CM2001 Article: Cooke .. Facelessness and Betrayal

Deleuze and Guattari mention two other famous betrayers, both of whom are marked by their deviance, their pure difference, their madness and their obsession; the marks of the faceless. Shakespeare's Richard III, and Aguirre, from Werner Herzog's film Aguirre Wrath of God. Both are lop-sided creatures, their entire bodies having undergone a radical defacialization; Richard III is a cripple, Klaus Kinski as Aguirre slopes through the film as if always with one foot elsewhere. Yet they are not entirely scapegoats, they are not the token representatives of an Otherness which is rendered harmless by manifestation or expulsion; rather, they are always in a sense returning, both from and to an elsewhere, to bring about their own personal re-vision of the social. And this elsewhere is visible in all that they do, in their mad ambition and the final thwarting of all their desires. Trapped on a raft circling in slow waters, with nothing but swarming monkeys and the dead bodies of his daughter and crew, Aguirre remains with his gaze firmly set on some distant land: "I will marry my daughter and found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen".

On a wider scale, perhaps it is that the face always has something to do with betrayal, in the sense of a revelation - not necessarily a relevation of 'Truth', but rather, a revelation of the way things are, or the way in which the machine functions. And that is always the function of cinema anyway; it exists in order to display the machines of everyday, and not-so everyday, life, and the use of the face and the facial machine is one of the most explicit ways to do this. Think of Greta Garbo in George Cukor's 1936 film Camille; the inexorability and inevitability of the betrayal of love; under the sign of the femme fatale, the Face of despotic feminine beauty will always betray; and what ironic twist would Nietzsche put to this? "The perfect woman tears to pieces when she loves..." (Ecce Homo, p.266).

In this way, the betraying face displays the abstract machine of faciality for all to see, whichever form of betraying face it is; the face of Garbo demonstrates the despotic function of faciality, the face of Aguirre testifies to the radical otherness and power of the deviant face, the face that circulates on some weird axis, operates through alternative traits of faciality.