OWING IN large part to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the face has received a lot of attention in recent years as a site of ethical activity. In her book Precarious Life, Judith Butler makes extensive use of Levinas’s notion of “the face of the Other,” which serves, for Levinas, as the locus of ethics. As Levinas puts it, “The face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill.’ ”
Unlike the many ethical systems that advocate beginning with the self and then extrapolating out to include an Other (epitomized, again, by the Golden Rule), Levinas begins with the reverse presumption—that “the other’s right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other.” The face of the Other delivers this edict, which can be understood as a kind of divine imperative. “If the Other, the Other’s face . . . at once tempts me with murder and prohibits me from acting upon it, then the face operates to produce a struggle for me, and establishes this struggle at the heart of ethics.”
This struggle would have come as no surprise to Francis Bacon, who customarily referred to the distortions he performed on the faces of his subjects as “injuries,” and preferred to work from photographs so as to “practice the injury in private.” He preferred, too, to work from images of friends, especially friends whose faces he found beautiful. “If they were not my friends, I could not do such violence to them,” he said. One primary object of this violence, for Bacon, was the subtraction of the face from the head, so that the head could be made meat.
For those of you with five minutes to spare and a curiosity about the head-made-meat, I recommend Otto Muehl’s 1967 film Kardinal, as it is one of the most efficient, unsettling renderings of such that I’ve ever seen. The film is remarkable for its bold proposal of the human head as a canvas for Action painting, and its performance of a disconcerting, minimalist brutality, complicated by the apparent consensuality of the event. The film begins with the hands of a male figure binding a human face and head (its eyes shut) with twine and a clear plastic-like tape. After the face is bound, the male figure—whose body flickers in and out of the frame—begins performing a series of mistreatments, applications, and effacements on it.
He starts by violently slapping a gloppy red substance onto the bound cheeks, then he chugs dark liquid from a bottle and spits it all over the face and scalp. He then pours gallons of a clear syrupy substance over the crown of the head, creating a wall of fluid that flows down over the front of the face like a shroud. Then he hits and smears the scalp and face with a thick, yellowy dough which leaves a plaster of sorts, through which it looks almost impossible to breathe, before slapping more red, blue, and green slime over the doughy plaster, packing it into the orifices. He finishes off by smacking yellow, red, and blue powder all over the subject, which is, by this point, a caked, dripping, unrecognizable mass. This is the first two and a half minutes; the second two and a half depict three naked bodies crawling over and under each other as the same substances—slime, dough, powder—rain down on their orgy: another form of meat-making, to be sure, but one whose effect is far less sinister, and far more comedic—all those silly butt cracks!—than the effacement that precedes it.
“AND I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself,” says Plath’s hospital-bed-bound speaker in “Tulips,” putting words to the desire that so often makes her poetry a horror show. For the head stripped of its face—because it never had one, because it has been sliced or burned off, because it has been covered, slimed over, because it still exists, but elsewhere (in a jar, on a different part of the body, in a mirror)—is a staple both of our nightmares and of Plath’s vision. If Bacon’s paintings evoke artist-as-butcher (and Muehl’s Kardinal, artist-as-sadistic-baker), Plath shows us what it means to be artist-as-surgeon, with the face at the center of the action. As a doctor reports of the body under his hands in the poem “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” “As usual there is no face. A lump of Chinese white / With seven holes lumped in.”
No one and nothing in Plath’s poetry escapes effacement—not the moon, not the clouds, not herself, not those she loves, not children. “And my child—look at her, face down on the floor, / Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear . . . She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two,” she writes in “Lesbos.” Sometimes this effacement in Plath is placid: a speaker in a maternity ward gazes on a row of infants thinking, “I think they are made of water; they have no expression. / Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.” But lo, when a child wakes, “her little head is carved in wood, / A red hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open. ( . . . ) It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.” It is not good, indeed. Everything is not nice here at all.
As with Bacon, who sometimes painted faces on pedestals or in mirrors, standing eerily apart from the human figures to which they once presumably belonged, sometimes in Plath missing features of the face show up elsewhere (“His fingers had the noses of weasels”), or appear punitively removed and isolated: “[The mouth] had been insatiable / And in punishment, was hung out like brown fruit / To wrinkle and dry.” And sometimes, most famously, in poems like “Lady Lazarus,” Plath dramatizes her own effacement and invites the reader in to watch. After scandalously describing her face in “Lady Lazarus” as “featureless, fine / Jew linen,” she taunts: “Peel off the napkin / O my enemy. / Do I terrify?— // The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?” She terrifies, indeed—and perhaps nowhere more so than in the poem’s final, menacing, post-incineration lines: “Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware. // Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” There is hair, there is mouth, but still no face. Like Bacon’s monstrous creatures crouching wickedly in his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), this speaker has pushed beyond the human. “She is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will,” Plath said politely of the speaker of “Lady Lazarus” in a 1962 BBC interview. “She is also just a good, plain, resourceful woman.”
THE FINAL lines of Plath’s poem “Elm” push beyond the chilling and into the slap-happy: “What is this, this face / So murderous in its strangle of branches?— // Its snaky acids kiss. / It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults / That kill, that kill, that kill.” “Elm” can be read as a sort of riddle: what is this, this face? Probably, an owl. But the force of the last stanza has little to do with the solution of a puzzle, and more to do with the biting audacity of its sibilance, and the hammering repetition of “that kill, that kill, that kill”—sounds that have all the subtlety of Norman Bates’s knife in the shower. These are the hooves; listen to their merciless churn.
At such moments, Plath’s linguistic melodrama nearly pushes her over into camp. Nearly, but not quite—like Bacon, she remains suspended between high seriousness and the ridiculous. A filmmaker such as Fassbinder immerses us in the tremendously exciting space that can open up when high seriousness and the ridiculous collapse into one another, each rendering the other unrecognizable, thereby creating a whole new tonal palette. In fact, a Fassbinder film such as In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) is able to hit tonal nuances that, I have to admit, can make both Bacon and Plath seem nearly Neanderthal in comparison.
In a Year with 13 Moons houses an abundance of surface cruelty: within the first five minutes of the film alone, we see our heroine—the tragically self-castrated, alcoholic, perpetually scorned, and ineluctably moving-toward-death Elvira (played by a beefy, chalky skinned Volker Spengler)—get beat up in a public park by a group of hustlers angered by the discovery that she has no penis, then get verbally and physically abused at home by her lover, Christoph, who calls her a walrus, a person with no soul, and a superfluous lump of meat, all the while forcing her—by yanking her hair—to behold herself in the mirror, so that she can see what a hideous, bloated cow she has become, and why he’s leaving her.
The cruelty is unrelenting, but it is feathered by a number of formal factors: principally, the cinematography, which showcases hallways and foyers in astonishingly crafted lighting setups, rather than the kind of point-of-view and reaction shots that would normally suggest or deliver psychological identification. (Indeed, throughout the movie, at Elvira’s most humiliated or despairing moments, her suffering face or body is lodged in a corner or cul-de-sac of the screen, her sobs only a fraction of a complex soundscape that includes the noise pollution of whatever television, music, or video game happens to be nearby.) When Christoph finally exits the apartment in the initial scene, we feel some relief, in that the terrible berating has finally come to an end. But Elvira is not relieved—like any good addict, she is alarmed, and runs after him into the street, begging him not to leave her. She ends up throwing herself onto the windshield of his car, after which he hits the gas, leaving her sprawled on the street. The movie has truly begun.
The action and language here are tough, but their affect is indeterminate, largely because Fassbinder has uncoupled this toughness from the set of signifiers that normally indicate how much—or even if—we are supposed to care. The spectrum is reset: no longer are we moving between tragedy and farce, melodrama and realism, empathy and coldness. Instead, we are set free to roam about in a landscape defined by not knowing, non sequitur, a radical uncoupling of cause and effect, and visual wormholes that lead us from one extraordinary location to the next. No sooner is Elvira dumped on the street, for instance, than she is swooped up by her prostitute friend Zora (Ingrid Caven), who drags her into a stunning gilded café, then into an even more stunning black-and-white tiled and mirrored bathroom. In the bathroom, Elvira tells Zora that in a previous life, she was trained as an animal slaughterer, a job she now misses. Zora shudders, calling the slaughter of animals “against life.” “No, it is life,” Elvira counters—and off they go to the slaughterhouse, as if to decide the case.
The slaughterhouse scene in 13 Moons is nothing short of incredible—and this precisely because it is the most credible, “realest” scene in a film that is otherwise quite phantasmagoric. Elvira and Zora stroll leisurely along the slaughterhouse floor, while Elvira, in voice-over, tells the story of her earlier marriage (to a butcher’s daughter) with whom she fathered a child, and of her current unhappy affair with the brutish Christoph. Their heels click along in the deep background, while in the foreground, dozens of cows get stunned, guillotined, hung by their feet to bleed out, stripped of their skin, and eventually strung up for market. The intensity of the bloodshed makes it almost impossible, at least upon first viewing, to take in anything Elvira’s voice-over is saying, even though she is delivering presumably crucial backstory. What can one say or think while watching an unthinkable amount of blood—real blood—steam forth from a swinging row of decapitated cows? Elvira is reciting a scripted monologue, while we are staring at the everyday machinations of a killing floor. It is as if Fassbinder were saying, nothing I could ever script or invent could possibly compare to the raw intensity of this scene, which is repeated all around the globe, every day: welcome, and behold.
Nothing as visually upsetting occurs again in 13 Moons, but it doesn’t need to. We have already been catapulted into a world in which hackneyed versions of empathy have no truck. In this world, humans behave in a schizoid and unpredictable fashion toward one another’s suffering. For instance, when Elvira’s wife, Irene, pays a visit to Elvira’s apartment and finds her passed out (which the viewer knows to be the result of a fitful session of autoerotic asphyxia), Irene is frantically concerned. As soon as Elvira revives, however, Irene’s tenderness evaporates on a dime. In a disturbing echo of the nasty Christoph, Irene begins berating Elvira severely about a magazine interview Elvira gave that Irene didn’t like.
Similarly, much later in the film, when Elvira stumbles upon a man preparing to hang himself in an abandoned building, Elvira treats him cordially enough, sharing her weird, quasi-religious picnic of baguette and wine with him and engaging him in philosophical small talk. Eventually, however, Elvira interrupts the man, and suggests that he might as well get on with the business of hanging himself, as she’s no longer interested in talking to him. A moment later, Elvira breathlessly rushes to report (to a woman working elsewhere in the building) that a man on the floor below has just hung himself. When the woman laughs it off, explaining that suicides happen all the time in the building, Elvira shrugs it off as well, and continues about her business—business that will lead, soon enough, to her own suicide, which, in turn, no one will try to prevent.
How, then, are we to feel about the suffering and eventual demise of our heroine? It’s hard to say. The insults, humiliation, and abandonments Elvira experiences seem cruel and excessive, but she is also one of those human souls seemingly immune to assistance—a suicidal, alcoholic masochist whose self-mutilation and death cannot rightly be blamed on anyone in particular, not even on the “cruelty of the world.” (The fact that the film was made in the wake of the suicide of Fassbinder’s lover, Armin Meier—a former butcher—deepens the psychological stakes of blame, guilt, and identification at play.) But in a sense, this whole line of questioning is off the point, as the systematic stylistic alienations of the film disallow projective identification with Elvira to be its engine. The film’s import lies elsewhere—in its shrewd thematic layering, in its visual and temporal fascinations, and, perhaps above all, in its sustained tone of irreverent, unpredictable, and deeply enjoyable grimness that nearly defies linguistic description.
In this context, the many close-up shots of Elvira’s face become not windows into her soul, but perches onto the inscrutable. Her face is neither wholly male nor wholly female, neither attractive nor completely repulsive, neither uncommonly expressive nor uncommonly remote. Over the course of film it becomes, in its unrelenting suffering, both an invitation to contemplate our common humanity, and a pasty, vaguely repellent block of flesh. Elvira’s face—like 13 Moons itself—strands us somewhere between caring and not caring. But regardless of our feelings about her, we do end up caring about the movie itself very much—and with good reason, as it is a film that rewards and perhaps even demands multiple viewings. As with its unforgettable slaughterhouse scene, if we can abide our discomfort long enough—and Fassbinder is more than happy to give us the time—the sight becomes riveting in unforeseeable ways.
“Who will love me through the blur of my deformity,” asks one of Plath’s speakers in “Three Women,” a harrowing poem in three voices set in a maternity ward. Throughout 13 Moons, Elvira tries to answer this question, with increasing desperation; it also haunts Alison, the narrator of Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica. For not only is Alison aging, sick, and primarily on her own, but also she is suffering the ongoing physical effects of a car accident that threatened to leave her disfigured. Her first question to a nurse, upon coming to, is “Is my face all right?” Then, as she’s wheeled into the X-ray room, she fights with the technician who is trying to remove her earrings, saying, “If you fuck up my ears, I swear I’ll sue you. I’m a model and I can’t have fucked-up ears.” To which the technician replies, “Why not? You got a fucked-up head.” Of course, it’s her fucked-up head—the head-made-meat, not the specificity of her beautiful face—that brings her to whatever redemption she eventually finds.
As for Plath, she was seemingly unable to answer the question posed in “Three Women,” either in her poems, or in her life. Nonetheless, it is a good one. It points to a place beyond cruelty.
GAITSKILL RETURNS to the face in “The Agonized Face,” a story from her 2009 collection, Don’t Cry. This story features Gaitskill at her best, insofar as it combines the take-no-prisoners ferocity of her earlier stories with her more recent interest in formlessness and space-making. Whereas Veronica performs a communion of these two modes, here they smash up in a collision made all the more fraught by the story’s focus on feminism and its discontents.
The story’s two protagonists are our narrator—a divorced mother and sharp-tongued journalist who has been sent to cover an unbearably self-serious literary conference in Toronto—and “the feminist author,” a charismatic star of the conference who incites a host of chaotic feelings, prejudices, and sympathies in the narrator. Gaitskill lays out the conflict in bold terms in the opening paragraph, in which the narrator describes the feminist author as “one of the good-looking types with expensive clothes who look younger than they are (which is irritating, even though it shouldn’t be), the kind of person who plays with her hair when she talks, who always seems to be asking you to like her. She was like that, but she had something else too, and it was that ‘something else’ quality that made what she did so peculiarly aggravating.” The rest of the story pulses around what this “something else” might be.
At times, it is the “feminist author”’s feel-good championing of the sex work of her youth, which she calls “a fight against patriarchy.” Other times, it’s her purportedly liberating contention that “women can enjoy sexual violence, too!” or her impassioned, clichéd speeches to the conference about the danger of denying other people their humanity, and therefore “impoverishing and cheating ourselves of life’s complexity and tenderness” (a literary conference mainstay). But mostly this “something else” is the “soft, reasonable” manner in which the feminist author addresses things that, to the narrator, cannot and should not be talked about in a soft or reasonable manner. As the story goes on, the symbol for these things becomes the “agonized face,” which, the narrator explains, is “a face of sex and woman’s pain,” a face of “disgrace and violence, dark orgasm, rape, with feeling so strong that it obviates the one who feels it.”
As the narrator meditates on this agonized face, she experiments with taking all sides in relation to it. At moments she sides with the feminist author, thinking, “Can you blame her for trying to put a good face on it? For talking so loudly about things that have been used to shame women for centuries? . . . Sometimes you want to be on the side of a smart-aleck middle-aged woman who thumbs her nose at the agonized face and fellates a snotty, sexy man, just for a dumb little thrill. Sometimes you wish it could be that easy.” Other moments she comes down hard, with no small measure of brutality: “To tell those stories and pretend there’s no agony—it makes you want to pinch her, like a boy in a gang, following her down the street while she tries to act like nothing’s wrong, hurrying her step while someone reaches out for another pinch. It makes you want to chase her down an alley, to stone her, to force her to show the face that she denies.”
In the end, the latter is the tack the narrator decides on, at least publicly: she publishes a piece about the feminist author so scathing that it creates an uproar among the younger women at the newspaper, who decry the article as mean-spirited and unfair. The narrator responds, “I almost agree that it was not fair. But fair or not, I was right. The agonized face and all it means is one of the few mysteries left to us on this ragged, gutted planet. It must be protected, even if someone must on occasion be ‘stoned.’ ” To agree with our narrator here is to get on board for an indefensible embrace of literal or metaphorical violence; on the other hand, the case she’s made throughout for the sanctity of the agonized face is affecting, the way any well-worded appeals to the primal, the animal, the sexual, and the ineffable tend to be.
But, as the narrator elsewhere explains, the agonized face “is not only about rape and pain.” To prove her point, she embarks on a long description of sex with her ex-husband, which she describes as follows: “Afterward, we smiled, rolling in each other’s arms, laughing at ourselves, laughing at the agonized face. But we couldn’t laugh at the emptiness. It was like entering an electrical current, passing first into a landscape of animate light, and then into pitching darkness, warm with invisible light, the whispering voices, the dissolving, re-forming faces of ghosts and the excited unborn. Everything horrible to us, everything nice to us.”
Who would want, the story suggests, a world in which everything nice were partitioned off from everything horrible, thereby draining the world of its wild, nearly unnavigable paradoxes? And who would want a feminism—or any form of social justice—that lessened our apprehension of such difficult coexistences, or diminished our access to this electrical current? The genius of “The Agonized Face” is that while its narrator eventually decides—in print, at any rate—that such contradictions are unsustainable, the story at large sustains them.