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.