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Mel Gibson's movie The Man Without a Face, Selected and introduced for ELLOPOS by Nat Gerrs
Page 4
THEY MEET for the first time at the hold of the ship that was taking them to their summer residences. McLeod was travelling below, as always, confined in his car. When Chuck's mother tells him, that he is slower than most children his age ("nothing to be ashamed of" though, a remark that is characteristic of her whole behaviour to him - protective and encouraging, but in the way one protects a retard), he gets down to the hold and bursts out against himself, blaming himself for what he is while damaging his mother's car.
This burst of a life that is simultaneously imminent and impossible, a burst that for the crowd is just a psychotic symptom, penetrates McLeod's mask. He was a teacher and a friend, he had a face, he is familiar with solitude and anger, both of Chuck's refuges - he can regognise the boy's agony.
Chuck's mother and his half sister look at McLeod and feel like they are at the circus. McLeod feels the same when he sees himself in the mirror. Looking at Charles he sees, beyond memory and art, right into a soul, how a face tries to be born.
The boy stands still, staring at him. He sees the mask, but not only this. He feels sorry for him, and he is thankful, because McLeod did not disclose who damaged the car. It is like seeing the very deformity that the crowd and his own dream cause to himself, yet now agony prepares to know gratitude and mercy - probability is already working, in both of them.
Cf. Someone Like Hodder | Rilke, Letter to a young poet | Jaspers, Truth is in communication | J. O. y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses | Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society | Wordsworth's and Magee's poems | K. Mansfield, There was a child once
More by Nat Gerrs : Why Europe? | J. M. Lefévre, The White Thinking
