Day 20: Eyes Without a Face

Day 20 of Calloween Movie Month

Content warnings: medical malpractice, misogyny, body dysmorphia, parental abuse, isolation, mention of vehicular accidents, gaslighting, surgical/medical imagery, mild gore

Recommended?: Yes

Spoilers and discussion of many of the mentioned topics below. You have been warned.

If looks could kill... Oh wait!



Eyes Without a Face (also known as Les Yeux sans visage in French) is a film about Dr. Génessier, a man ridden with guilt after he causes an accident that disfigures his daughter Christiane's face. To make up for this, he fakes her death and starts murdering beautiful young women to attempt to give their faces to her.

In many ways, Eyes Without a Face is similar to a film I touched on towards the start of the month, Helter Skelter. The premises are not entirely too different from each other. They're both medical horror and cautionary tales about the obsession with beauty. They both involve plastic surgeries that would be both unethical and physically impossible in the real world.

But whereas Helter Skelter is both tragic and satirical, Eyes Without a Face is straightforward and strangely uplifting.

Christiane is obsessed with her beauty, even going so far as to beg her family to let her actually die to end the suffering of not being beautiful. But then, when a facial surgery seemingly goes well, she doesn't even seem particularly happy about it. She feels as though she's looking at another person who looks like her, and in many ways she is. This feeling is worsened when her body starts rejecting the facial tissue and she starts to physically decompose over the course of a month, leading her to put her uncannily beautiful rubber mask back over it.

No matter what she does, she can't get back what she lost, but her father won't let her move on. He's grieving her beauty more than she ever had. He even locks her away to prevent her from being seen and separates her from her fiance by telling the world she's died. She's not given the freedom to become a full person without a pretty face. She's trapped, like a caged animal.

Her father also leads other women into the trap, but gives them a freedom in death she's never allowed to have. It's not until Christiane is able to save another woman from her fathers trap that she realizes she can save herself, too.

She ends the movie freeing both the aggressive, strong, loud dogs and the beautiful, soft, quiet doves her father has also imprisoned. The dogs attack her father, disfiguring him in much the same way as she was. And the doves cautiously take flight. She walks alongside them. They represent the dualistic nature of her. Her forcefully isolated internal strength and her unwilling entrapment in external beauty. By freeing them with herself, she can come to terms with everything that has happened to her, and find peace in her life.

The only way to stop beauty from becoming pain is to free yourself from any standard of beauty that is not your own. Physical beauty will fade, but a peaceful and free life you've created for yourself will stay with you until death. Let your hungry hounds feed and your caged birds sing.