The Eyes of Hell: Depth and Despair in The Mask
Art & Trash, episode 32
The Eyes of Hell: Depth and Despair in The Mask
Stephen Broomer, May 3, 2024
In the stereoscopic 3-D movie, the imagined things on the screen might escape the canvas and become real, to terrorize and haunt and touch us; it’s a grand exaggeration of the early dreams of cinema, that the phantasms might gain their own agency, like souls stolen through an anthropologist’s camera, or that, conversely, the projections could be stepped into, an immersive simulation of the halls of reality. Julian Roffman's The Mask is such a film: it suggests folie à deux, the collective unconscious, the transmission of a nightmare from one person to another. It rationalizes its 3-D gimmickry with corresponding themes, vividly realizing the slumber of the psychoanalyst’s couch, synthesizing visions as mysterious as those conceived under hypnosis.
With this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses The Mask in the context of 3-D, unpacks the manifestation of its themes in an analysis of the film's three hallucinatory sequences, and considers its themes as a collision of modern and ancient belief.
SCRIPT:
The 3-D or stereoscopic filmmaking craze of the 1950s had been adopted, for the most part, by science-fiction and fantasy filmmakers to exaggerate their spectacular qualities. It was a means for fantastical cinema to compete with the growing scale of the historical epic. In stereo, the imagined things on the screen might escape the canvas and become real, to terrorize and haunt and touch us; it’s a grand exaggeration of the early dreams of cinema, that the phantasms might gain their own agency, like souls stolen through an anthropologist’s camera, or that, conversely, the projections could be stepped into, an immersive simulation of the halls of reality. The 3-D image could lend the illusions of cinema an uncanny, impossible presence, exciting and thrilling the spectator. It felt dangerous, a game played as much on the mind as on the eyes. The stereo illusion is also a translation of screen space, from the flat grain of the traditional image, to a selectively deep image, one that bends grain through optics, allowing monsters and fists and yo-yos to reach out towards us, constrained by the boundaries of the frame. The premise of the 3-D movie often rationalized the gimmick: for example, in I, the Jury, the realism of Mickey Spillane’s New York could spill out of the page and into the tangible sleaze of an expanded screen space; and in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the revelations of a missing link become the audience’s tangible revelations, the scientist’s examining table as a canvas for spectacle. By the time that Canadian filmmaker Julian Roffman made The Mask in 1961, 3-D was fading—such is the way of the fad—even as the technology was maturing, becoming more accessible and refined. Like its precursors, The Mask rationalized its 3-D sequences with corresponding themes, vividly realizing the slumber of the psychoanalyst’s couch, synthesizing visions as mysterious as those conceived under hypnosis.
The Mask suggests folie à deux, the collective unconscious, the transmission of a nightmare from one person to another. A disturbed scholar dreams that he has attacked and murdered a woman, under the influence of an Aztec mask; he later flees his psychiatrist, Dr. Barnes, when the doctor fails to take his claims seriously. The scholar subsequently mails the mask to Barnes and then commits suicide. His delusion is transmitted to Dr. Barnes, who covets the mask and is overcome with violent fantasies, compulsions and suspicions. This circuit is destructive for Barnes and those around him, and the film suggests in its final sequence that this circuit will be perpetuated, by the lure of ‘exhibition’ itself: the mask is last seen in a museum display, the focus of a lingering visitor who may share the compulsion to wear it, to step into another culture, another skin. The Mask is a prescient film about cultural appropriation, a critique of the standards spread through the Commonwealth by the example of the British Museum, whose literal grave robbing in Egypt overshadows, but just barely, their pillaging of artifacts from other civilizations who had tragic dates with white devils in the great colonial expansions of the age of empire. One evolutionary critique becomes another, as the film explores a new frontier, that interior and still uncharted territory primed for colonization: the undercurrents of the mind as understood through psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis had been articulated into popular culture through the image of its founder, the late Sigmund Freud, chomping on his cigar (that’s just a cigar), advisor to straightjacketed maniacs and couch-bound intellectuals. The field of psychoanalysis was also being furthered in pop culture through the continuing discourse of the post-Freudians, who by the end of the 1950s were advancing new interpretations of mind-body health, memory and trauma, the underlying causes of neurosis, the nature of reflections, the systems of symbols. The notion that a fine line separates analyst and analysand, prisoner and jailor, can be traced to the widespread colloquialism of inmates running an asylum, a phrase that denotes the interchangeability of the tortured and the torturers. The Mask is about flaws of the soul that level doctor and patient, and that leave the godless logic of modernism groping in the dark.
It is in this spirit that The Mask begins with an appeal-to-authority, offered in the guise of Jim Moran, an eccentric career publicist and prankster who presents himself here as an antiquities expert with special knowledge of masks. Moran’s presence reinforces the carnival barker nature of the gimmick film: he was well-known for the stunts he would stage on behalf of clients, which often made literal illustrations out of hackneyed clichés: changing a horse midstream in a Nevada river, walking a bull through a New York china shop, and spending ten days searching for a needle in a haystack. His appearance gives The Mask a strange duality, as a film that presents itself with a warning to take seriously the mysteries and omens of ancient cultures, but which also winks at us, offering this lesson by way of a man whose entire public persona was focused on the ‘show’ of show-business. Even concealed, that persona rests just under the surface. Moran’s prelude is a utilitarian, professional foregrounding to the story, a timid link to the more outrageous real-world intrusions of gimmick filmmaker William Castle. Castle’s sense of showmanship had occasionally relied on such fallacies, to cast doubt on the viewer’s suspended disbelief, authenticating his grim scenarios with nurses and insurance salesmen on hand, a legitimating counterpoint to the cheap thrills of the phantasmal illusion, the seat-buzzer, the coward’s corner.
The bulk of The Mask is focused on Dr. Barnes and the havoc that the mask wrecks on his relationship to reality; it balances his unravelling with an investigation undertaken by the police. In this game of jailers, neither the psychiatrist nor the police are quite aware of one another; neither can lower their modern biases enough to see what is happening, or to give credence to the dead patient’s mystical portents. The most superficial allegory of The Mask is straightforward: this is a film about addiction as a social disease, transmitted from person to person, inhabiting and eroding the individual. The film’s cinematography is a mod contrast to conventional composition style: the camera often placed in uneasy proximity to the subject, a technique that serves two purposes: it uses the theatre of the actor’s face and body to relate the terror of their circumstances, akin to the probing eyes of the analyst on a subject under hypnosis, personal agency in arrest, the body in claustrophobic closeup deprived of agency by the weight of the examining eye, or for that matter, by the symptoms of addiction and withdrawal; it also reminds the viewer of the presence of the body itself, to a degree that medium- and long-shots tend to avoid. These compositions exploit the close-up, and in doing so, they avoid translating the actor into a votive totem, placing the viewer in direct relation to the subject’s body. Such reminders of humanity, of embodied performance, perform a deep relief to the film’s hallucinatory 3-D sequences that take us beyond that threshold, into the figure’s interior, what could be the feedback of an agitated mind, or of the soul, or some distant ancestral memory.
In this realm, Barnes encounters his double, a puppet-like figure with a waxy countenance, as if covered in a film of thin plastic that makes him vaguely inhuman and totemic, like a doll, or like Frankenstein’s monster. Barnes’s transition into this surrogate is marked when the men come face-to-face, or rather, mask-to-mask, and the polarities of the image invert, a blast of photonegative like a bolt of electricity to animate the doll. The surrogate navigates the liminal space of the dream stumbling, hands extended as if learning to see and touch for the first time. The space is filled with larval sacks, cobwebs and branches, like an illustration from the pages of Vault of Horror. A reaction shot on the face of the surrogate keeps perspective anchored with him: this puppet is our host and guide. He encounters a woman with a similarly waxy, mask-like face—she is a woman the audience has seen in Barnes’s waking life, his secretary, Miss Goodrich. When they first see each other, the image alternates between them: he and she, him and her, yin and yang, two spheres of experience exchanged in a current. This spark of connection is interrupted by a robed cultist who drags her away to the recesses of the cavern. As the surrogate pursues the fleeing figure he is stopped by yet another robed, masked figure, who strikes out from the negative space at frame right. It is a jump-scare to take advantage of the 3-D effect, but it is also another signal that this puppet is not in control: whether this world is of Barnes’s making or, indeed, some ancient drama that is playing out in his subconscious, his surrogate is not in control. Barnes, a man who wields intellectual authority over others, who refers to others as fools and prides himself for his esteemed medical training, is also this puppet, stymied by the brutish antagonists that live either in his head or simply in the mask. The cultists ‘pop’ into place with simple trick photography, like illusions from the first hours of cinema, as they attend to the maiden on an altar, under the eyes of the mask, which looms large above it. Their hands tear at the maiden’s flesh and emit flames to torment the surrogate: much as the surrogate is powerless, blindly grasping with his hands to lead his path through this strange atmosphere, the hands of the cultists are all-powerful, turning the living to the dead. In this realm, death is not the end: in Barnes’s words, the mask reveals something. The ritual is sacrificial but it is also transformative: her flesh stripped away, the sacrificial maiden, now skeletal, is animated again, by snakes that emerge from behind her eyes. Indeed, the mask reveals something: a realm of necromancy and magick.
In Barnes’s second hallucination, the surrogate is beckoned through a cavern of flames by a deformed figure who resembles his dead patient. The surrogate holds his hands up in front of his face, flailing wildly, as if learning to use his arms for the first time. Spiders appear superimposed on the image, and he cowers from them, another symbolic encounter with the things that stir terror in the subconscious, as if propelled by a long-entrenched genetic knowledge of danger. The surrogate comes across a psychiatric couch, and Barnes himself manifests on it, like the maiden laid upon the altar. When Barnes fades away, all that remains are his hands, which grow bigger, or move nearer, to the surrogate, emitting flames. The deformed figure advances on the surrogate, who finds himself on a stone altar, attended by cultists: a flaming eyeball descends from the ceiling, and a figure stands before him, wearing the mask, commanding the fire: this figure is a personification of the mask itself, spindly and skeletal. As the surrogate flees, the mask pursues him, now emitting fire from its hands and its mouth, burning his flesh. When at last the figure corners and embraces him, still breathing fire, the surrogate, now visibly, even laughably, a doll, plummets into a wet fog. Emerging from it, the surrogate encounters a large sculpture of a hand, its fingertips sconces, the maiden standing at it, beckoning him for an embrace. A snake emerges from the recesses of the sculpture, to attack him: it leaps past him, towards us, another jump-scare effected in stereo, but also, a reminder of devilish temptation from the story of Adam and Eve. The surrogate now sees plainly that the maiden is wearing a mask, and when he removes it, he reveals the face of Miss Goodrich. Her mask, which he now holds, turns into a skull, and he hurls it at the camera.
Barnes’s anxieties and needs are made explicit by the allegory of these puppets: the role played by Miss Goodrich in his fantasies, as damsel in distress, as unattainable object of desire, as goddess, as Eve, as puppet, gives purpose to his surrogate, but the quest to save her is a quest rooted in animal instinct, in a desire to cast away the professional, mannered life of the therapist, the future he has planned with his fiancée. To return to the film’s overarching themes of addiction, the mask may be a channel to another world, but it is also a reminder that Barnes’s own face is a mask, that the public face of the professional is a courteous mask worn for a society that negates desires and impulses that it deems to be aberrant. What makes the mask an attractive conduit for Barnes is its apparent ability to reach some deeper truth about his nature; like alcohol or heroin or cocaine, it cuts through the dull make-believe of the everyday and shows him a surrogate of simple, instinctual being. That it also tortures this surrogate is, again, a characteristic of addiction: craven need.
In the third and final hallucinatory sequence, the mask manifests as a reflection in water; the water is broken by the paddle of the disfigured patient: he has become a Charon-like figure boating down the River Styx. From the water, hands emerge, reaching for his passenger, the surrogate. They pass Barnes, reclining in sleep, and phantasmal images of skulls float past them. The surrogate sees that the water is full of skeletons, the drowned remains of those who travelled before him. Finally, they approach the mask, looming large above them, bellowing flames as well as images, fragments of glass, torrents of glass and stone, and finally, a boulder. Through the foggy atmosphere, the camera trucks in on a ceremonial altar. The maiden manifests on the altar, calling out to Barnes: her legs turn, momentarily, to bare bones, a strange parallel between the 3-D effect and the X-ray image, and a suggestion of the necrophiliac implications of desire. The image of woman, like any image of the object of desire, is dead. As the surrogate approaches and looks down at her face, he sees the mask, illuminated from its eyes: the light dies and is replaced with human eyes, and he kisses her. The personified mask appears again, transforming her by magic from woman, to mask, to skull. As flames emanate from the masked figure’s hands, the skeleton and surrogate embrace. The surrogate collapses into the skeleton, into the altar, and the altar sinks into the ground, and him with it, a blaze rising up from the hole, symbolic of Barnes’s final, mad immolation.
These sequences are credited to Slavko Vorkapich, the experimental filmmaker and montage theorist best remembered for his vanguard contributions to Golden Age Hollywood, sequences that often used mythic and symbolic imagery to make explicit the themes of the films for which they were made. Vorkapich’s montage sequences were remarkable above all for their dynamic visualization of inbuilt dramatic themes that were otherwise concealed beneath a sheen of conventional dramatic staging. Vorkapich’s plans for the 3-D sequences in The Mask were not used, as they were deemed too ambitious; he was replaced first by Len Lye, the visionary New Zealand sculptor and experimental filmmaker, who was in turn replaced by a collaborative and transient team of technicians. The authorship of the final sequences is accordingly unknowable. But however impossible Vorkapich’s plans for these sequences may have been, one might still identify him as a conceptual designer of these scenes, and his influence is evident on the final sequences, where images are printed together in elaborate ways to create the illusion of mental-images formed out of thin air. They are, if nothing else, offered in his style, as moments demarcated from the rest of the film, stepping out of the flow of relatively naturalistic, conventional filmmaking, and into a realm of allegory and dynamic movement.
The doctor becomes the patient, the jailor becomes the prisoner, the salesman becomes the collector, the modern scholar becomes primitive impulse itself. The three-dimensional image is a fashionable affectation, but it is also an invitation into that storm that rages beneath the manicured surface of contemporary experience. The Mask is about a collision of modern and ancient belief. It is left undecided where these hallucinations originate: an authentic otherworldly realm, the feedback of a hypnotized mind, or something deeper, an ancient memory rising up in a grand return-of-the-repressed.