The Hybrid Face
This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary
semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural
perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the
human utopia of creating a hybrid face.
The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital
face, exploring its biological and social functions, the concept of masks,
the impact of COVID-19, AI systems, digital portraiture, symbolic
faces in films, viral communication, alien depictions, personhood in
video games, online intimacy, and digital memorials. The human face is
increasingly living a life that is not only that of the biological body but
also that of its digital avatar, spread through a myriad of new channels and
transformable through filters, post-productions, digital cosmetics, all the
way to the creation of deepfakes. The digital face expresses new and largely
unknown meanings, which this book explores and analyzes through an
interdisciplinary but systematic approach.
The volume will interest researchers, scholars, and advanced students
who are interested in digital humanities, communication studies, semiotics,
visual studies, visual anthropology, cultural studies, and, broadly speaking,
innovative approaches about the meaning of the face in present-day digital
societies.
Massimo Leone is Professor of Philosophy of Communication at the
University of Turin; Research Director at the “Bruno Kessler Foundation”,
Trento; part-time Professor of Semiotics at the University of Shanghai;
associate member of Cambridge Digital Humanities; and Adjunct Professor
at the UCAB University of Caracas. He is the PI of ERC Projects FACETS
(2019) and EUFACETS (2022).
Routledge/FACETS Advances in Face Studies
Series Editor: Massimo Leone
Routledge/FACETS Advances in Face Studies offers a pioneering
interdisciplinary collection of research. The series responds to the changing
meaning of the human face: through the invention and diffusion of new
visual technologies (digital photography, visual filters, as well as software
for automatic face recognition); through the creation and establishment of
novel genres of face representation (the selfie); and through new approaches
to face perception, reading, and memorization (the ‘scrolling’ of faces on
Tinder).
Offering an interdisciplinary but focused approach in the fields of
communication studies, visual history, semiotics, phenomenology, visual
anthropology, but also face perception studies and collection, analysis,
and social contextualization of big data, the series will concentrate on the
cultural and technological causes of these changes and their effects in terms
of alterations in self-perception and communicative interaction.
The series will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the fields of
communication studies, digital cultures studies, digital humanities, visual
communication, linguistic anthropology, semiotic anthropology, cognitive
linguistics, semiotics, ethnomethodology, cultural theory, cultural studies,
visual studies, performance studies, as well as philosophy of culture,
hermeneutics, and ritual studies.
1. The Hybrid Face
Paradoxes of the Visage in the Digital Era
Edited by Massimo Leone
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com
The Hybrid Face
Paradoxes of the Visage
in the Digital Era
Edited by Massimo Leone
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Massimo Leone; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Massimo Leone to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Leone, Massimo, 1975– editor.
Title: The hybrid face : paradoxes of the visage in the digital era /
edited by Massimo Leone.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge/
FACETS advances in face studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023037390 (print) | LCCN 2023037391 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032455723 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032460963 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003380047 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Face (Philosophy) | Face.
Classification: LCC B105.F29 H93 2024 (print) | LCC B105.F29
(ebook) | DDC 128/.6—dc23/eng/20230815
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023037390
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023037391
ISBN: 978-1-032-45572-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-46096-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-38004-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003380047
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Masked faces: a tale of functional redeployment between
biology and material culture
vii
xii
xix
1
MARCO VIOLA
2 Contagious faces: coping digitally with the pandemic by
means of memes
22
GABRIELE MARINO
3 Uncertain faces: an investigation into visual forms for
communicating otherness
39
CRISTINA VOTO
4 Simulacral faces: a dramaturgy in digital environments
59
ENZO D’ARMENIO
5 Emerging faces: the figure-ground relation from
renaissance painting to deepfakes
74
MARIA GIULIA DONDERO
6 Timely faces
87
ANTONIO DANTE SANTANGELO
7 Featureless faces: a film aesthetics
BRUNO SURACE
109
vi
Contents
8 Imaginary faces: aliens, monsters, and otherness
129
REMO GRAMIGNA
9 Automatic faces: the transcendent visage of
trans-humanity
146
GIANMARCO THIERRY GIULIANA
10 Algorithmic faces: reflections on the visage in artistic
translation and transition
161
SILVIA BARBOTTO
11 Dating faces: the facial space of belonging in online
(dating) communities
180
ELSA SORO
12 Evanescent faces: a semiotic investigation of digital
memorials and commemorative practices
192
FEDERICO BELLENTANI
Reference
Index
215
249
7
Featureless faces
A film aesthetics1
Bruno Surace
1. Introduction: can a meme kill?
Can a meme kill? It would seem so, according to a semiotically significant
news story. Marcel Danesi, commenting on the nineteen stab wounds suffered by a twelve-year-old at the hands of two of her peers in Waukesha
(Wisconsin) in 2014,2 affirms that “the world of the matrix is more real and
perhaps more meaningful to people today than the real world” (2019: 64).
The girl survived by a miracle, and her friends stated they had performed
the act as a sacrifice for “Slender Man”. It was therefore in all respects an
attempted human sacrifice, made to please (or because forced by) an entity
that ontologically does not exist, and that is part of an “online mythology”
capable of inducing a form of so-called screen paranoia (ibidem). Slender
Man does not exist in reality: we can identify its demiurge in Erik Knudsen,
and we even have access to the reconstruction of some sources that probably inspired this character’s creation:
At that time, Knudsen used the username “Victor Surge”, a fact that
seems to refer to the sources of inspiration for the visual design of the
Slender Man. Described as a tall man, dressed in a black suit, and who
has a “faceless face”, whose identity it is therefore impossible to recognize, the characteristics mentioned still point to a visual similarity with
the character The Question (as it was called in Brazil). Typically a hero
with no special powers, the Question was a masked vigilante who used
his intelligence and combat skills to fight criminals. His secret identity
was protected by a mask that made his face look flat. His real name
was Victor Sage, a detail that probably influenced Eric Knudsen’s choice
of pseudonym Victor Surge, as well as the lack of facial appearance in
Slender Man.
(Bastos Dias 2019: 261)3
DOI: 10.4324/9781003380047-7
110
Bruno Surace
However, Slender Man evidently exists as a cultural fact and has very profound consequences on the ontological reality.4 We are not interested here
in thinking about the psychic disorders of the two stabbers – limiting ourselves to noting the relevance of this paranoid act’s having been carried out
by not one but two people (a so-called folie à deux) of very tender age –5
but rather in how what is in effect a fruit of fiction and human intelligence
was able to become the motive (or at least the justification) for such a brutal act.6 It is not the only related case:
In May 2015, the New York Times reported that in the previous six
months there had been nine suicides and over 100 suicide attempts
made by youths living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. As
reporter Julie Bosman (2015) explains, “Several officials with knowledge of the cases said that at least one of the youths who committed
suicide was influenced by Slender Man, a tall, faceless creature who
appears in storytelling websites, often as a figure who stalks and kills
victims.”
(Blank and McNeill 2018: 14)
Our thesis is that not only the narrative substrate but also the somatic
specificity of this entity affects its success and can furnish some relevant
Figure 7.1 A cosplay of the Slender Man. Credits: Terry Robinson; www.flickr.
com/photos/suburbanadventure/8494619702; licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.
Featureless faces 111
data in terms of a semiotic anthropology of postmodernity. Slender Man
is a meme of a certain kind. It is undoubtedly the best-known exponent of
that para-literary form born within the Internet known as creepypasta.7
Creepypastas (portmanteau of “creepy” plus “copypasta”, an Internet
slang expression)8 are horror stories, usually written anonymously and
disseminated online, starting from a dedicated “wiki” (https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Creepypasta_Wiki). The objects of these tales of
terror are highly varied, but it is no coincidence that some recurring isotopies of this fringe of “digital folklore” (see Sánchez 2018) appear in
them: naturally the theme of the paranormal declined in many ways but
also a certain protagonist dimension of the media (especially digital) as a
vehicle of evil, the presence of adolescent or infant victims/executioners (a
direct reflection of empirical/model authors and readers),9 and a certain
tendency towards seriality (usually achieved through the recurrence of
some characters, such as Slender Man) as a trace of that narrative ecosystem that forms and conforms to the tastes of the new generations with
increasing vigor.10 All this is situated on common ground, namely that
of writing almost always devoid of strong literary connotations – there
is a preponderant interest in content and plot rather than in expression
or style – and of a cultural sediment which is a direct consequence of the
so-called urban/metropolitan legends of the pre-digital world. In the light
of these considerations, a further underlying characteristic of this genre is
explained, and that is, a certain disregard towards the historical sources
of what are always presented as natural narratives or, in other words,11
true stories:
The Slender Man Mythos unquestionably functions as a virtual world in
Saler’s sense: it is a fictional universe which countless individuals from
around the world have chosen to both inhabit and build upon through
creative contributions in the form of videos, games, and written narratives. The overwhelming majority of these contributors and participants
also exhibit what Saler would term ironic belief: they know that Slender
Man is a fiction, but winkingly create media that pretend otherwise. But
as we have seen, not all responses to fictional media are ironic.
(Tolbert 2015: 50)12
All this is true although technically they are often false uchronic narratives
as demonstrated by all the creepypastas that are based on Nazism, claiming to build on a historically solid background (since it is surreptitiously
assimilated by readers who thus believe they have a true idea of the historical event) when they are rather the result of the unconscious processing of
a mythical imaginary already explored in Nazisploitation or similar veins
several decades ago.13
112
Bruno Surace
In this fictional context, Slender Man has assumed, from the year of
its birth, 2009, to the present day, a mythological status, to the point of
having been relocated transmedially numerous times, becoming a character in video games, cartoons, and even live-action films. It is a malicious
Figure 7.2 An artwork depicting Slender Man. Credits: LuxAmber; https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Тонкий_человек.jpg; Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Featureless faces 113
and mysterious entity, clearly humanoid in shape. An oblong, lanky “individual”, dressed in a suit and tie, with a variable number of elegant tentacles protruding from its back, but above all with a face/no-face. Slender
Man’s head is white, and where the features should be, there is nothing.
The creature is endowed with various paranormal powers and usually targets youngsters or children, kidnapping them or driving them to insanity or
self-injury. Its fame is such as to have generated a complex symbolism and
an articulated narrative system of roles linked to its figure.
The Slender Man schematically described earlier as “tall, dark, and
loathsome”14 cannot but call to mind several previous references: it is
very similar to a contemporary version of the Boogeyman, for example,
but also conveys multiple traits of a horror imaginary that consolidated itself throughout the twentieth century in literature and fantasy
cinema. The somatic datum, however, is what is most pertinent here.
In fact, the character’s features in no way resemble those of a classic
monster, except for its tentacles, an iconic remnant of a Lovecraftian
background. There are no suckers or burrs. Slender Man’s tentacles
are elegant symmetrical filaments, befitting a certain underlying grace
inherent in the character. What makes the entity frightening is rather
the physical disproportion of its stature, slightly taller than an ordinary
human, and above all the absent face, which can only activate a doubly
disturbing mechanism:
1. Where there should be a certain system of human apparatuses, perceptually there is nothing, which places the being in a categorical dyscrasia;
2. Where there is nothing, those elements that serve as an “agency detection” portal are missing, and so we fall back into a specific Uncanny
Valley.15
The fact that it is clothed in a suit and tie lends itself to numerous ideological readings but undoubtedly heightens that strange and paradoxical
human/nonhuman condition that finds its confirmation and acme in the
face. If we think of Slender Man’s visage in terms of a Greimassian articulation, then it is not the opposite of a face but its contradiction.16 It is a nonface, just as a zombie is not a dead man but a non-dead being. The fact that
this specific non-face is thus placed in the axis of the subcontraries, that is,
in that semiotically rather problematic gray area, only further motivates its
esoteric charm. It is not in fact a representation of the indefinable face, like
that – we will get to it – of Marcel Schwob sans-gueule (1891) but of the
indefinite face. Slender Man’s face is a consubstantial non-face, nor can it
be otherwise. The faces of the sans-gueule are, at least in their aspectuality,
faces that are no longer faces. The two are quite different, although their
disturbing effects may appear similar.
114
Bruno Surace
2. Slender Man – the movie
The Slender Man phenomenon becomes a feature film of the same name
with a major production in 2018, directed by Sylvain White. The result is
not exciting, according to the critics who generally treat it as an unsuccessful experiment which wastes a potentially interesting character in rather
trivial ways. In fact, the film does not stand out either from a formal point
of view or in terms of the plot, re-proposing the tired pattern of the teen
movie with the theme of evocation. Nonetheless, beyond these value judgments, in the text we find a whole series of elements that corroborate the
theses put forward earlier about the characterizations of the Slender Man
myth.17
There is certainly the theme of “media contagion”. The narrative premise is that Slender Man persecutes those who are daring or reckless enough
to summon it, an evocation that occurs “virally” – here is the underlying
memetic humus –18 through a video circulating on the Internet which contains the secret instructions for this operation. Nothing new, if one thinks
of cinematographic cornerstones such as Ringu/The Ring (Nakata 1998;
Verbinski 2002), Poltergeist (Hooper 1982), Videodrome (Cronenberg
1983), or lesser-known films such as Pontypool (McDonald 2009), Cell
(Williams 2016), and so on. There the “traditional” media were the vehicle while here everything passes through the Internet and the discourses it
produces:
[A]s a consciously-constructed sign, Slender Man . . . reflects important
semiotic processes at work among members of the various internet communities in which his [sic] legend has appeared. The most significant
of these processes, and perhaps the area that has seen the most fruitful
overlap of folkloristic and literary semiotic investigation, is ostension.
(Tolbert 2013)
Indeed, the Slender Man in the film is not a mystery. Students talk about
it in high school, and the idea that it can be evoked with a specific ritual,
transmitted through a sort of “electronic gospel” (Mellor et al. 2016), circulates as an initiatory myth. In this case, too, an eternal return is reified if
one thinks of how many times in past decades the topos of the séance, held
by adolescents in search of a thrill, has constituted the basis for demonic
narratives of various kinds. Here, however, there is – in essence at least –
the exaltation of a meta-discursive component. The film was born from
an Internet phenomenon, to which it refers as a culturally existing fabric
in the diegetic premises and even reproduces creepypasta wiki-style sites,
showing the young protagonists, before and after the evocation, feverishly
in search of videos to unravel the mystery of the creature that haunts them,
in what at times therefore presents itself as a detective story.
Featureless faces 115
In this spiritism 2.0 the medium therefore not only confirms its role as
a vehicle of evil but is also promoted as an investigative tool. The role of
the face is clearly paramount, as has already occurred in other films, such
as Unfriended (Gabriadze 2014), entirely based on a Skype video call in
which the ghost of a cyber-bullied girl punishes her peers by making them
suffer via webcam, or Host (Savage 2020), with a similar plot expressed
in a Zoom call.19 In Slender Man, however, the face assumes various roles.
There is the face filmed in the video-selfies, which become evidence of close
encounters with Slender Man in the woods; the face in close-up, seen during sleep troubled by the nightmares induced by the creature (echoing Wes
Craven’s Freddy Krueger); the non-face of the creature itself, here whitish
and with veins that also make it a sort of mummy; or the faces belonging to
the hallucinatory states of the protagonists who see strange figures with a
void instead of a face or perceive people’s faces as deformed (in this vortex
of madness sometimes the faces turn black or are penetrated by tentacles),
as happens in other teenage horror movies such as Truth or Dare (Wadlow
2018) from the same year, where the deformation of the face is a disturbing element and prelude to nefarious events. Already in Final Destination
(Wong 2000), however, the initiator of a successful saga, those predestined
for death have seen their faces dim in their photographs, and in Smile (Finn
2022) an eerie smile is the prelude to a sordid, deadly curse.
The somatic relevance of the character is further testified by a certain iconic obsession that accompanies it. Slender Man in all respects is
glimpsed, dreamed, and perceived through various visual indexes (shadows, traces of its appearance in loved ones, and so on). This obviously
applies online, and in fact the web is full of videos and photographs more
or less clearly created ad hoc in which the character can be discerned, and
of course a similar semiotic protocol reemerges in the film. The characters
draw it, look for evidence online, and so on. The creature’s specific design
also makes it particularly inclined to materialize in various pareidolias,
just as its reference “habitat” constitutes the mimetic fabric within which
it can most visually manifest itself. Among the branches and brambles that
become misshapen dark tangles in the night, the creature seems to be everywhere because of its black dress and oblong limbs. The film will eventually
merge environment and character when the latter reaps its last victim by
literally incorporating her into a tree trunk.
The non-face is the culmination, the ultimate place of making contact.
Here, therefore, emerges a further specificity of Slender Man. One should
not look it in the face, otherwise madness and, sooner or later, death will
follow. So much so that the second evocation in the film takes place right
in the woods, where the creature is thought to reside, but with the girls
blindfolded. This veiling strategy is in effect a modification of the face
through the affixing of a drape that at first sight appears useless, as the eyes
already have their own biological ability to eclipse, namely the closing of
116
Bruno Surace
the eyelids. However, the tension between fascination and terror is evident,
that ancestral curiosity towards the unknown, which requires bandaging
as a form of artificial or prosthetic eyelid. Furthermore, this intensifies on
the face a strategy of not seeing which is also, phenomenologically, a primitive form of not being seen. Just as children hide under their bedsheets to
protect themselves from the monster under the bed, or a cat tries to conceal
itself behind a post, the underlying mechanism is a sort of suspension of
perceptual disbelief:
Being seen (being witnessed) . . . in non-judgmental supportive somatic
explorations is an antidote for depression and builds confidence. Being
seen is ultimately about seeing as well. As phenomenology has taught
[...] we cannot separate ourselves from the world. We are implicated
from the start, as part of the otherness that we perceive to be separate.
We are not alone; separateness is an illusion. . . . We might feel alone,
however, as a matter of experience. Surely many people feel isolated,
and empty sometimes, even those who are for the most part happy. Feelings of isolation and separation arise phenomenologically – as ways in
which the world appears to us and is sometimes experienced.
(Fraleigh 2019: 91–92)20
Hiding one’s face, or part of it, blindfolding oneself, masking oneself,
means not seeing but also not being seen, incorporating in the facial surface – a place of unification of the human senses and antechamber of the
most vital of the organs, namely the brain – the wholeness of the body. And
yet the bandaged face is also an immediately mutilated face, which protects
itself from its own scopophilia but which is also, paradoxically, exposed.
Slender Man thus engages in an atrocious form of blackmail: if one wants
to dialogue with it, one has to deprive oneself of the most precious – as a
place of phenomenological self-certification –21 of the senses, building an
esoteric language based on deprivation.22 However, this dispossession is
like the casting down of a shield, which in the moment of perception of
danger one wants to take up again: this happens when one of the girls gives
in to the urge to take off her blindfold and has contact with the monster
face to face.
It is an impossible confrontation with a lying being, which declares
itself human but whose otherness is revealed in its face, making it a transient creature, which can assume a thousand forms. This is a “figure of
absence” (Vernet 1988), a personification of fear and representation of evil
like its many predecessors in the history of cinema; just think of the cult
of Pennywise, IT, born from the pen of Stephen King (1986), which later
became an iconic TV film in the 1990s (Wallace 1990) and more recently a
Featureless faces 117
cinematographic bilogy (Muschietti 2017, 2019). Here the person responsible for the “coulrophobia” of an entire generation constructs fearfulness
on mutations of the clownish semblance, which in the moment of revelation passes from affability to hunger, changing its mouth, eyes, proportions, and so on. Slender Man, an authentic case of bricolage, remix, and
semiotic mash-up, also appropriates these elements, eventually closing the
cycle when, in addition to terrorizing and capturing one by one the four
protagonists who have evoked it, the entity also begins to haunt the innocent little sister of one of the victims, driving her insane. This madness,
which leads to forced hospitalization (paratopic horror space par excellence)23 and gruesome facial hallucinations of all sorts, will be expressed
in a series of desperate screams: “He was faceless! He was faceless!” As
demonstrated by the most typical of cinematographic horror procedures,
the “jumpscare” (whose effect proves the importance of the face as a scopic
device, which looks at us),24 the initial fright generated by a monstrous
face that appears out of nowhere is usually immediately assimilated, and
its terrifying potential declines (it is then the task of the diegesis and other
formal solutions to keep it alive). On the contrary, if the face is absent, if
there is only a head but the rest is missing, then the disturbance is perpetuated like an incessant an-epistemic horizon. As Trevor J. Blank and Lynne
S. McNeill argue: “Fear has no face” (2018: 3).
3. Ante litteram creepypastas: les sans-gueule
In 1891 Marcel Schwob published Cœur double, a collection of fantasy
and horror stories coming a few decades after those of Edgar Allan Poe
but absolutely of the same stature. Among these, the short story of the
Sans-gueule (literally, “The Without-snout”) stands out. It is a heartbreaking tale of two soldiers, found on the battlefield, physically alike
and bearing the same wounds: deaf and blind, their faces blasted away
by a howitzer. A doctor operates on them and gives them mouths which
emit inarticulate sounds. A woman, a “quasi-widow” who is looking for
her husband who she knows is missing and wounded, decides to take
them both in because they remind her of her lost husband but then little
by little begins to prefer one over the other, for reasons that have nothing to do with physical similarities, since the two bodies have lost the
traits that made them significantly different (in the full Saussurian sense).
Meanwhile, the other’s condition slowly worsens, and he eventually dies,
throwing the woman into the despair of uncertainty: she does not know
if the one who has left her was her husband or not while the survivor’s
living body, totally unaware, continues to smoke from that slit it has in
place of a mouth.
118
Bruno Surace
Here, therefore, the lost face is a perturbing object as a synecdoche of
a dehumanization that coincides with a loss of sociality. The two men are
no longer men but completely indecipherable physiologies. They also no
longer have an identity. They breathe, require nourishment, and even seem
to enjoy smoking, emitting strange gasps when they do so, but the lack of
a face has made them something completely different, eliminating any possibility of establishing even the simplest of communications, the phatic one,
which enables us to understand if they can hear or comprehend. Whoever
does not have a face is eventually in some way stripped, one by one, of
Jakobson’s communication functions (1963), up to the meta-linguistic one.
The face is thus configured as an interface, a linguistic bridge, between us
and the other, which if eliminated makes any communicative exchange,
any semiosic production, impossible. At most, the poor woman has to
limit herself to interpreting these bodies, thus passing to a regime of signification, without ever obtaining confirmation that they are possessed of
any initial intentionality. Slender Man is equally frightening somatically
because it lacks a lingua franca, a common metalanguage, an aid to understanding its intentions.
Schwob’s story, therefore, which is initially the narration of the horrors
of war through a literary invention that actually reconstructs an episode
not so infrequent at the time,25 is also and above all a reflection on the
facial device as a necessary threshold for the establishment of a meaningful relationship between us and otherness. The face is a precious sign. This
exegesis is shared by a valuable, and very rare, semiotic study of the story:
Structurally, the story pivots . . . on a description of the anxiety to which
the “petite femme” is subject by reason of the need to choose between
two featureless – not faces – but “surfaces”. . . . This passage makes it
clear that her careful scrutiny does succeed in distinguishing something
equivalent to a “face”. . . . But her anxiety stems from the impossibility
of discerning a sign that would give one of the Sans-Gueule, but not the
other, a face (the face of her husband): she cannot choose between them.
So the problem is not to produce meaning by humanizing the faceless
surfaces she is scanning; the problem is to opt for one rather than the
other as being the “true” or “right” choice, the one that corresponds to
her lost husband. The anxiety she displays in attempting to “read,” . . .
the undifferentiated text. . . . In short, the problematics of reading she is
thus enacting derives from the classical conception of meaning as being
unique and determinable and subject in consequence to acts of discernment as to the rightness or wrongness of specific “readings”: it is reading of the “readable,” not the scriptable.
(Chambers 1984: 40)26
Featureless faces 119
And:
At a number of points, the text is explicit that the two Sans-Gueules
pose the problem of meaning. At the outset, they are a “double cicatrice
arrondie, gigantesque et sans signification,” and later, “les deux coupes
rouges couturées reposaient toujours sur les oreillers, avec cette même
absence de signification qui en faisaient une double énigme.” . . . Since
it is the two Sans-Gueule together who form the mouth (even though
each is equipped individually with a “palais beant” and a “tremblant
moignon de langue”), the selectivity of love can only be self-defeating,
and the production of meaning can only destroy the totality that offered
the possibility of meaning.
(Ibidem: 42)
The rarefaction of facial features, therefore, from the perspective of a
strong relationship between “soma” and “sema”,27 coincides on the one
hand with a loss of meaning and on the other with an almost inversely
proportional increase in restlessness. Where the face empties, cognition
fills with uncertainties and anxieties. In fact, Les Sans-gueule seems to prefigure a sort of creepypasta literature, both in terms of the themes and
rhetorical choices (the open ending, for example) and on account of its
duration (it is a short, immediate story, which begins in medias res without
getting lost in particular contextualizations). Of course, unlike creepypastas, it claims its own literary dignity, but what interests us is that it constitutes a cornerstone in a potential philology of the face/non-face as a device
which elicits anxiety.
The cinema will then become an ideal place for the development of this
dimension of the contradicted face, clearly due to its media specificity based
on the visual.28 More or less marginal characters, but of great impact, with
empty faces, will appear throughout the history of cinema. In the dream
sequence in Spellbound (Hitchcock 1945), whose setting was masterfully
designed by Salvador Dalì, the character played by Gregory Peck relates a
specific moment of his dream in which the manager of a gambling house
introduces himself, fully dressed, but without a face. In one of old Isak
Borg’s dreams in Smultronstället (Bergman 1957), a strange man appears,
once again well dressed, whose face is a strange two-dimensional surface (as sometimes happens to faces in INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch 2006),
white, with deformed and rarefied features, and eyes reduced to small slits.
One of the witches in Polański’s Macbeth (1971) is not only blind but the
space where her eyes should be seems covered with skin as is also the case
with the young Laura in Pieles (Casanova 2017), as if the eyes had never
been there (therefore not a space of being that is no longer but a space
120
Bruno Surace
of nonbeing). In Joel Barish’s twisted dreams in Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind (Gondry 2004), the progressive cancellation of Clementine’s
memories coincides with the rarefaction of faces. There is a lengthy list of
similar examples.
What do all these characters have in common? They are, first of all,
always relegated to a dream or hypnagogic dimension, designating one
or other space or “allospace” (cf. Surace 2019). They are also marginalized. As signaling of the limen or threshold figures they seem to enjoy a
limited cultural autonomy, which explodes in their perturbing power and
immediately dissipates. The faceless, in other words, do not seem to have
enough strength to hold up a whole narrative; they mostly act as props.
This appears not to be true for some cases: one might argue that it is not
the case with Slender Man or the Sans-gueule. But, in fact, Slender Man is
rarely seen. Rather, it can be glimpsed from afar in the pareidolias, hinted
at but not clearly shown, and even in the film based on this figure its presence is marginal compared to the actions of the protagonists who struggle to escape it. When it appears it is either dark, blurred, or merely the
means to an end (it does what it must do and disappears). Similarly, the
Sans-gueule are the object of description in Schwob’s tale, while the story
of the woman is its fulcrum. Most of the aforementioned faceless appear
in dreams or magic as figures of passage, memory traces, residues of the
unconscious, ultimately functional exclusively to the development of those
who still have a face. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the disappearing faces tell us about Joel’s memory loss, which we can see very well.
In Spellbound the owner of the gambling house, representing the metonymy of the white cards thrown on the table, is a sign of the protagonist’s
mental state. The “face” is therefore not only interface but also surface, on
which traces of us are written – or in some cases erased – as demonstrated
by other films, such as La Jetée (Marker 1962): “On a primary narrative
level, as the protagonist’s mind, and the photogrammatic representation
of his body, move between past, present and future, the only visual, rather
than diegetic clues to temporal location are the repetitions of images, particularly the face” (Chamarette 2012: 79).
The empty face, the removed face, the thin face, or the rarefied face is a
generous face in semiotic terms, which abandons the claim to mean something for itself and begins to mean exclusively for the other, to be consumed
quickly, and painfully.
4. Les Yeux sans visage, Le Visage Sans Yeux
In 1937 the character of The Blank appeared for the first time in the famous
series of detective comics Dick Tracy: a very dangerous killer which is,
again, faceless. Covered by a blindfold, the Blank’s face hides his identity,
Featureless faces 121
although once “unmasked” he is revealed to be Frank Redrum (read backward and the word “murder” will appear, as anyone who has seen The
Shining immediately realizes), a criminal with a horribly disfigured face,
just like Erik, the Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux,29 or Spawn,
another comic book character created in 1992 by Todd McFarlane, both
committed to obscuring their disfigurement.30
These stories introduce us to a further dimension of the featureless face,
similar in the disturbing effects elicited by its emptiness on those who see it
but dissimilar in the order of the genesis of this emptiness. In these cases,
the empty face is in fact not a non-face but a meta-face, placed on an
“ante-face” (what remains of a face after an accident or what is behind the
epidermis) that is to be concealed, somewhat in the manner of Leatherface
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper 1974), who shows himself only
with his face covered by the skin of his victims, thus wearing a full and
empty mask at the same time: “Blank masks simultaneously erase identity
and create spaces to project new meanings onto, prompting another dimension to the visual iconography of horror film masks” (Heller-Nicholas
2019: 112).
These narratives deal with a face that has been lost. The loss is both
physical and symbolic. Sometimes the subject feels that s/he has lost her/
his face symbolically and so covers her-/himself in white to cancel a missing identity and seek shelter in a non-identity. Other times, however, it is a
physical loss, as happens to Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street
(Craven 1984), which sanctions the symbolic passage. In short, if soma is
sema, it is also true that sema is soma.
In Les Yeux sans visage (Franju 1960) this theme is developed through
a triple semantization of the face. In the first instance, there is a discourse
related to the living face and the dead face. Instead of ceasing its function,
the latter becomes the possibility of re-facialization for those who have lost
their faces, through futuristic transplants.31 The film places the emphasis in
this case on the face as an obsession. In fact, the lost face must be regained,
no matter at what price, even at the cost of sacrificing more than one person by luring them and taking their face away by force. The second dimension of the face is that of the mask, which Christiane wears, for example,
when she does not have an “other’s” face on her. Here we are dealing with
a totally neutral mask, in fact, a white face, whose only significant elements are the eyes, alive, which are behind it once worn. The gloomy nonexpressiveness of the mask, also conveyed by other films such as Vanilla
Sky (Crowe 2001), while on the one hand inducing a certain restlessness in
the viewer, is at the same time a sign of a lack of acceptance by the wearer,
rather as if it were a transitory device, useful only in the limbic waiting
to regain possession of a new skin, as happens in Seconds (Frankeheimer
1966). The third valorization of the face is that which passes from diegesis
122
Bruno Surace
to mimesis through the medium of film. In fact, the film not only stages a
story in which the face is first lost and subsequently rediscovered, passing
through the empty face of the mask but also emphasizes this facial obsession through a calibrated use of the foreground:
It is almost impossible to read about the unnaturalness of the close-up
and its association with death without thinking of the classical French
horror film Les Yeux sans visage (1960), an adaptation of Jean Redon’s
novel that demonstrates the notion of the close-up as a representation
of “dismembered” body, a two-dimensional face severed from its body
by the cinematic cut. The uniqueness of Franju’s film resides not necessarily in its use of the close-up (although it does that as well) but in the
way it literalizes the notion regarding the monstrosity of the close-up in
the story it tells. The question that it raises is the following: How does
a film “attacking” one of the basic elements of engagement with the
protagonist’s desire – the face of the actor – affect spectators regarding
this very engagement?
(Meiri and Kohen-Raz 2020: 48)
Similar epidermal obsessions can be found in the aforementioned Pieles, a
Spanish film with a grotesque flavor (not surprisingly a production by Álex
de la Iglesia), in which a courageous operation is carried out concerning
bodies and faces which are deformed for reasons as imaginative as they are
realistic (that is, attributable to existing pathologies). Among the characters can be found Laura who, as we mentioned earlier, has half a face and is
eyeless (the place where the eyes should be is covered with skin); Samantha,
who manifests a curious pathology whereby she has an anus instead of a
mouth (and vice versa); Guile, whose face is completely burned; and Ana,
whose left side of her face droops (her pathology is not specified in the
film but could be hemifacial hyperplasia). If many of these cases are actually provided with a face, albeit deviant, or as in the case of Guile with an
ante-face (there is a very moving final scene in which he looks in the mirror after having undergone a maxillofacial operation, while his ex-beloved
Ana proudly chooses to remain as she is), it is Laura’s case here that is
most prominent, since hers is half a young and pretty face while, vertically, half a non-face. The girl’s sad story reveals how she has been locked
up in a brothel all her life, in bondage since childhood to afford pleasure
first to pedophiles and then when she grows up to women and men whose
identity she does not know (being devoid of eyes). One of these gives her
two diamonds – telling her: “The world is full of people it is better not to
see . . . you deserve the most beautiful eyes in the world”– and puts them
on her face like eyes. She will become so fond of them that she will no
longer be able to part with them. The outcome of this sort of “symbolic
Featureless faces 123
plastic” is again alienating. In the eyes of the beholder, or at least of those
who watch the film, this face with its false ocularity is rather perturbing,
reminding the viewer a little of the chilling button eyes in the world behind
Coraline’s wall (Selik 2009). For Laura, however, these diamonds become
indispensable, a form of re-appropriation of the self that passes through
a specific somaticity. Only at the end, when she has found the love of an
obese woman (who in the meantime has stolen her diamond eyes to pay off
her debt), will she be able to accept her half-face and achieve happiness.
Laura’s in Pieles is a face without eyes, while Christiane’s are eyes without a face. In both cases, a new look corresponds to a new attitude, as the
claims of Bruiser, a 2000 film by George A. Romero, confirm. The director,
in fact, after a career spent glorifying the emaciated and indistinguishable
visages of zombies, this time depicts the killer Henry who once again opts
for a white mask without features: two dot-like holes for eyes, a thin slit for
a mouth, and a mere hint of a nose. The identity dimension is once again
magnified through the empty face: “Through the blank mask, Henry’s
monstrosity does not denote an eradication of his identity as such, but a
transformation of it” (Heller-Nicholas 2019: 123). Similar are the characters of The Invisible Man (H. G. Wells 1881), the last of which (filmed in
2020 by Leigh Whannell) emphasizes the potential of the nonexistent face
as a form of anonymity and “passport” for carrying out the worst possible
atrocities.
The emptying of the face therefore coincides with the cancellation of a
series of stigmas that manifest themselves instead in the counterpart of the
“full” face – abnormal, deformed, deviant, as in The Man Without a Face
(Gibson 1993), in which the protagonist’s face is disfigured by burns, and,
consequently, he is essentially an outcast, the character of John Hurt in The
Elephant Man (Lynch 1980), or Roy in Mask (Bogdanovich 1985).
5. Conclusions
The figure of the “non-face” thus crosses many narrative spaces, from classical to contemporary literature, from horror cinema to the grotesque, naturally also passing through animation if one thinks of the faceless demon
in Spirited Away (Miyazaki 2001). It constitutes a degeneration of the face
that configures an absent presence of a particularly perturbing character,
which potentially magnifies the sociocultural specificities of which the face
is a bearer: identity, idea of self, agency detection, aesthetic canons, and the
notion of social and personal mask.
The face/non-face induces hesitation precisely because it is devoid of these
complex elements, thus leading to a dyscrasia – albeit perhaps a certain
fascination, too – in the observer, as in the case of Slender Man but also
posing as an ineffable heterotopia that recounts the feelings of those who
124
Bruno Surace
are sometimes forced to wear it, as in Pieles or Les Yeux sans visage. In both
cases, however, this interpretation of the face/non-face is often entrusted
to the receiver. It remains an enigmatic device, hovering at the edges of the
semiosphere (and indeed the corpus of texts in which it appears is significant
but restricted),32 a place where the face as a cultural construct is canceled
and the humanity of the wearer inferred but not confirmed, as demonstrated
by the Sans-gueule, machines of flesh that breathe but disturb because in
them no specific intentionality can be perceived. On the other hand, this
type of iconography, which also arises at times from tragic human events,33
may culturally cover a specific semantic universe: that of monsters.
It should be emphasized that the etymology of “monster” is that of the
Latin “monère”, which means to “admonish” or warn, but there are also
links to “show”34 or make something visible.
Monsters . . . are therefore not simple things or events but always
require: a) to be recognized as such and b) to be interpreted. . . . However, the same things may not always produce the same emotions, and
this obviously also applies to the monsters proper, called to generate
specific emotions, of a repulsive nature, as Benveniste has already told
us, such as fright or terror. In order for these emotions to emerge, the
manifestation in the phenomenal field of some deformity is necessary,
which inevitably appeals to a canon of forms, and consequently to an
idea of conformity.
(Lancioni 2020: 84–85)35
The face/non-face cannot be beheld but comes into view as a “manifestation
in the phenomenal field” relegating itself to it immediately relegates itself
to the domain of the most irreducible otherness. That on the margins of the
semiosphere – that of monstrosity, be it demonic, as in the case of Slender
Man, or extraterrestrial, as for the “gray men” of A.I. Artificial Intelligence
(Spielberg 2001), oblong like the monster of creepypasta tales, humanoid,
with heads, but without any facial features. This monstrosity finds in the
“empty” signifier of the empty face the springboard for a specific meaning, which is otherness. Thus, in the end, this peculiar facial dysmorphia
transliterates from the level of expression to that of content, from a formal
level to an ideological and political one, capable of recounting the anxieties
and fears, but also prejudices and limits, of certain cultures.36 Verily, just as
there are cultures of the face, there are also cultures of the non-face.
Notes
1 This chapter results from a project that has received funding from the European
Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation program (Grant Agreement No 819649-FACETS; PI: Massimo
LEONE).
Featureless faces 125
2 The story of the trial elicited great public interest and was extensively dealt with
in both the American and international press. See www.latimes.com/nation/
nationnow/la-na-nn-slenderman-girls-adult-case-20150810-story.html (last accessed 05 January 2021).
3 My translation from Portuguese.
4 I reflected on this peculiar connection between the imaginary and the real in
Surace (2020b) unicorni.
5 We limit ourselves to suggesting that since it is not an act committed by a
single person but rather a “shared brutality”, the social role assumed by the
imaginary linked to Slender Man is relevant enough to warrant dealing with the
matter not only exclusively in psychiatric terms but also in semiotic terms.
6 This is not the first case, and even in the pre-digital world episodes can be
traced in which a certain maniacality deriving from fictional imaginings was
then dangerously transferred into reality. In this relation we consider the burgeoning field of criminal humanities to be of great importance (see Arntfield
and Danesi 2016).
7 “an emergent horror genre that manifests through the form of digital fiction,
characterized by unsettling paranormal and horror content copied, pasted and
remixed on social media and Web 2.0 platforms under the guise of real and
lived encounters” (Ondrak 2018: 162). See also Chess and Newsom 2015.
8 See Page 2018; Henriksen 2018.
9 The concepts of author and model reader are found in Eco 1979.
10 On the notion of narrative ecosystem, see Pescatore 2018.
11 The notions of “natural narrative” and its opposite “artificial narrative” are in
Eco 1994, and respectively designate a text’s claim to be read as reporting truth
(as in the case of a news program but also of an urban legend) or fiction (as in
the case of a fantasy or science fiction novel). That a narrative presents itself
as natural or artificial is not an explicit fact but has to do with the strategies of
drafting the text itself.
12 The reference is to Saler 2012 who “has discussed the capacity of certain works
of fiction to effectively transcend their own fictionality, to create imaginary
worlds that become, through deliberate inhabitation by their audiences, virtual
worlds” (Tolbert 2015: 50).
13 Cf. Magilow et al. 2012; Fedorov 2018.
14 Cf. Peck 2022.
15 I investigated this concept in Surace (2021b) with specific reference to artificial
and robotic faces.
16 Cf. Greimas 1966.
17 We refer to it as a myth, naturally in terms of the mythological reading of society proposed in Barthes 1957, but also relying on the idea of contemporaneity
as founded on “low-intensity myths” (that is, in short, less powerful and persistent, more ephemeral and transient) in Ortoleva 2019.
18 On the phenomena of online virality see, firstly, Marino and Thibault 2016, for
a compendium. An initial but good definition, which is the one underlying our
use of the term, is the following: “First of all, we have to point out that we are
dealing with two different forms of virality, which may be complementary but
nevertheless need to be kept theoretically separated: the first one entails a piece
of media content spreading pervasively and the other entails the practice of creating other contents from a first one understood as the model or prototype. In
the latter case we have a token that establishes a type from which other tokens
are created by means of replication and modification; this is what happens with
memes, which we may conceive, with a pun, as a form of ‘complex virality’ (as
opposed to ‘simple virality’). As suggested by Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013),
126
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Bruno Surace
we may articulate the opposition between an old and a new model of content
use: the first one, called stickiness, defines when many people in one place are
enjoying a given content (as in the case of a successful article or website) and
the latter, called spreadability, applies when one content is placed almost literally everywhere for everybody to peruse with ease (as in the case of a viral picture or video or of a series of memes with the same base). What we call virality,
including both types described above, owes as much to the replicability as to
the customization allowed by digital technologies; it is not merely an issue of
copying a given content, but rather of adapting, appropriating and properly
translating a given content according to need” (Marino 2022).
It is evident that, in this case, the COVID-19 pandemic, with its overbearing
remodeling of the global imagination and the reconfiguration of common proxemics, has also played a fundamental role and perhaps above all in the way our
faces mean outside and inside the digital context. See Leone 2020.
On this point, it is possible to approach it with a more psychoanalytical gaze,
for example, Lacan 1991, and philosophical, Žižek 2000.
As proof of this, just think of the great and lasting (so much so that it has its
roots in the origins of the web) success of online videos that prove conspiracy
theories visually. The basic idea is that “sightings” or in any case visual
evidence are more effective than other types of evidence. A video showing
aliens in one’s backyard will receive more hits than an alleged declassified
document from any government in which evidence of the same fact is set out
in writing.
And in fact, if one thinks about it, one can “lose” face, thus effectively losing
one’s reputation (and this is a fact shared culturally from West to East, so much
so that in China a common insult is to say that someone “has no face”), or one
“wants to lose face” to protect oneself even from embarrassment as in the case
of the “facepalm”, a veiling of the face analyzed in Marino 2020.
The notion of paratopic space is taken from Greimas’ theory of the relationship
between space and narrativity. Specifically, the paratopic space is understood
as the space in which certain skills are acquired by the characters in the story.
See Greimas 1976.
See Surace 2022: 78.
It was not, nor is it unfortunately, merely a literary invention. War wounds
have always disfigured thousands of faces. As regards the twentieth-century
wars, here you can find photo albums of plastic surgery practiced at the
King George Military Hospital in London https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/
b20160999#?m=0&cv=0&c=0&s=0; regarding more recent wars an interesting interview with Col. Robert G. Hale, commander of the Army’s dental
and trauma research detachment at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for
the New York Times, can be found at www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/science/
healing-soldiers-most-exposed-wounds.html?pagewanted=all (last accessed 05
January 2021).
Here specifically Chambers reflects on the following passage of the story: “Elle
allait éternellement de l’un à l’autre, épiant une indication, attendant un signe.
Elle guettait ces surfaces rouges qui ne bougeraient jamais plus. Elle regardait
avec anxiété ces énormes cicatrices dont elle distinguait graduellement les coutures comme on connaît les traits des visages aimés. Elle les examinait tour à
tour, ainsi que l’on considère les épreuves d’une photographie, sans se décider à
choisir.”
Featureless faces 127
27 The fertile soma/sema formula has a long philosophical history that dates back
to Plato’s Gorgias and goes as far as the post-structuralist works of Derrida
1972 or the semiotic works of Fontanille 2004.
28 On the importance of the face in cinema, from its origins, see Jandelli 2016.
29 Relevant in this sense is the question that Strong puts at the beginning of his
bioethical reflection on facial transplantation: “If the Phantom of the Opera
were offered a face transplant, would he have the capacity to say ‘no,’ or would
he be so desperate for a new face that he would grasp at straws?” (2004: 13).
30 On the relationship between body image and disfigurement, see Rumsey and
Harcourt 2004.
31 Today, face transplantation is a scientific reality, also thanks to the pioneering
work (not only in the medical field but also in the bioethical field) conducted
by researchers such as Maria Siemionow. See her 2019 volume in which she
reconstructs the stages, including the philosophical ones that led to her first face
transplant.
32 The notion was codified by Jurij Lotman. See Lotman 1984. For a good definition see Cobley 2009.
33 Proof of this are precisely those people who, for example, victims of an accident, lose their faces and need a transplant or cases in the news such as that of
the child born in Portugal without facial features: www.bbc.com/news/worldeurope-50166857 (last accessed 05 January 2021).
34 See Benveniste 1969.
35 My translation from Italian.
36 On these topics see also Surace (2020a) culture.
Filmography
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven 1984)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg 2001)
Bruiser (George A. Romero 2000)
Cell (Tod Williams 2016)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry 2004)
Final Destination (James Wong 2000)
Host (Rob Savage 2020)
INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch 2006)
IT (Tommy Lee Wallace 1990)
IT (Andy Muschietti 2017, 2019)
La Jetée (Chris Marker 1962)
Les Yeux sans visage (Georges Franju 1960)
Macbeth (Roman Polański 1971)
Mask (Peter Bogdanovich 1985)
Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper 1982)
Pontypool (Bruce McDonald 2009)
Pieles (Eduardo Casanova 2017)
Ringu (Hideo Nakata 1988)
Seconds (John Frankenheimer 1966)
Slender Man (Sylvain White 2018)
Smile (Parker Finn 2022)
128
Bruno Surace
Smultronstället (Ingmar Bergman 1957)
Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock 1945)
Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し, Hayao Miyazaki 2001)
The Elephant Man (David Lynch 1980)
The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell 2020)
The Man Without a Face (Mel Gibson 1993)
The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002)
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper 1974)
Truth or Dare (Jeff Wadlow 2018)
Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze 2014)
Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe 2001)
Videodrome (David Cronenberg 1983)