Ching Jan, E. De Luca, I. Bachmann, S. Abbey, D. Dal Bo, J. Poole, T. El-Sheikh and H. Ross, ‘Messy entanglements’, Medical Humanities, Online First (2017), 1-9 

Sinclair, Iain, ‘Homeopathic horror’, Sight and Sound, 5:4 (1995), 24-27

Wasson, Sara, Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film and Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)

 

Author bio:

Sara Wasson is Reader in Gothic Studies at Lancaster University. She is the author of Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film and Medicine (2020) and Urban Gothic of the Second World War (2010), which won the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize of the International Gothic Association. With Emily Alder, she co-edited Gothic Science Fiction, 1980-2010 (2011), editor of a special issue of Gothic Studies exploring Medical Gothic (2015), and primary investigator of the UK AHRC-funded project Translating Chronic Pain. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture, Medical Humanities, Gothic Studies, and other publications.

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Transplantation narratives on screen: a Halloween blog series

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Transplantation narratives on screen: a Halloween blog series

The Author

Fay Bound Alberti

An introduction to our October blog series, exploring the ties between transplantation and the horror film genre. Don’t miss blogs on Les Yeux sans Visage, The Eye, and Hollywood’s negative representations of facial difference.

Transplantation narratives on screen: a Halloween blog series

At InterFace we work according to a strict code of ethics around respect for human life and dignity. We care about the language that we use to talk about facial difference and appearance, and about the emotional, ethical and socio-economic challenges of transplantation. That work and care, takes place within a wider cultural context in which the major themes of our research – facial difference and transplantation – are not always treated with sensitivity or regard for human experience. Indeed, as the founder of Face Equality International and our own Sarah Hall has shown, facial difference is associated with negative personality traits in popular culture; Hollywood “baddies” carry facial scars that mark them out as separate from (and antithetical to) civilised society.

Transplantation is also a subject that has, since its inception, generated considerable public interest and anxiety. Transplanted organs, as historians of literature, film and ethics, have shown, are invested with a wide range of meanings, whether it’s the Hands of Orlac (1924) which an experimental graft gives a concert pianist the hands of a murderer – who continues to murder. Or Face/Off (1997) in which FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) and master criminal Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage) change faces, and with it their entire social and familial identity. Stories of body swapping, organ harvesting and enforced donation have been part of the literary landscape since the 1960s, and these influence, and contribute to, broader social and political concerns about bodies, citizenship, and personhood.

Throughout October, and as an antidote to the casual exploitation of horror narratives around appearance and the limits of the body, we will be reflecting on transplantation narratives in fiction, with a series of fascinating guest blogs: Sara Wasson will be writing about Eyes without a Face (1960), a film that invites audiences to contemplate ‘unbearable and unspeakable’ around transplant ethics; Lauren Stephenson will be writing about The Eye (2002), a film that, like Hands of Orlac, continues the fear of the ‘haunted organ’; and Paddy Adamson will be exploring the Hollywood’s exploitation of spectacles of facial difference. Thank you to all our contributors.

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Drag Face: exploring my identity through masculine performance

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Drag Face: exploring my identity through masculine performance

The Author

Isabel Adomakoh Young

Isabel Adomakoh Young discusses identity, race, and performing as a drag king in this week’s guest blog. Don’t miss our other blogs exploring the connections between faces, expression and identity: Daring to be Different, by Amanda Bates and Owning by Face, by Marc Crank.

Drag Face: exploring my identity through masculine performance

As a young woman in the final years of her Bachelor’s degree, I had a complex relationship with my face already. It’s well known by now that women are under an onslaught of marketing and socio-historical pressure to take issue with our natural appearance. Young women, only just getting to know themselves and how they interact with the world around them, are susceptible to this in specific ways. 

Then there was the fact of my being one of a handful of brown faces across the entire university – “the beans in the rice”, as an African American man I once met put it. I was lucky enough, however, to have been raised with priorities beyond surface appearance, and with a sense that I was both Ghanaian (father’s side) and English (mother’s), rather than neither. I was also lucky that my appearance passed for ‘normal’ in all the insidious ways that make some people’s lives easier and some people’s incredibly hard.

I appeared confident enough to my peers, apparently, to be invited to perform in theatre shows, which I did with some trepidation and a lot of enjoyment, until one day I was asked, quite out of the blue as it seemed to me, if I wanted to come to a drag workshop. An actor I knew a bit had cooked up the idea with a director to get a group of women together and explore ‘drag kinging’. It was the first time I’d heard the phrase and it took me a moment to understand. Drag queens are historically men exploring femininity, so… kings must be women exploring masculinity! It makes perfect sense when you think of it, but I certainly never had. 

As the years have gone by since, I learned that not many people have, even now. (The binary concept of swapping opposites has also been exploded by the fantastic variety of drag performance I’ve since encountered, across the gender spectrum. But that was all still to come.) And they’d chosen me, for reasons I was never clear on, as someone who ‘might be interested’. I was.

Image credit: Alex Wojcik

A group of us met in a big college space they’d booked, with carpeted floor and wraparound windows. The two directors did a little presentation; some quotes from gender theorists, images of music hall performers, 80s musicians, smoky cabaret shows, boy bands. Gradually, we moved from discussion to action, pulling on miscellaneous pieces of clothing people had brought, watching the lines of our bodies alter. We asked, what makes a man? What do we do that most men don’t? How would you signify masculinity without words? What might your body do in public space? Alone? What is male seduction like? What about men who don’t read as conventionally masculine? It was fascinating. 

I suddenly became aware how hard I worked, almost unconsciously, to signify femininity to those around me. Decisions I’d made years ago, as a pre-teen, about “what a woman does”, how my face rests or moves, where and how my body should be. Weight on one leg, give way on the pavement, lively smile not slack neutrality. Attractiveness, passiveness, correctness. I’d grown out of ideas like putting your tongue in your back teeth when you smile, or perfecting the America’s Next Top Model “smize”, but there were stealthier, less conscious things still in there. Feminist activism had highlighted oppressive norms to me by then, but not down to my own physicality. 

I realised then that I could let go of some of those behaviours; the ones that I’d chosen not from a place of authenticity but of fear and shame, the ones that didn’t express me.

Not many of the group knew each other, but we leaned in close, sharing eyebrow pencils and contour brushes in what would become a familiar routine, but was, that first time, revolutionary for us. With the scanty internet guidance we could find, and lots of discussion, we re-invented ourselves. Moustaches and beards, sure, but subtler things too. Of course each man is different, but how to signal masculinity to an audience? Might eyebrows be heavier, might an adam’s apple protrude more, a jawline be more square? The art of contouring; many of us were well-practised in traditionally feminine makeup, but now we were in uncharted waters, our old habits useless. It was exciting. I followed along with the group’s decisions, only later recognising that a broad rule for Caucasian men may not be right for a mixed-race king.

Image credit: Stephen Allwright

We laughed as students walked unwittingly past the huge windows, thrilled to be in these new unfamiliar guises. Looking into a hand-mirror, I saw someone known and unknown, like a long-lost brother. As a child, I’d been a tom-boy for years, wishing in some nebulous way to “be a boy”. What if that kid could see me now? I even found my face moved differently; my new character raised one eyebrow suggestively, hooded his eyes and held a sleepy half-smile. He pleased an imagined audience without trying. Where did this all come from?

As we explored the theory of drag more – discussing performative gender, preconceptions and limitations, norms and expectations – the fact that masculinity really is seen as the default was brought home to me. Part of what was so liberating about drag kinging was that we were breaking free of the age-old principle that a man is a blank slate, full of potential and possibility, but a woman is a set thing, constrained; a thing to get right or wrong. 

When we’d formed our company Pecs Drag Kings, and told people about it, we often met blank looks, questions like “But what do you even do?” etc. It takes some thought to realise that masculinity is just as performative as femininity. Just because men mostly don’t paint their faces these days doesn’t mean the concept’s not hugely contrived. Our fun, high energy, surprising cabaret shows bring that truth into focus in technicolour.

Image credit: Harry Elletson

While I’m proud of the brilliant work Pecs make, and the fascinating conversations it sparks – which I love eavesdropping on in the bar after the show – I am most grateful to drag for helping me to find my own gender expression. By pushing boundaries and exploring possibilities, I’ve found a more authentic version of my day-to-day self; in my appearance and in how I move through the world. I set the terms of my gender expression now, each and every day. I’m glad that through our workshops and shows we sow those seeds in others too.

Author Bio

Isabel is a queer theatre-maker, voiceover and writer of English and Ghanaian origins based in London. After studying English at Cambridge, she trained with NYT Rep, then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for 2019. She co-created the binary-bending collective Pecs Drag Kings, inclusive arts event Brainchild Festival and the bestselling ‘Lionboy’ book trilogy, adapted and toured globally by Complicité.

http://www.isabeladomakohyoung.com/

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Visualising Evil: Depictions of Visible Facial Difference in Film Culture

by

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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