it isn't enough
on beauty & loathing in & out of the picture house, pt. 2
I do not have a very high opinion of myself. If the general bent of my behavior isn’t enough for people to catch on, there’s little else I can do to perpetuate the illusion of a healthier self-image than I actually have. This both is and isn’t in my control: people instilled it in me years ago for the simple intent of inflicting misery upon and othering me, and I, in turn, willingly carried the torch of it along since then. Abuse of the self is so much like abuse which arrives externally, in that it’s cyclical, feeding itself through nauseous repetitions of rage & pity. Do I know how to cope with it? Well,
After a long enough time getting into needless fights with the consciousness carrying you around, you start to loathe the cycle itself, because you’ve already broken it down into its component parts. You know how the machine operates, but you still let it run every day because you quietly don’t want to burn it down in the first place. You’ve created a nightmare for yourself, and leaving doesn’t sound like any more fun than continuing your one-person sparring match. I’ve been ride-or-die for A Different Man because it is a work of art that ultimately cuts down to the bone at this language of self-hatred I’ve spent so much time trying to interrogate from myself, as well as the greater history of The Cinematic Gaze at large, ultimately knowing that the hell of “being yourself” turns you into your own judge, jury & executioner. The film released wide the same day as The Substance1, which I talked about earlier in Part 1 of this lengthy critique/self-examination/rambling diatribe, & I’ll try to restrain references to it for moments in which I feel a need to contrast the two on a level of execution, because I could probably stand to be nicer to someone this once. Not necessarily myself.
Some mornings when I step out of the shower, the first thing I notice on my face in the mirror are the little marks where the staples that briefly held me together are. For a month or so I had my own grade-school imitation of a crown of thorns embedded in my skin. They hurt like shit, a good number of them just fell out as I was going about my day, they made it near impossible to fall asleep, & yet I still dumped all my money & time into these things because I wanted to patch some part of the perception of me, for myself or the outside world or God, who knows. I can’t tell you if it worked. I have an ongoing tic where I run my fingers along the edge of my hairline, not because I’m worried about my follicles receding, but just to feel the little spine of scars running around my skull. Do I need to worry about this, or are the marks of adjustment almost invisible to everyone but their bearers?
Different Man is about Edward (Sebastian Stan), an aspiring actor with severe facial disfigurement, a man so submerged in his own self-loathing it’s seemed to manifest itself in a dripping wound in his apartment ceiling.2 The only work he can get casted in due to the obvious discrimination around his face is acting in PSAs about how you should avoid discriminating against visually disabled people. At every turn of his day he is harassed, gawked at, told to chin up & look on the bright side, etc. etc. His day-to-day life looks not dissimilar from the opening act of Beau is Afraid’s nightmare cityscape3 of unending anxiety resulting from a deluge of Stupid Things happening directly at you or in your proximity. People are constantly talking about or at Edward, but he is never given voice in his own existence. Again, half of this is enforced & the other half of this is reflexive. Edward is diminished, just as Edward diminishes himself. In his first encounter with his neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), he can hardly get a word in on a basic two-way conversation with her. Ingrid is the most sympathetic person to interact with him, but as she keeps talking to him, her friendliness begins to seem indistinguishable from pity, or worse, fetishization.
Edward, despite this, clearly desires Ingrid, because being offered a slightly burnt sandwich sounds delicious when you’ve been eating table scraps. He goes in for what he thinks is a kiss…wrong move. Like with the story of Frankenstein, we see a being who is offered their first bit of perceived affection, then trying to swallow it whole, not understanding that this is not how these things work. This goodwill of strangers is a conditional thing, one which you cannot step over the line of despite the fact that nobody wants to tell you where the line is if you haven’t learned already. He tries repeatedly to connect, but fumbles because he lacks the experience to communicate his own boundaries or desires. We see this again & again with basic interactions, Edward trying to make a step into the reality of others but just not understanding how. When you’re actively withheld from the language of the social world, who is to teach it to you? How do you even learn it when you’re late enough in the game, far enough from the orbit of “normal non-ostracized human” that it was simply not a thing handed to you? It is typically not a question that is allowed to be asked by those victims of social othering in the first place, because there is no exit, at least not any sort of voluntary one short of…well,,, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a bullshit sentiment in most cases, because what doesn’t kill you usually keeps trying to kill you, social suicide as slasher villain, always rising to haunt you again.
In this opening stretch, the film asks us to pay particular attention to people’s eyes. Edward’s eyes are never in place, continually evading the effort that comes with having to meet the gaze of another & acknowledge their perception of him. He’s already resigned himself before any interaction, & as you see the eyes of every stranger around him, you get why. They’re just as avoidant, but only to his own presence. The social contract has willed him a non-person, a thing to be avoided unless you simply have to be around this guy every day. As for the camera, the big set of eyeballs the audience is watching through: Different Man is well aware of the filmic history of disability & disfigurement. In its attempt to step above what might otherwise be a Charlie Kaufman story with just a little bit of the “repressed transsexual loathing” tamped down & the number of crash zooms dialed up to “as many as we can offer”, Different Man wants to take its time skewering the great long-term failure of film, theatre, the art world at large in truly presenting & conversely, representing marginalization & bodily difference4. We can put a face on the screen, but what’s being said about that face is not the voice of its owner, but of the one rolling the camera, editing the footage, presenting it to others. Whereas The Substance tried to broadly throw up its hands & say “well, yknow, society”, here the blame more specifically lies with the nature of depiction itself. We love the Anthony Hopkins performance in The Elephant Man, but what would Joseph Merrick himself think? In his reality, the only stable work he could find was through performance, being presented in “freak shows” across England, always the subject but never in control of how he was shown to people. “Elephant Man” is not a self-designation, it’s a label. In front of the lens, you are not you without the permission of whoever depicts you, just a vessel for the story they want to tell for themselves.
So when Different Man finally gets to the thrust of its own story, where Edward is allowed to remove his disfigurement from the equation altogether & start a new life, we have to soak it all in from his face. Up to this point, Sebastian Stan’s performance has relied in part on incredibly detailed makeup to help carry the idea of Edward, but it’s in the moment where he’s magically able to take his face off5 that we start asking questions about the person that’s been left underneath. The first moments after he’s been handed his opportunity at normality, Stan plays Edward like a newborn Ken doll: He’s all shock & wonder, he’s finding camaraderie with the loud idiots at the bar, he’s screaming with the loud idiots at the bar, he’s hammering down drinks with the loud idiots at the bar, he’s staring at the queers across the room6, he’s immediately diverting from the idiots at the bar to receive oral sex for what may be the first time in his life. He’s fresh-faced & excitable, a gorgeous tabula rasa, & he gulps down human experience like oxygen. He sees this step into the “real” world as a chance to break cleanly, & disappears from his current life altogether, desperate to chase this newfound joy of being ignored. After we hard cut to an indeterminate amount of time later, the glow seems to have worn off.
Neuroticism has always been eating me alive. I spent years being bullied & critiqued by others for every little aspect of myself; my height, my face, my attitude, my body, the way I talk, the way I wanted to live my life, the way I actually was living it. Even after escaping the judgement of others, I found it again, being refracted back at me by myself. I changed things about me to fit what others might like, only to find I still hated it. I found what I thought was the real problem, my gender, & I burned it all down again, only to find the same instabilities hampering me. I no longer hated myself because it was enforced, I did so because it was a language that had been taught to me. You can “fix” yourself from the surface all you want, but under the skin the same irrational creature will always be piloting the body, the way it’s been trained to understand.
Edward is now “Guy Moratz”, a successful real estate agent with what seems to be a normal life, & he’s particularly nonplussed about it. He’s had all the victories he can ask for, & kids are still drawing a little Hitler stache on his face in the subway advertisements for his work. He’s still got that doll-like sheen on his face, but his default expression is more sad goldfish than excited puppy now. He’s stumbling through his life in a haze of normality, & only gets jolted out of it the moment he spots Ingrid on the street. Suddenly the spark of inaccessible desire sets him alight again, stalking away to see where she may end up, finally landing at the casting session for her new play…Edward. As he spends his time observing the play, he begins to understand that Ingrid finally made good on her promise to write a story that he could star in, a role that he was literally born to play, only after he’s killed any part of himself that could properly represent it. He comes back with a mask molded from his old face, trying to play himself. He gets cast over the same guys he was working alongside in the disability PSAs, Ingrid preferring perfect performance over authenticity, a thing that isn’t called into question until Oswald (Adam Pearson7) pops in. Gatecrashing at first into a rehearsal of the play & then Edward’s life at large, Oswald is everything Edward assumed he couldn’t be. He’s visibly disfigured, just as Edward was but he still found a way to have it all. He’s charming, he’s talented, he’s well-liked by everyone around him, he’s just so perfect, to a degree that sends Edward immediately off the rails.
He spends the rest of the movie with the sad puppy eyes mutated into a look of simmering rage, having realized that while, yes, he’s been hurt on a systemic level, he’s been just as culpable in his own self-destruction. He has nothing because he only ever allowed himself to believe nothing was possible. He takes it as an excuse to fly off the handle at Ingrid, arguing “Edward”, her character, must have some agency of his own. He no longer wants to play himself, he wants to play an idealization of it. In his total absence of personhood, he desires to be a mirror of what he most aspires to rather than his own self. Things further unravel, Oswald taking Edward’s place as the play’s lead & supplanting him as the object of Ingrid’s personal & romantic interest. He has everything Edward could have wanted, without sacrifice! Edward descends full-throttle into his Kafka K-hole of disappointment, now wearing the mask of his old face full-time seemingly determined to burn down every aspect of his new life, & he succeeds quite handily, leaving himself in a position of no agency at all. TCould he ever get out of this, or does he like it down here at the bottom, where he doesn’t have to make a choice about how to live? Either way, he’s still paralyzed by the indecision of potential, of having to pick a thing to be beyond “pitiable”. He’ll probably never figure it out, in any case. Same as it ever was.
Housekeeping: okay cool. I had to get this out of my system, just as everything else that’s going up sooner or later is very much something I “had to get out of my system.” I’m operating on a more moment-to-moment basis with the creative process now, something not dissimilar to the way I learned how to walk on ice: If you learn to move without thinking about it, you won’t slip. As stated before, this will not be a regularly paced newsletter, just something I drop into when I’m ready. Also, don’t expect the next thing here to be about film, or, barring failure to launch on the other work, criticism. Next thing I’m probably putting up here is a short story about a woman trying to kill herself. After (or before, depending on timing & writer’s block and my social life and the five hundred other things circling my brain) that, a review of the newest record by Baths. After that? I dunno. Thanks for reading.
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If we’re being real though it’s funny how similar these films are story-structure wise, to the point where one wonders what kind of influence they may have had on one another’s reception in the long term. It’s the Armageddon/Deep Impact of neurotic satires about societal perception of beauty & perfect doubles, I guess, and I’m team Deep Impact the way I’m rooting for the party that ultimately seem to be history’s loser here.
Shoutout to Tsai Ming-liang, who else is out here presenting their gross-ass apartments as symbols for impossible yearning these days?
2024 was a big year for me positively comparing things to Beau is Afraid. May it be the only year where I ever have to do that.
This has become somewhat of an ongoing theme in Schimberg’s work, with his previous feature, Chained For Life taking a more abstracted approach to a similar question. It’s a bit narratively shaggy, but the part of that film where it’s just the “freak” actors scheming about what kind of movies they’d make with long-term access to the cameras being pointed at them is charming and just makes you wish they could do that.
Because part of the initiation into the “normal” realm is finding those who are acceptable for you to subjugate! Even when we are absent from the gaze of others, we have our own gaze to contend with. There’s always a lower rung on the ladder, you just won’t start stomping it until you’re told to.
I don’t care about the Oscars all that much because to do so would just make me really annoyed but he should’ve been nominated AND won Supporting Performance for this performance, one of those feats of acting where someone enters & shifts the temperature of the entire film by presence alone!!!