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Mel Gibson's movie The Man Without a Face, Selected and introduced for ELLOPOS by Nat Gerrs
Page 6
AS HE STANDS on his chair waving his hands to the teacher and friend that leaves forever, we know that they would have nothing to do together any way. McLeod now exists only as a memory that points upwards. The living soul itself has been totally and permanently transformed into the likeness of a divine symbol - and this is a new, horrible and definitive deformity, a mask that resembles a face in every detail.
It is not the crowd any more that separates them and they don't have even a role to play, or anything we should care about. Above the melodramatic (this doesn't mean bad) music, above the greetings from beyond - Mel Gibson's disastrous attempt to a semblance of a happy end - narration comes to complete what is only a depressing end.
At the opening parade narration was natural, powerful, true and convincing. Now it comes in a no man's voice to suggest what does not exist, to make us believe what is not there, making of love an ideology, God a no man's land, Sequere Deum an adage, handy for the doors and the emblems of old fashion colleges, and "the best that is yet to be", just a glittering void for the two of them to sink into and avoid one another.
If Gibson had ended the movie when Norstadt read McLeod's letter, at the deserted place where sometime he was with his teacher, we would be sad, but not depressed - probability would not have been lost, Norstadt had not yet spoken his last word. But taking the nobleness of an supposedly absolute relationship to drop it into artificial nothingness - this is not sad.
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
