Seconds and Faces and Masks

Seconds
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Released in  1966



Cheryl, one of my frequent visitors here, suggested a resemblance between the Japanese film The Face of Another and the US film Seconds, starring Rock Hudson.  The Face of Another is the story of a Japanese businessman whose face is horribly scarred in a laboratory accident.  He covers his head with bandages, resembling the character in films of  H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man.  He is not adapting well, so his psychiatrist suggests a radical solution.  He will make a mask that is so lifelike few will ever realize it is a mask.

In Seconds, the businessman is a successful officer at a bank and seems likely to become bank president in the near future.  However, he is suffering from what was called a midlife crisis.   His job is boring and the romance has gone from his marriage.  His daughter has grown up and is now married and living far away, sending only a few letters and making an occasional phone call. He has come to the point that life means little or nothing to him--just endless tedium.

Then, he is contacted by a friend, a shock, for he thought Sam had died.  Sam tells him there is a company that will solve his problems for him, for a fee of course.  The solution is plastic surgery.  The company will arrange everything:  plastic surgery so he won't be recognized and his "death," so he won't be searched for.  The company will even provide him with a new life--something like a witness protection program for the bored.

After a bit of coaxing, he finally agrees.  This part is the one that doesn't work for me--the plastic surgery.  He changes from a 50 year old man, of average height, and somewhat overweight to Rock Hudson, who is 6'4" with an athlete's body.  A few weeks of workouts in the gym is not going to change his  body that much nor can it add maybe a half foot to his height.  However, once I got past that, I found it an interesting and absorbing film.

Rock Hudson comes up with one of his finest acting jobs in this film.  Regardless of his physical appearance, Hudson really seems to be a 50 year old man, still tired and now lost in his new life.   As in Face, events do not go the way all had hoped for.

While Face is concerned with a mask and Seconds employs plastic surgery, the overlying theme in the two films is the same--the change of one's external appearance and the effects of that change.  In Face, the mask seems to release the inner monster or at least it allows one to become something other than it was without the mask, while the plastic surgery in Seconds may change one's physical appearance, it does not change the inner person.

In Thomas Mann's short novel (perhaps even a novella) The Transposed Heads, Mann proposes a third answer to the question of the significance of the physical body to the spirit.  In the story two vastly different friends, one an intellectual and decidedly not athletic and the other a hardworking farmer commit suicide in order to allow the other to win the heart of the woman they both love.   She, on her part, finds it impossible to choose between them.  Discovering that they have committed suicide by praying to the goddess Kali to decapitate them, she attempts to save them by putting their heads back with their bodies and praying to Kali to resurrect them.   Kali hears her plea and brings them back to life, but unfortunately in her grief and panic the young woman had placed the wrong heads on the bodies.

Over a period of time, the intellectual appearing head with the intellectual mind began to change a bit.  The features coarsened somewhat, its interests and thinking processes were not quite as intellectual as before, and the body began to soften and to resemble the body of an intellectual.  And, the head of the farmer on the intellectual body began to change in the opposite direction.  The head began to resemble that of the intellectual while the body became tougher and stronger.   Mann's point, as I see it, is that the spirit and the body are one unit and influence each other.   The two friends over time may resemble each other in physique and mind more than they did before they committed suicide.

So, there are three positions here:  the spirit controls the body or the outward appearance, the outward appearance greatly influences the spirit, and the spirit and the body mutually influence each other for they are really one.


 One side note here--in psychology the term "persona" refers to "the role that a person assumes in order to display his conscious intentions to himself and others."   The term "persona" comes from Latin and it means "mask."  So, the persona is a mask assumed to display his conscious intentions to himself and others.  The relationship to others is very clear, but what does it mean when we assume a mask to display our conscious intentions to ourselves?

I'm not sure what this all means, but the interrelationship among the terms persona, person, and mask is fascinating.   And how does Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fit in here, as well as stories about the doppelgangers by Poe, Dostoyevsky, and others?

Thomas Mann: The Transposed Heads

Thomas Mann: The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India

This is not only a short novel by Thomas Mann, it’s also a very unusual novel for him. It’s set in India, in mythic times, so, therefore, it must be true. I’ll let Mann introduce the novel, for he does it much better than I ever could.

The story of Sita of the beautiful hips, daughter of the cattle-breeder Sumantra of the wqrrior caste and of her two husbands (if one may put it like that) is so sanguinary, so amazing to the senses, that it makes the greatest demands on the hearer's strength of mind and his power to resist the gruesome guiles of Maya. it would be well for the listener to take pattern from the fortitude of the teller, for it requires, if anything, more courage to tell such a tale that to hear it. But here it is, from first to last, just as it fell out:

As you may have guessed, this is a tale of the eternal triangle and the way it worked itself out in India of mythic times—the tale of Sita, Shridaman and Nanda.

Young Shridaman was a merchant, and the son of a merchant; Nanda, on the other hand, both a smith and a cowherd, for his father Garga not only kept cattle on the meadow and in the byre, but also plied the hammer and fanned the fire with a bird’s wing.

Shridaman followed in his father’s footsteps after “having previously devoted some years to grammar and the elements of astronomy and ontology, under the supervision of a guru or spiritual preceptor.

Not so Nanda, son of Garga. His karma was otherwise; and never, by either tradition or inheritance, had he had to do with things of the mind . . . His work as a smith had made powerful his arms; that as a shepherd had been further an advantage, for he had a well set-up body, which he loved to rub with mustard oil adn drape with gold ornaments and chains of wild flowers.

Shridaman, on the other hand, had a thin aristocratic face and a soft body, not hardened by exercise. It was the perfect body for "a noble and knowledgeable head piece." Nanda's head to the contrary was merely a "pleasing appendage" for the body was "the main thing."

In spite of, or perhaps because of, these differences Shridaman and Nanda became good friends. All was well until they met Sita, she of the beautiful hips. Both became enamored of her, but it was Shridaman who spoke first. She accepted his proposal, but they did not live happily ever after. Shortly after the wedding, Sita began to wonder if she hadn’t made a mistake, especially after seeing Nanda, for he was a frequent visitor. Eventually both Nanda and Shridaman became aware of the situation.

Six months after the wedding, the three went to visit Sita’s parents. On the trip, they found a temple to Kali. Shridaman said he wished to pray a moment and entered the temple. There he prayed to Kali and then cut his head off (obviously with Kali’s help), thus freeing Sita to marry Nanda.

Eventually Nanda goes looking for Shridaman and finds his friend. He realizes instantly why Shridaman has done this and feeling guilty as the cause of his best friend’s suicide, he resolves he cannot do anything but to follow his friend into death.

After a while, Sita becomes concerned and enters the temple in search of them. She finds them and although confused as to how it happened, she understands very well why it happened. She decides also to commit suicide by hanging herself. While she stands there with the noose around her neck, Kali appears and tells her to take the noose off or she will get her “ears boxed.”

Kali tells her that all will be well, for all Sita has to do is put the heads carefully back on the bodies and she (Kali) will do the rest. Sita does but in her sorrow and grief makes one minor mistake—she puts the heads back on the wrong bodies.

At first Nanda and Shridaman are happy with the transposition, for both had been afflicted with “the grass is greener” longings—Shridaman for Nanda’s physique and Nanda for Shridaman’s intellectual bearing and appearance. But, you may be surprised to learn (or perhaps not surprised) that all still is not well with the threesome.

From this point on, three issues are worked out in the story: (1) to whom is Sita married?; (2) what happens to Shridaman’s fine aristocratic head and intellectual capacities on Nanda’s strong young body?; and (3) what happens to Nanda’s broad happy face and rather ordinary intellect on Shridaman’s intellectual and clerkly body?

The ultimate question addressed here, therefore, is which creates and rules the person—the mind or the body?

Overall Reaction: an unanswerable question that Mann handles with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Lots of fun if you are looking for a novel that plays with ideas.