Halloween. The time for
costumes and disguises. One of the few days in the year where the are
accepted and worn deliberately and openly also in public more then
otherwise. Time for me to write a post on masks, a kind of disguise
of the face.
I'm mostly unaware of
Asian cultures and also movies. It's not a particular interest of
mine to watch Asian movies or dealing with Asian cultures, at least
not in detail. A friend of mine that I only know via E-Mail contact
so far, wrote to me a while ago that the expressionless masks of the
Japanese No Theatre are fascinating to him.
Two days ago I watched the
two part movie “It” (from 1990). No wonder that people are afraid
of clowns after such a movie. Clowns made up or with mask scare a lot
of people. Personally I don't quite understand that. There are scary
masks and especially clown masks. Add to that the aggressive behaviour
of mask wearing people from last year, I can understand the fear of
people like them, but not the general fear of clowns as such. I don't
mean this as a criticism. I would very much like to understand what
scares people so much about clowns. Maybe there are readers that are
afraid of clowns and could explain it. Feel free to leave me a
comment!
Masks of criminals are
meant to conceal the true identity for them to be unknown and
therefore free from punishment. Superheroes on the other hand use
masks to hide their own identity for criminals that may otherwise
hurt or even kill them more easily without their costume and
corresponding weapons. But the lives of the people the superheroes
love is also protected by the mask of the hero. Because it could be a
leverage for the criminal to kidnap important people and threaten
their life to force the superhero to do certain things, as can be
seen for example in “The Dark Knight” after the Joker learns that
Batman/Bruce Wayne cares a lot about Rachel Dawes and the Joker gives
the order to kidnap her.
A mask of a particular
kind is worn by the anti-hero Rorschach from “Watchmen” by Alan
Moore and Dave Gibbons. Over the course of the story Rorschach is
caught and described by the psychiatrist who questions him as
“fascinatingly ugly”. The name Rorschach originates from the
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach who invented a test
named “Rorschach test”, which are ink blots images that the
person has to interpret and say what they see in them. The blots are
a symmetrical and mostly black. There are also some with more
colours. Rorschach from Watchmen worked with clothes as a young man
and during that time he gets a special cloth that is white with
black, moving and continuously changing blots. Originally he makes a
dress from that for a customer, but she eventually disregards it as
ugly. Later he uses that cloth to make himself a mask from it with
symmetrical black blots that keep changing. Rorschach calls this mask
his “face”. After he is ambushed and caught by the police, the
mask gets ripped off and he screams, “No! My face! Give it back!”
Regardless of Rorschach's personal attitude towards his mask, the
description of “my face” for is (actual) mask seems fitting
though. A face is usually moving and changes in relation to emotions.
The psychiatrist notes however that Rorschach's face is
expressionless and finds it difficult to tell what really goes on in
him emotionally. Regardless of Rorschach's own attitude towards his
(actual) mask, it therefore seems actually fitting when he calls it his "face". His (actual) mask is moving
and his (actual) face is expressionless like other masks usually are.
It's not necessarily noticed by the reader or viewer of the movie,
but the blots on Rorschach's “face” are not only moving, but are
in fact linked to his emotions and show identical blot
patterns at different times when the same or similar emotions can be
assumed!
I also want to
mention the post “The
Hidden Genius of RORSCHACH's Mask! (Watchmen)“ by Scott Niswander from NerdSync.
Among other things he points out in his post that the moment and timing
of unmasking is often a bit strange choice. Often the masked person
is unconscious or at least bound or otherwise hindered to resist and
their identity unknown. The unmasking therefore is a sort of
humiliation, because the identity is then revealed at least for the
person taking off the mask of the one wearing it. The interesting
thing about this is that with this there is a possibility to
completely eliminate the masked person, meaning to kill them. But the
unmasking and with this revelation of the secret of who is behind the
mask, seems a stronger urge for the person that is with the masked
person at that moment. Scott Niswander mentions a scene from “Spider-Man
2” and “The Dark Knight” for this.
In regards to
unmasking or taking off masks let's one more time refer to Watchmen.
Rorschach's true identity (or in his case probably better: identity
without “his face”) is revealed to the reader and other people in
the story with the aforementioned arrest. He does have “his face”
back on for the final fight though. Normally every masked person
would resist even at the threat that his masked may be taken away.
Understandably so, because the secret identity up until that moment
is at risk and also the possible security of beloved persons, as
mentioned above. Rorschach, too, resists and screams for his
face during his arrest. At the end of Watchmen however he himself
takes off his face, his mask and faces his final enemy this way.
In 2012 a series of
books came out that showed individual Watchmen characters before the
events of Watchmen. Accordingly the series is called “Before
Watchmen”. Of course there is also a story about Rorschach by
Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo. Then and now the story itself
doesn't seem to appeal to many people. Like with all stories, I
think, this is a matter of personal taste and different people have
different tastes. Regarding unmasking there is however one
interesting moment in “Before Watchmen: Rorschach”, too. Over the
course of the story he gets beat up by a group of bad people and
several of the henchmen eventually keep him in check. One of the
henchmen wants to take off Rorschach's mask, to see what the fearful
Rorschach looks like without the mask. But his boss calls him back
and is noticeably disappointed by the fairly short man (described in
Watchmen with a height of 168 cm/5' 6 '') to have him caught and
defenceless that easily, “Rorschach.
Huh. For some reason, I thought... Dude, you don't measure up to your
myth. I mean, what the hell?
I cocked up this elaborate scheme just to take you
down? What was I thinking? Big
bad Rorschach.
Well, bad
anyway Frankly, I'm disappointed in myself. That I stooped to your
level. No, no, lucky Pierre. You know what's under that mask?
Nothing that matters. In this case, the mask
makes the corpse.” After they beat him up some more and seemingly
leave him there to die, he adds, “And
the front page.“ In another moment of that story one of the bad
guys gets his hands on Rorschach's mask and for a moment he can take
on Rorschach's identity, because if nobody knows who is behind the
mask, a lot of people could be underneath it. Hurm...
