A characteristic emotion on seeing a favourite
novel turned into a film is puzzlement. We
may not hate the actor playing a particular
role, we might even find them rather beautiful,
it’s just that they tend not to be as we
imagined they should be. We never thought
that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Ishiguro’s
Stevens or Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood
or Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby would look
like quite… like that!
When we originally read the novel, we didn’t
necessarily even imagine what they would look
like. Their identity was free of the tyrannical
requirement for a face. We were liberated
to ‘see’ them in their unbounded entirety,
because we did not have to visualise them
concretely. Their appearances were fluid and,
where necessary, hazy, so as better to allow
their multiplicity to take form. By not having
to look a certain way, they could be far more
than just one thing.
The discomfort we feel at the cinema reflects,
on a small scale, the pain we are likely to
experience with far greater force closer to
home: in the bathroom mirror, in relation
to ourselves. Here too we are prone to looking
at the face in front of us and thinking – even
if we do not hate how we look, though we probably
do – that our features are in multiple ways
extremely unfaithful to how it feels to be
us. As with a character in a novel, we know
ourselves in the comforting darkness of the
inner mind where we don’t place strict boundaries
or blunt conclusions on who we might be. We
give ourselves latitude. We know we have a
thousand moods, that we are a bewildering
mixture of the kind and the selfish, the immoral
and the good, the confused and the clear-eyed.
We know that we harbour infinite possibilities;
that we are at once artists, ploughmen, accountants,
babies, presidents, lunatics, men, boys, girls,
women, dolphins, okapis, jellyfish and ballerinas.
Pretty much any life form that has ever bubbled
up and breathed on the earth has some echo
inside us. How perplexing, therefore, to have
to look in the mirror and be obtusely presented
with just one particular person, with one
predominant expression, one rather serious
nose, one set of sensible ears and one pair
of cautious lips.
This perplexing feeling first descends in
adolescence. If we are frequently to be found
dazed on the sofa at that age, or snappy towards
our parents or melancholic in a shapeless
black tunic, it is hardly a surprise given
that we have recently – and probably for
the first time – become properly aware of
how our bodies must look to others – and
what a cage we are condemned to inhabit, having
once blithely assumed that we might be as
free of definition as a cloud or an ellipsis.
Our face in the mirror may come as no less
of a surprise for us than would, for a reader,
the arrival of a random Hollywood star in
the space of a fictional persona. Someone
is playing us – and we’re really not sure
we like who has been cast.
We're sometimes given advice on how to cope at this point. We must
learn to love what has happened to us and
who, equipped with this new body, we have
turned out to be. We should consider ourselves
with enthusiasm and gratitude – and to interpret
our bodies as a gift of nature. We are, whatever
we feel, beautiful. We should give ourselves
a hug.
The advice is well-meaning and in its place
apt. But there might be another, starker philosophy
to try out too.
We might look at the face in the mirror and pull an incensed mutinous
smile as if to say: that really is not me
and never will be. Rather than attempting
to overcome our initial discomfiture, we might
hold on to it and make a cult of it, founding
a major part of our identity on a gutsy and
insolent refusal to take on board the so-called
‘gift of nature’ we can’t stand. Following
Kingsley Amis in his truculent description
of his body as an ‘idiot’ to whom he was
chained, we might consider our appearance
as a banal and ridiculous actor to whom a
malevolent casting agent had mysterious decided
to shackle us – and to whom we owe no particular
favours or loyalty. We might think of our
body as a taxi the universe has rudely shoved
us into, not a vehicle we have carefully had
the opportunity to choose – and to deserve.
Out of such insubordination can come a liberating
lightness. No longer do we have to worry whether
or not we are our own faces; we’ll know
for sure we absolutely aren’t. We’ll hint
to the world that there are armies of people,
beings funnier and sadder, cleverer and simpler,
more masculine and more feminine, struggling
to get out. At the same time, we’ll be able
to bring our knowledge of the radical disconnection
between outer form and inner character to
bear on our views of others. We’ll cease
taking their appearance as any sort of truth.
We’ll know that they are likely to feel
as let down by their bodies as we do. We’ll
come to ‘see’ beauty where no one else
has learnt to spot it, because we’ll be
looking with new, and more penetrating sorts
of eyes. And most importantly, we’ll feel
compassion, for ourselves and others, for
the blatant injustice of the facial lottery
that we have all been compelled to play.
