ABSTRACT
If the mask is Mission: Impossible’s distinguishing mark, in both its televisual and cinematic variants, then John Woo’s Face/Off (1997) amounts to a feature-length application for the job of directing the second movie in this series. For Face/Off pivots around the impossible possibility of two men literally wearing one another’s faces, and so around the anxiety that the very idea of a mask might become indistinguishable from the idea of the face it masks. And because the two men concerned are tied to one another in a variety of ways – on opposing sides professionally (one a nihilistic criminal named Castor Troy and the other, Sean Archer, a federal agent committed to his capture), but indistinguishable in their compulsive-obsessive temperaments and their sense of the irreducible obligations of family bonds – the idea of faces as masks is thereby tied to two others: the idea of enemies as brothers under the skin; and the idea that ultimately no matter of principle separates the obdurate enforcer of the law from one whose existence repudiates it. It is this conjunction that will find new life in Woo’s contribution to the Mission: Impossible series. Although David Thomson is here prepared to make an excep-
tion with respect to his general criticism of Woo’s Hollywood work, talking of Face/Off as his ‘most interesting English-language picture, with a clever script and flamboyant performances from John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’,1 even so some might wish to ask whether Woo in effect shares the nihilism he depicts in Castor
Troy. Woo’s stylistic flourishes are all here in place: the elaborately choreographed fight scenes, motor-cycles versus cars and helicopters, children as iconic victims and means of redemption, and lashings of religious imagery; and none of this is exactly anchored in a realistically depicted world of transplant surgery, federal law enforcement or terrorism. So when Troy walks into a chapel, through a flock of white doves, and declares to Archer, ‘This is so religious! The eternal battle between good and evil, saint and sinner; and you’re still not having any fun . . . ’, before initiating the final, longest and most pyrotechnic of their confrontations, we are invited to wonder whether such structures of value are no more than free-floating signifiers for Woo as well, their significance reduced to set-dressing for his way of having empty, meaningless fun with boys and their toys. Suppose, however, we reflect further on the film’s key idea of
faces as transposable masks. This idea at once literalizes and epitomizes the postmodernist or modernizing idea of identity as a surface phenomenon, no more anchored in its material referent than any other concept in contemporary culture. But what the film tracks is the extent to which that supposed freedom, that capacity for endless displacement, is resisted by those whose faces are turned into masks; and this resistance operates simultaneously on the level of narrative content and cinematic form. In the narrative, both men discover that there is nothing
superficial or simple about acquiring another person’s identity by acquiring their face, particularly when that other is an enemy. For to see that other’s face in the mirror is to see it as somehow authentically expressive of the person who continues to exist behind it; it declares something about their uncannily intimate closeness to one another, as if each gives expression to something unrealized but fundamental in the other, even if something they each wish to extirpate from within (with Castor seeing in Sean the possibility of devotedness to family that his own relationship with his brother contains in embryo, and Sean seeing in Castor the possibility of doing things simply because you can, unrestrained by any conception of justice or fellow-feeling, that his own wounded isolation after the death of his son tempts him towards in his work). But that wish is frustrated, because assuming
each man’s facial identity turns out to mean involving oneself in relations of blood and comradeship with a variety of other people; and, once inhabited, these relationships have the power to make demands upon, and to reshape the commitments of, the person hiding behind his mask. At the same time, donning the other’s face is quickly shown to
be insufficient to deceive those close to that other. First, the voice must be altered to match the mask; but, even more fundamentally, a match is required with what one might think of as the signature of that voice (its intonations and stress patterns, its expressive rhythm) if self-betrayal is to be avoided. And both mask-wearers find it at once exhilaratingly transgressive and extremely difficult to acquire that signature, as more generally they find it pleasurably and perplexingly difficult to acquire its bodily equivalent – the characteristic patterns of facial expression, hand gesture and gait through which the person they aspire to imitate makes manifest his distinctive bodily inhabitation of the world. Here we see the crucial connection between narrative content
and reflexive concern in this film. For, of course, the postmodern idea of identity (and of representation more generally) as floating free of its material referent finds its cinematic echo in the massively expanding use of CGI technology, which can in principle produce a screened image without any reliance upon a real object’s placement before a camera, and which has often been thought to hold out the prospect of overcoming the film industry’s continued reliance upon overpaid and overly demanding real people – the stars – by the employment of digital actors. Against this background – one which will seem particularly hard to avoid for a director of contemporary action movies – the demands of the face-transposition plot acquire a particular resonance; for they require that, after the opening sequences, Nicolas Cage (as Castor Troy) and John Travolta (as Sean Archer) must each inhabit their characters as they imagine they would have been inhabited by the other; so that, in acting out Sean Archer’s attempt to be Castor Troy, Cage must attempt to imitate John Travolta, and in acting out Castor Troy’s impersonation of Archer, Travolta must imitate Cage. As a consequence, Face/Off becomes a study of the distinctive
character of cinematic acting and stardom. For suppose we accept
that, in cinema as we have so far understood its possibilities, the actor is prior to the character, and that the actor’s capacity for stardom depends upon the unpredictable effects of projecting his physiognomy as captured by the camera onto the screen. Then Face/Off tells us that a star’s physiognomical signature is as much a matter of voice and body as it is a matter of his face; and it asks us whether or not we are willing or able to regard that signature as imitable, say iterable. In the first instance, the question is whether this can be done by another person, even perhaps another star, equipped as he presumably is with his own distinctive embodied signature. But lying in the background is the question of whether it might be done by an appropriately programmed computer, one capable of generating a digital image of that person, and hence perhaps of generating such images without the need for any original (at which point the distinction between representation and presentation threatens to break down, leaving us in a world of iterations that operate upon nothing real – no prior value or origin). In my judgement, the film’s answer to its own question is ‘No’.
To be sure, we take a peculiar pleasure in seeing the degree of success that Cage and Travolta both have in impersonating one another’s expressive bodily idiosyncracies, and we are certainly capable of being startled and informed by what it is that each actor takes to be impersonatable in the other – their mutual study deepens our understanding of who each is, as an actor and as a star. It is also true that the success of these impersonations indicates a threat inherent in any actor’s translation to stardom: the threat of turning oneself into an agglomeration of essentially iterable tics and gestures, and so an impersonator of oneself. But seeing Cage as Travolta and Travolta as Cage simultaneously confirms that, beyond or before their imitable expressive repertoires, there is the fundamental fact of material, bodily difference and distinctness, and the essentially ungraspable range and depth of difference it engenders. For Cage’s iteration of Travolta’s bodily signature is patently and
necessarily not identical with Travolta’s conscious or unconscious iterations of it; it is itself signed by Cage, the man actually before the camera, just as Travolta’s iteration of Cage’s signature is distinctively
informed by Travolta’s way of signing anything and everything he does in the camera’s gaze – by his own embodied way of being in the world, and so of being projected on screen (even as another actor). To put it another way, that bodily signature can at best be parodied or caricatured; to be genuinely iterated in all its richness and depth, it must be made manifest in and through the singular body that first produced it. CGI acknowledges a more general indebtedness to the body in
its dependence upon motion-capture technology (tracking the motion of sensors attached to various parts of a moving human being) in order to acquire the digital data needed to generate moving images of individual people that are plausibly human, even if they are not representations of any real individual (not even the one who wore the sensors). Woo’s point in this context would be that only the technology of the camera can capture the indefinitely receding richness and depth of a real object’s revelation of itself to the human eye. CGI aside, however, it seems clear that Face/Off aims to
demonstrate the inimitability of individuality by demonstrating the extent to which physiognomy is still destiny in cinema.
