Eyes Without A Face (1960)
With a haunting score by Maurice Jarre (Dr. Zhivago) and the haunting eyes of Edith Scob. Eyes Without A Face is — you guessed it — haunting. It’s kind of a horror flick; the director Georges Franju preferred to call it ‘poetic’ horror. But Eyes Without a Face is offensive, because of it’s intentional juxtaposition of reality and fantasy. Pierre Brasseur is a surgeon who wishes to replace his daughters damaged features; so his sinister, devoted assistant (played by Allida Valli) captures a young woman, and they remove her face. The removal is horrifyingly real. Though I kept thinking — would that actually work? Just peeling it off and attaching it to someone else? Of course it doesn’t; and the scene when Brasseur discovers something wrong it's chilling. As he gently touches his daughter’s new face, we sense there is a problem. She wants to smile. He says “Smile, but not too much,” and whether it’s intentionally or unintentionally funny I am not sure, but I couldn’t laugh. The amazing thing is that there is actually nothing camp here, even when Edit Scob stabs Allida Valli in the neck with a scalpel and Valli simply asks: ‘Why?’ The ending is sublime, as Scob releases the caged, tortured dogs Brasseur has been using for his experiments, and they consequently devour him. Franju wanted to insert real violence into art. Audiences at the premiere in Edinburgh walked out, causing Franju to quip, memorably: “Now I know why Scotsmen wear kilts.” The only critic who gave it a good review was fired. Consider Ibsen’s reviews for Ghosts -- “An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly.” Merely hinting at venereal disease was enough to unleash a veritable fountain of rhetorical masturbation. Remember, one Edwardian judge who had to deal with a ‘lesbianic’ performance — Maude Adams’ interpretations of Oscar Wilde’s Salome -- said ‘such subject matter should never be spoken of because it will bring to young ladies’ minds something which they could not normally think of themselves.’ But the human imagination is able to conjure things that are too fantastical even to be real; there’s proof enough in the madness that grips our world now. And it is perhaps relevant that COVID-19 and racism have merged. CNN speaks of them in one breath as ‘sister epidemics’ and I believe they are, because the fight against both appeals to our better selves, and there is no lie more attractive than that. Franju, in contrast, appeals to our baser instincts, and as you are watching the facial transplant, you are on the one hand saying to yourself ‘there’s no need for us to see this’ -- but you can’t tear yourself away. Yes we all have assholes; a startling revelation when you really think of it. A character in Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends goes on about how amazing it is that people have genitals under their clothes. I must admit I do get quite obsessed with that sometimes, which makes it difficult for me to concentrate. Jerry Ciccoritti once told someone: ‘Sky’s work is just about shocking Mommy and Daddy.’ Except they are long in their graves so why do I still do it? Perhaps it’s an illness, but I think I am exposing hypocrisy by saying: we all have bodies, those bodies do unpleasant things and make unpleasant sounds and leave unpleasant stains on the bed. Christopher Newton’s standard for whether or not a stage character was ‘real’ or not was —‘do they shit?’ The body is death; because bodies die. I only watched half the video of George Floyd being asphyxiated by that cop’s knee. But for those of you who watched it to the end -- all this may have to do with the impossible task we have been set by God. We are conscious, when it would have been so much better to be just a plant or a rock, because they don’t see their own death. To be given this and then have it all taken away — though religion tries to make that into a blessing — seems like cruelty on someone’s part. And that realization may explain human cruelty/voyeurism to some degree. Maybe death won’t happen to us if we do it to someone else, or maybe it will go away if we imagine it happening to ourselves over and over again— and yet. And yet, Bataille says a part of us wants death, and we instinctively long for it, because we were dead before we were born; or at least we weren’t alive. So there are two choices. You either delude yourself into pretending there is no death, or constantly remind yourself there is, and somehow carry on. I’m sorry to tell you that diseases will never disappear and there will always be racism. The weird little bubble we are living in now seems heroic — because it seems brave to imagine a perfect world — but it’s simply nuts. Ibsen wanted to remind us that syphilitic bodies are covered with sores, and then you go mad, and then you die. Franju didn’t want to make a horror movie where the mad scientists cackle — because after all, there are real Nazis in the world who never cackle and are occasionally kind— so instead he made a film about a very cool rational doctor with a deep voice who very carefully cuts someone’s face off and steals it. The two men (Boileau-Narcejac) who wrote Eyes Without a Face also wrote Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is another dance with beauty and death. So I realise now what happens when I get to this point in one of these blogs and I am nearing the end. And in addition -- now I am getting nearer to the end of writing all these blogs. Because the end must come. (And I think I will have to stop writing them soon. I’m only preparing myself, not you, I know you don’t care.) (Do you?) Both situations call up the same urgency -- that I simply must cram in all this profundity -- somehow -- before the end, because it all must end well, so it's a race with time. And every line I write makes it impossible to write another. (These blogs must be of certain length that I deem to be appropriate.) So the answer to the dilemma — which I have only found because this blog is ending and I must find an answer — is that there is no heroism in a dream that does not acknowledge death. Speaking of being without a face, there is no heroism in a fake pasted-on-smile that is oblivious to the fact that people have dirty naked bumholes under their clothes. But to know that, and acknowledge that, and continue to try and create some sort of beauty, is a kind of hopelessness that we would all do well to yearn for. For all is passing; and you may have missed it already, and it may already be too late.