Becoming Unrecognisable

I remember staying up through the night to watch CNN's live coverage of Yitzhak Rabin's burial service and how it was a speech given by his granddaughter at that event which brought me closest to the significance of his death. The granddaughter explained to the world watching that the memorialising images of Rabin's face was not the face she knew. This was not her grandfather we saw on the screen. On the contrary, in death Rabin was, for her, unrecognisable – 'a smile that is no longer'. While Western news services desperately tried to sustain Rabin's recognisability, to allow viewers to continue to see him 'as he was' – indeed, to allow the dead to speak again through his last public words uttered at a peace rally only minutes before he was killed – it was also reported that British actor, Paul Eddington, best known for roles he played in BBC (UK) comedies Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, died of a rare skin cancer which left him 'faceless' and 'unrecognisable'. While I make no attempt now to compare these disparate stories, it was the tension produced in the strangeness of these two faces coming together, back to back, as they did in many of the Australian television news broadcasts, that got me thinking in a new way about the face and death and the problems of recognition and recognisability.

What I saw that night after Rabin's assassination as I was switching between various news services was that just as reports on Rabin sought to restore his face in death, television news tried equally hard to smooth over the shock of Eddington's facelessness in life. For Rabin's granddaughter, the mass circulation of her grandfather's image was unbearable. Addressing her dead grandfather, she cried: 'The television does not stop transmitting your picture'. Yet, it was not these pictures that news services identified as potentially 'disturbing' but the image of Paul Eddington's apparent facelessness. In this chapter, I explore what it means to look directly into Eddington's face, to look in the way television advised us not to. For as with the strange mix of tenses in Rabin's granddaughter's speech, this direct view of the spectacular loss of Eddington's well-known face shatters the illusion of eternal sameness – the almost sacred conception in Western cultures of a unitary, transcendent self. And as I will show, to see through this particular veil is to look in the way that Maurice Blanchot suggests Orpheus did when he 'turned back': 'to look into the night at what the night is concealing – the other night, concealment which becomes visible'. Or, in this case, to look into the face at what the face normally conceals – 'the blinding non-existence of death', which our hearts, as Schopenhauer once said, tell us cannot possibly be true.

I: When People See People

Channel Ten (Australia) reported on Paul Eddington's death by showing three short grabs – two of which were images of him as he had not been seen on television before.The first was taken from the long running British television series Yes, Prime Minister, which made Eddington internationally recognisable as the face of Jim Hacker, Minister of Parliament. Here, Hacker explains: If people saw people coming, before people saw them seeing people coming, people would see people. This instance of 'Hackeresque' logic, underscored by the laughter track, becomes uncanny when this image, serving now to stand in for Eddington, cuts to the second image, a wide shot of an unrecognisable figure. Although Eddington is seen in this second shot in conversation, his voice has been muted, replaced by the voice of the news reader who reports:Of course, that's how most people remember Eddington – the bumbling MP, star of the TV comedy series 'Yes, Prime Minister'. But at the end he was almost unrecognisable – his skin blotchy and his hair falling out. The report then cuts to a final close-up shot of Eddington's silent, unrecognisable face. The reader concludes: He was suffering from a rare skin disease, which probably cost him his life.

Ten's story attempted to compensate for the shock of Eddington's apparently sudden unrecognisability by projecting on to him an image not simply of a former self but a fictional self. Eddington speaks not as himself, that is, as actor, but as character. It would seem that Ten preferred to confer on to Eddington a fixed, fictional identity, to have him speak from the grave as another, rather than face the mystery of his facelessness, or, worse, perhaps, allow for a faceless figure to speak. Not that I'm suggesting Ten's effort should be deplored. While their 'before and after' approach may be regarded as somewhat tacky, so called tasteful approaches taken by some other news services, such as ABC (Australia), for example, were equally problematic. Tiptoeing around the subject of his disfigurement by showing him only in character, the ABC spoke of Eddington's facelessness in the hushed, holy tones of tragedy. Descriptions of the effects of skin cancer as a tragic situation were, I am sure, intended to give some kind of 'deeper' significance to this disconcerting calamity. But in an interview shown on Australian television a week or so after the above-mentioned news report, Eddington describes his condition in very different terms, referring to it as an 'absurd situation' and claiming that the look of his face is nothing less than 'grotesque'.

The grotesque is most easily defined as an un-natural excess. The grotesque face is overblown and distorted: it is an exaggeration of the face. What shocks us into the repulsive/attractive gaze of the grotesque, 'the embarrassed smile', as Wolfgang Kayser puts it, is the recognition of a resemblance to, or continuity between, the human form and other forms, such as animal or plant forms, or even other forms of pictorial representation. In a chapter of his influential book on the topic where he attempts to define the specific affect of the grotesque, Kayser writes: 'We are so strongly affected and terrified because it is our world which ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world. The grotesque instils fear of life rather than fear of death' (185). However, in Ten's report Eddington's altered face appeared to be neither deformed nor misshapen. It did not appear overblown, nor was there any trace of animality. What appeared on the screen was a perfectly proportional face altered only at surface level – it was, to put it bluntly, a peculiarly blank face, nondescript in the way that police identikit pictures resemble faces in general but no one face in particular. Perhaps then even a term like 'the grotesque' is too general when speaking about this face, because it does not distinguish between the excessive facedness of deformity and the baffling facelessness of Eddington's sudden unrecognisability.

As if erased, Eddington's face was not...