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Home , Billy Wilder, Elliott Gould, Nicolas Roeg

Masquerade! Cinema and Its Masks

by Richard Combs

Our autumn season of 28 films is the largest we have so far staged as part of the Passport to Cinema programme – largest, that is, as in numbers of films, but still tiny in comparison with the subject of the season: identity, and the way it has been understood and explored in cinema. We have thought of this in terms of a masquerade, because identity is only manifest in the forms it takes on, the way it chooses (or is driven) to present itself. And the way we witness this being manifested in the cinema is through the masks of stories and characters. Or, to give the season a twist after – one of cinema’s major existentialists, perhaps alongside – this is everything you always wanted to know about yourself* *but were afraid to ask your shrink.

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And this season includes the two major films with which those directors have explored our subject. Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) is a faux documentary about a faux personality, the title character who is himself so negligible that he becomes whomever he is standing next to. And Bergman’s Persona (1966) is about an actress who decides in the midst of a performance that she will henceforth live without masks, without the human interaction that encourages the presentation of false selves. This then leads to intense difficulties of exchange with the nurse who is assigned to be her carer. ‘Persona’ itself is a wonderful word that covers all our bases: in the original Latin it means a player’s mask, an acted character, but then it also came to mean the actual person, a human being.

The word ‘masquerade’ has been ascribed French, Spanish and Italian origins in the 16th century to mean an actual masked ball, later coming to mean any false outward show. And from questions about how we place, identify and fix the real self behind the mask – or whether such a reality even exists – it’s a short hop to fantasies about the others, doubles and freely migrating selves who might occupy the cloud kingdom of our ‘real’ self. The 19th century saw the burgeoning of such fantasies – before Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the poet Coleridge had declared that he felt he was “a hive of selves” – and what gave them a boost were modern means of projecting such fantasies.

In her book about such migrating and shape-shifting through the ages, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, Marina Warner says, “The raising of spectral others develops in symbiosis with the development of media of representation, above all optical or, in the term the Jesuit experimenter Athanasius Kircher favours, catoptrical, or worked through mirrors”. So this is a season of such mirrors, through which we can see the busy activity of that hive of selves. For convenience, or manoeuverability, we’ve divided it into three sections, roughly corresponding to three planes of activity for the self – or theatres for presentation.

The first, running through August and up to September 10th, is cinema that fits the original definition of masquerade, in which participants make an identity/clothes switch, perhaps in drag – (1959) – perhaps not (, 1939), or find themselves in social situations where some defensive (, 1972) or agonised (The Blot, 1921) role- playing is necessary. Jean Renoir’s classic La Règle du jeu (1939) incorporates the latter with an actual masquerade, which retrospectively characterises the role-playing as a dance of death. The last film in this section, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), pitches role-playing on to the level of a clash of civilisations: an aborigine boy, undergoing the initiation

2 of walkabout, rescues two white children lost in the outback; eventually these two are reclaimed by their civilisation, at the cost of other connections to life.

The second section, which concentrates on individual crises of identity, opens on September 16th with ’s Mulholland Drive (2001), in which literal roles intersect with personal dreams, fears and wish-fulfilments, and through which the film’s (Lynch’s?) own dream-life twists and turns, transforming and recombining everything according to its own (il)logic. This section also includes Allen’s technical wonder of shape-shifting in Zelig and ’ operatic treatment of the mysteries of identity, (1941).

Our last section, beginning on November 12, draws identity back to its spiritual sources, or to an understanding of where it fits in a cosmic scheme, from ’s transformation of the human in 2001 (1968) to David Lynch’s treatment of a biological anomaly, The Elephant Man (1980). This ends by invoking human- possibility-in-change through a line from the Latin poet Ovid’s own Metamorphoses – with which Marina Warner’s treatise begins – “Nothing dies”.

Of course, separating our subject into sections immediately makes it apparent that there can be no such separation of identity (or call it ‘being’). Films from one of these sections, for instance, easily merge with titles in another: the masquerade of cross-dressing in Some Like It Hot, or I Was a Male War Bride

3 (1949), becomes a historical parade of gender roles – with attendant personal crises – in Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1992). Also crossing our boundaries are certain film- makers who have picked at the multi-faceted quality of identity from different angles: David Lynch and Nicolas Roeg, for instance. We could choose at random from the filmography of , the ur-director of this subject – in a variety of historical, biographical and genre forms – but we have chosen his most intense, and controversial, example, Mickey One (1965).

And the matter of identity will be turned – as a subject, a question, a problem, as an arena of play or an individual crisis – by the stylistic approach of individual films. Mickey One battens on hero ’s bewildered search for meaning with the atmospheric variety of paranoid thriller, absurd comedy, or Kafka-esque nightmare. The no less bewildered hero (Elliott Gould) of ’s The Long Goodbye wanders through a sunny, slip-sliding world where nothing is certain, least of all the role or relevance of this misplaced 40s gumshoe. Zelig updates the technology for troublesome projections by combining faked footage of the hero’s shadowy self with real footage of real personalities. And ’s Days of Heaven (1978) exults in scenes of natural splendour – to conjure a mood of pantheistic wonder? – so that the world of his characters might shimmer in its own double state of the here-and-now and the heretofore.

And apart from its own projections, where does cinema stand in relation to the long history of philosophical reflections on identity? The term ‘existential’ – usually linked with ‘doubt’ – has come to stand for the range of modern anxieties about identity (it’s used that way in the first paragraph here). But the father of modern existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, had a particular view of the self, which didn’t include too much splitting, or doubling. There was just ‘being’, which was not divisible; there was no “hive of selves”, not even the duality of interior and exterior, or of appearance and reality (“the appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence”). But there are two kinds of being – those with self-consciousness, imagination, and the possibility of freedom (i.e., us) – and objects without these qualities (i.e., the world we live in).

4 The gap between these two states of being is just – Nothingness (Being and Nothingness: it’s the textbook of existentialism). Out of this void our self- consciousness can produce the kinds of false states Sartre called Bad Faith – negativity, falsehood, masquerade. And with Bad Faith, Sartre enters the cinema. The examples he gave included a waiter putting on a self-conscious show of ‘being’ a waiter for his customers, or a student giving such a conscientious display of listening to a teacher that he doesn’t hear what’s being said. What’s also interesting about these examples is that they were picked up in a very different book about behaviour, about ‘putting on a show’: the sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, an anthology of situations in which people project a version of both themselves and the situation, where there can be no ‘real’ reality, only a mutually agreed one.

The possibilities here for comedy (and much else) – the agonies of putting on the show, the constant threat of exposure and humiliation – are obvious, and lead back to at least one of our films, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Wilder could be another ur- film-maker on the subject of identity (he also co-wrote Ninotchka), and one article about his films, in the UK Cinema magazine, by Robert Mundy, explicitly connects them to Erving Goffman: “The sociological theory of role-playing can elucidate the function of disguise in Wilder’s films… in has four different personae, each with a different uniform: policeman, pimp, English lord and labourer”.

There’s a comprehensive history of our subject in an impressive work of moral philosophy, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, by Charles Taylor. This details how every age has construed those sources on the basis of beliefs in God or the natural world or our own powers of creation. The modern version has secularised and reoriented those sources towards justice, benevolence, an affirmation of ordinary life and self-fulfilment. What might be missing from the modern picture is a catalysing need for what Taylor calls “epiphany”, a vaguely pressing spiritual need which takes him to the brink of hankering after a religious revival. It’s a need which is obviously pressing in Bergman (The Seventh Seal, 1957), or hangs like smoke in the atmosphere of an Andrei Tarkovsky film (The Sacrifice, 1985).

5 It also rises up, in a final explosion of awe, at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), when the hero finally dwindles to a point where he can feel at one with the infinity of the cosmos. Philosophy can lead pulp to some interesting places – or vice versa – as witness two different treatments of the swallowing of the self. One of the most famous passages in Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s description of the quality of “viscosity” or “sliminess”, an enquiry into the meaning of the term and then into the nature of the thing itself, and how it’s ‘being’ might attach to ours (“The slimy is docile. Only at the very moment when I believe that I possess it, behold by a curious reversal, it possesses me…its softness is leech-like… To touch the slimy is to risk being dissolved in sliminess”).

There’s no better dramatisation of this passage – seven or eight pages about how the self might be sucked away – than the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Here an alien invasion seeds the earth with mysterious pods, from which emerge, glutinously, replicas of ordinary people – but without personality or soul. Director Don Siegel – describing how the pod people can’t be destroyed like old movie monsters (“others take their place…it is more horrible than that”) – strikes a note right out of Sartre. An early mooted title for the film was Sleep No More, because it is while people are sleeping that they are taken over. One kind of self-forgetting leads to another.

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