Okay. Before hitting on today’s big topic, I know it’s been so long since an update from here, but life’s been busy for a while, and then the idea of how hard it actually is to be remotely creative, or be inspirational, when you’re supposed to be physically and mentally occupied with daily trivialities (and that’s why I run away from chores, not really though), and so it takes more than 2 weeks to finally settle down and have the energy of doing so.
As my self-imposed book-buying ban ended for me, I went to the bookstore one day and bought Schopenhauer’s Suffering, Suicide and Immortality, a couple of essays on his view on life, and there’s one part of it that caught my eyes as I was waiting upon the big realisation of a new massive idea that would somehow pin me against my keyboard to feel the keys clatter under my fingers — the productive means of outputting. The quote is as follows:
The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it.
Schopenhauer’s jab at social function as in people having to constantly disguise some parts of themselves in order to be included as a recognised member of the society as above is surely insightful, albeit the reason I was quoting this very bit was that it reminded me of a topic that I wanted to talk about for some time, that being the idea of persona.
The title of this post may be familiar to some of you if you’ve ever come across the famous Ingmar Bergman film, Persona. The way it explores two women in the same environment, and they become each other as if masked by the other’s identity or that there is no separation between the idea of self and the Other. The horrifying tale of it is that we couldn’t bear to see ourselves as the Other, we can only see ourselves as who we are under the vague idea of our own individuality. But the idea is that individuality is basically nothing if it isn’t something to be shown to other people — you’d need to talk to people and communicate with them via different mediums, like words, texts, music, etc. In that sense, the idea of how you feel and how other people feel is technically not that different. We are after all, constantly under the exposure to other people’s views and ideas, and what society expects us to be and our values are highly influenced by the social expectations we have on our identities. In the film, the two women eventually become the look-alike of each other, the two distinct contrasts of the silent actress and the friendly nurse, the more sophisticated and complex versus the more simple-minded and outgoing. How the idea of persona intertwines with the concept of our true identities and how the facade of the difference between ourselves and other people is examined in the film, yet it blurrily bridges the gap between person and persona. The truth is, we are often defined by our representation towards the world other than whatever we whole-heartedly believe in without the disturbance of the Others — for example, you’d say that achievement isn’t the best thing we should attach ourselves to, but then your lack of any would result in other people seeing you as someone who’s finding excuses to not work your ass off and attain something, or at least try to do so. Our world is conceived not by ourselves, but by other people, in this way, the significance of others is much more than ourselves.
In the film, Alma, the nurse, figured out that during her stay in a remote Swedish hut where she took care of the actress, Elisabet, Elisabet mentioned Alma in her letters exchanged with other people, and she thought of her as someone who’s too naive and simple in a way, though she’s fond of her. Alma, then, was agitated by this observation that cuts through who she was, that she no longer knew whether her way of living, or her values and beliefs were supposedly justified at all. She started throwing tantrums at the silent actress, who was threatened to be scalded by hot water, and till then, finally spoke to beg Alma for not doing so.
The film shows how fragile our sense of self really is when interpreted openly by other people before us. Another film produced in the same year, The Face of Another, examines how people put on masks and eventually let the mask become the self, or lose who we truly are under the disguise of a lovely persona that other people attach their liking to. The story starts with a man who lost his face in a fire accident in a factory. Then, he was tempted by a doctor to put on a mask using someone else’s face as a template. After wearing the mask, the man started to change his personality, from the clothes he wore to how he expressed himself in conversations. The man then tried to woo his wife into sleeping with him, assuming that his wife wouldn’t recognise him and would find some sex appeal from his new face. Yet, his wife recognised him and the man found out that his plan to wear a mask and win his wife back had failed. The film ended with the doctor acknowledging the drastic change and trying to warn the man of it. The man at last killed the doctor as his sense of self was completely disrupted under the guise of another face, alongside a horrible scene shown on the screen — a crowd full of faceless people like him.
The Face of Another goes further to obstruct the idea of self. It also goes towards the direction of how much our exterior look matters to who we are, and that means external representation and outward self-expression of ourselves in a way, matter more than whatever’s in the inner beauty of who we are, because those are qualities that are constructed by our looks, instead of something innate. Even though the film comes from an oriental perspective which values collectivism in values, judgements, and so on, it doesn’t erase the truth in the film, however pessimistic it is. The way how we look and who we are mutually affect each other, and there would be none if it weren’t for the other. I guess that’s why concealing blemishes on faces is important in a sense, that’s not just a mask but also to simply integrate the image of the more perfect look with our identity. In the film, the wife talked about how make-up was so necessary for women, which was not to let men see their true faces. This is a phenomenon that can be seen as a construct by the patriarchal society that women have to wear make-up, but the sadder truth is that women are mostly defined by their looks, and therefore their sense of self is completely reliant upon how flawless and beautiful their faces are.
These two films put into work how much the idea of a mask as a part of the self will eventually become who we are, and the lack of boundary between the “us” and “them”, that there’s not much difference between the subject and the objects under a collective consciousness that is held true, i.e. the same social values, the same political influences, the same collective consciousness that urges us to be liberal, encompassing and open-minded. Upon the cinematic discourse of self, another feature of the same year, Seconds, in a way also examines the individual life under a different face. It has a similar premise to The Face of Another in terms of changing someone’s face, yet, Seconds focuses more on the individual under the present ideology. Being an American film, its narrative centres on a man finding his true self by giving himself a new identity, yet was betrayed by the very company that gave him his new life, as he found out that he was under surveillance and without any sense of true free will in doing what he wanted to in his life.
Compared to the former two films, Seconds has an approach that resonates with Americans at that period, which it leans towards the perspective of self coming from the lack of social justice and attacking the totalitarianism of how much our lives are not in our control, and that whatever we want is conjured up by others’ expectations and social expectations. It also has a more holistic way of viewing the self in a fatalist and deterministic light, while the former two focus on the characters’ own struggles in facing their disrupted sense of self and how their personalities changed upon interacting with others or getting a new face. Seconds is more optimistic in determining that the self is less likely to be changeable even with a new identity, its focus is entirely centred on the ideological mirage of true freedom and a compromise to the society with the lack of individuality in us.
All in all, the three films share the similarity that explains how our self and identity actually result from others’ gaze, there would be no self if there weren’t any other selves. To coin the term self-complexity, which the self is different upon exposure to different social settings and the requirements of different people, it is often hard to steer clear of other people and their influences, alongside the fact that presumably, our sense of self, in an extremely individualistic view, could be non-existent. It is hard to “stay true to ourselves” in this sense, who we are is not up to ourselves, but to the people around us who evaluate us under every other social setting. That being said, perhaps the best way to decide our future goals or to portray ourselves is to simply be a chameleon and change as you will, for that is the nature of self.