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?

The Fight Club--who is the real opponent? Pt. 1

POILER WARNING:

THIS COMMENTARY REVEALS CRUCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE OVERALL PLOT AND ENDING OF THE STORY. IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN FIGHT CLUB, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU READ NO FURTHER.


The Fight Club is a unique film. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are completely believable in their roles, as are Helena Bonham Carter and Meatloaf, who play two of the most important supporting roles. You may not like one or more of them, or possibly all of them, but they are convincing, and they engage the viewer to the point that liking or disliking becomes irrelevant.

Unlike too many films I've viewed recently, this one was unpredictable. I never expected what was going to happen, and when it did, it seemed perfectly natural. It was unexpected but reasonable.

Fight Club begins with a chance conversation on a plane and ends with a catastrophe possibly greater in its effect than that of 9/11. Each step is a small one, but seemingly inevitable, so that the viewer will accept it as being the next logical step. Only at the end does the viewer realize just how far the inexorable logic of the film has taken the characters and the viewer.

The plot twist comes near the end of the film and radically changes the viewer's perception of what has been going on in front of him. Frankly, I found it as hard to accept as the nameless narrator, but like the narrator, I eventually had to accept what I was seeing on the screen.

The twist or reversal of the foundation of the story is based on a literary device which was developed in the 19th century and has produced some of the most memorable literature ever written--the double or the doppelganger. Briefly, the main character or the protagonist is doubled in some way--there is another person who bears a striking resemblance to the main character, but strangely only the main character seems aware of this. But, the double is not the exact duplicate of the main character in all respects; while the double may physically resemble the main character, the personality differences between the two are most often exactly the opposite.

As it is in this film, the double has been used to illustrate the dual nature of the human being: sometimes it's the good and the bad within all of us or at other times it's the difference between our external behavior and our repressed inner nature. It does this by completely separating the two opposing elements in our nature that are, in reality, hopelessly intermingled.

One of the first examples of the double occurs in Dostoyevsky's short novel, The Double. In this story, the main character is a meek and mild civil servant, who is so shy and retiring that he has no friends and hasn't spoken to his supervisor at work in weeks, if not months. He is unable to put himself forward. One day at the office, he sees a man who resembles himself to a remarkable degree. However, this man is outgoing and, in spite of just having appeared for the first time at the office, engages in a conversation eventually with everyone at the office, including the head of the department. Later, at a party given by his superior, our unnamed narrator again sees his double. While the narrator spends most of his time buried in the crowd and isolated from everyone around him, his double is the life of the party, acting in a way the narrator wishes he could.

Edgar Allen Poe's "William Wilson" features a schoolboy who discovers that he has a double among his fellow pupils, one with the same initials, the same physical appearance, and the same birth date. No one else seems to be aware of this. This double also frequently whispers advice and warnings to William Wilson that nobody else notices or hears. Moreover, the double frequently interferes with Wilson's activities for Wilson is an evil person. Either the double advises him to avoid actions which are harmful to others or frustrates them in some way.

Probably the most famous "double" tale in literature is Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so much so that the names of the characters have become embedded in our everyday language. People are frequently characterized as being a Jekyll and Hyde. In this story, Dr Jekyll has discovered a drug that will allow either his good side or his evil side to dominate his entire being.

In a more modern retelling, one of the Episodes of the original Star Trek series had Captain Kirk the victim of a transporter malfunction which somehow separated him into two separate beings. One of these beings was his good side, and the other his evil side--an up-to-date version of the Jekyll and Hyde tale, but with the difference that both sides existed independently of the other. What was intriguing about the division was that the evil side had Kirk's energy and drive, while the good Kirk was weak and ineffectual throughout most of the episode.

There are other examples of the double in both literature and in film, but I think this post is long enough. If any wish to look further into the topic, I would recommend the following work as an excellent starting point:

C. F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson , Arizona, 1972. He has also published a novel, The Other, in which "centers in the unique relatiohship between the first self and the second self.