Among the few extraordinary films that have left me spellbound in this lifetime, one stands out: ‘The Face of Another (1966)’. The story belongs to Kobo Abe, brought to life by Hiroshi Teshigahara’s direction.
Okuyama is a businessman. In some accident, his face is burned, his features disfigured beyond recognition. So grotesquely that he no longer possessed any definite countenance at all. A psychiatrist provides him with a mask—the face of another man, and so his true appearance is transformed. This mask gradually turns him into an entirely different person. This film explores the journey of transformation and the relationship between himself, his surroundings, and the world around him.
Why do people drink alcohol? To get intoxicated. What’s the point of intoxication? When intoxicated, a person becomes someone else entirely. Everything they cannot do in their normal state, but secretly long to do in their subconscious, becomes effortlessly possible when drunk. That’s why people want to get intoxicated. Humans grow weary of their own existence. They fantasize about living in another existence, and given the chance, they want to transport themselves there. To forget home, people seek shelter in other homes. What safer refuge could there be than alcohol?
When we’re at home, we wear one outfit; when we go out, another. What we wear to the office isn’t what we’d wear on vacation. The person at home and the person at the office are two different-looking individuals. The same person appears differently in different offices. When traveling, they become yet another person. Where they’re going determines what their external appearance will be. People don masks based on necessity and circumstance. And the mask itself determines their behavior and outward presentation.
When a daughter leaves her parents’ home for her in-laws’ after marriage, she gradually becomes her in-laws’ daughter-in-law, her husband’s wife, her children’s mother. Her behavior and role from before marriage change according to circumstances and environment. That’s why we see that the girlfriend before marriage and the wife after marriage, though the same woman, are not identical due to changed circumstances—they are different. Again, when that same woman becomes a mother, her appearance changes once more. My girlfriend, my wife, my parents’ daughter-in-law, my child’s mother—four completely different entities in the same body, four different faces. Necessity makes people wear masks. Or to put it more clearly, people become new persons by wearing new masks.
There’s more intrigue to this. Suppose you’re chatting with an unfamiliar person of the opposite gender on Facebook. Their profile doesn’t show their own picture. Wanting to see what the person you’re talking to looks like, you ask for their photo. Whatever picture they send will determine how you speak to them. If you like their appearance, you’ll speak one way; if you don’t, you won’t speak that way. Even seeing their photo will give you some notion of what their personality might be like. Here, two things can happen. The picture they sent you might not be their own photo. So after seeing the picture, the path your thoughts and behavior took would be the wrong path. Or it could be that they did send you their own picture, but based on the photo, all your assumptions about them are incorrect—they’re not actually like that. So what does this amount to? A person’s face or appearance doesn’t truly help us know them. Yet initially, we rely precisely on their appearance to recognize people. Which face they’re showing us, or which face we think we’re seeing, determines what kind of person we think they are, regardless of what kind of person they actually might be!
Well, have we ever wondered why some people who are ugly to look at, or whose faces have become ugly due to accidents, behave badly toward others? There could be several reasons for this. Perhaps they don’t like seeing themselves as they appear. Through mistreatment, they console themselves by thinking: I may have destroyed someone more beautiful than me, but I’m still standing tall above ground! It could also be that they can’t bear to see those around them who look better than they do. Natural enough! The boy in class who could never come first considers it his God-given right to envy, even hate, the first-place student. Or perhaps they’re sitting there with the assumption that those who aren’t ugly to look at want to keep themselves distant from them. Humans cannot tolerate neglect, and when they assume someone is neglecting them, they become truly angry and inhuman, even though this sense of being neglected is entirely a product of their imagination………People behave irrationally to hide something or other.
Suppose you came into this world without any specific face. What would happen then? No one would recognize you as any particular person. If they don’t recognize you, what then? In that case, you are not any specific someone. You could think of yourself as anyone, present yourself to others in any form whatsoever. You wouldn’t be shackled by the chains of identity. You wouldn’t have to live with any fixed existence or appearance. You wouldn’t have to carry the burden of people’s judgments. When you appear bad to someone in one form, you could easily change that form and move to another. No frame could bind you. You would be a free person. Every free person is alone. Alone, but free—that much consolation, at least.
Let’s look at one person. As a human being, absolutely wonderful. But they are ugly to look at—either by birth or by accident. Now the question is: how do others receive them? The inner beauty is what matters, external appearance means nothing—these textbook platitudes do help us think and speak beautifully, but how much do they actually help that person live like any other ten people? More depressingly, given various cruel realities, they cannot accept those who do accept their ugly appearance. Then how possible is it for them to live as a wonderful person? For how long is it possible? Eventually we see them living with the neglect of people around them, with infinite self-hatred. Their self-respect begins to diminish, their relationships with others deteriorate, gradually they withdraw themselves from everyone. Then they either live with loneliness, or they destroy themselves.
How do we behave with our family members? If we behaved as we actually are, we’d often create additional troubles. Then we’d have to spend extra time resolving those troubles, putting pressure on our minds and brains as well. Why bother? Better to live in a way that avoids trouble. With whomever, however they prefer us to behave, that’s how we’ll behave. Whichever face of mine someone likes, I’ll show them that face. The way I talk with my wife, laugh, behave—none of it is the real ‘me’ or the ‘me’ of that moment. She cannot accept me as I am, and it’s wrong to grieve over this, because I too cannot accept her as she is. This living and letting live behind masks—this is what we call life.
Everyone wears masks. Some masks come off, others don’t. Actually, what is human identity? How is it established? External appearance, personality, and identity—what is the relationship among these three? Does our appearance determine our personality? Or does our personality determine our appearance? ‘The Face of Another’ is a dispassionate and sincere exploration of this eternal conflict.