Stop using scars as a shorthand for evil
Tim Robey reports on the campaign to stop the powerful and influential movie industry stigmatising scarring
‘Freddy Krueger was my earliest memory,” says Tulsi Vagjiani, a 39-yearold plane crash survivor, who’s being featured in a new campaign challenging Hollywood’s attitudes to facial disfigurement. “I got compared to him when I was growing up.”
In 1990, the 10-year-old Vagjiani, from London, was rescued from the wreckage of an Airbus 320 that had crashed on its way from Mumbai to Bangalore, leaving 92 people, including her parents and brother, dead. Sustaining 45 per cent burns, she went through more than 50 reconstructive operations on her face, chest and legs in the years that followed.
But, aside from her physical injuries, there were deep psychological scars, and the Krueger taunts made them even worse. An embodiment of pure evil and insatiable revenge, the demonic baddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series would be few people’s idea of a positive role model. The make-up job on Robert Englund, the actor who played him, was itself overtly based on medical photographs of severe burn victims.
And Freddy Krueger is just one of a string of movie villains — from Scar in The Lion King to Darth Vader and Kylo Ren in Star Wars, and the phantom in The Phantom of the Opera
— who have been given facial traumas by directors, and thus encouraged the assumption that disfigurement is something to be afraid of.
Look at the example of the Bond films, where no fewer than five key villains are given disfigurements so that we can’t mistake them for anything other than vicious. There’s Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld, with the deep vertical scar, in You Only Live
Twice (1967), Sean Bean’s burned Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye (1995), the henchman Zao (Rick Yune), aka “our little friend with the expensive acne”, who has diamonds embedded in his face after Bond blows up a suitcase containing the stones in Die Another
Day (2002), Mads Mikkelsen’s bloodweeping Le Chiffre in Casino Royale
(2006), and Javier Bardem sans dental implant in Skyfall (2012).
It’s not as if Bardem, say, needed this extra help from the effects and make-up departments to be an extremely unsettling villain, as he proved amply, armed with little more than a mop top, in No Country for Old
Men.
Bond is one of the most regressive film franchises. (This is particularly ironic given that, in the books, 007 is described as having a 7cm long vertical scar on his right cheek.)
Superhero films have been just as guilty, very recently: consider Andy Serkis’s branded Ulysses in Black
Panther, Thanos in Avengers: Infinity
War, or Isabel Maru (Elena Anaya), wearing an eyes-without-a-face-style mask after exposure to her own chemical weapons, in Wonder Woman.
It’s telling in the Batman movie The
Dark Knight that Aaron Eckhart’s character, Harvey Dent, transforms from an upstanding Gotham attorney to an insane criminal at the exact point where half of his face is destroyed in a bomb blast. Now Vagjiani and other young people are backing calls by UK charity Changing Faces for the film industry to stop using scars, burns or marks to represent evil. “The film industry has such power to influence the public with its representation of diversity, and yet films use scars and looking different as a shorthand for villainy far too often,” says Becky Hewitt, Changing Faces’s chief executive.
“Scar is such an evil character,” says Vagjiani’s fellow champion in the Changing Faces campaign, 14-year-old Marcus, who was born with a cleft palate. “Scar is a lion and not a person, but children still made the connection.”
The campaigners want to see themselves — not evil or malign versions of themselves — reflected on our screens.
A film like Wonder, last year’s major global hit about a boy with Treacher Collins syndrome who gets teased when he starts a mainstream school, can make a world of difference in encouraging more enlightened attitudes, just as Mask
(1985) did before it.
The BBC was recently criticised by disability charities for casting the able-bodied Charlie Heaton, from
Stranger Things, to play John Merrick in their new version of The Elephant
Man.
Some would point to Harry Potter’s lightning scar as a counterexample in this ongoing trend. He’s the hero, after all. But it’s a cool shape, and easily concealed by his fringe — more edgy accessory than impairing disfigurement. Besides, in the same universe, why does the archvillain Voldemort have that flattened nose, and the same kind of smooth skin Ralph Fiennes previously sported as a burns victim in The English Patient?
The #IAmNotYourVillain campaign comes at a time when diversity issues have never been more prominent. The British Film Institute is the first organisation to support the campaign.
“Film is a catalyst for change and that is why we are committing to not having negative representations depicted through scars or facial difference in the films we fund,” says Ben Roberts, the BFI’s deputy chief executive.
The BFI film fund has given financial backing to a forthcoming drama called Dirty God, about a woman in South London rebuilding her life after an acid attack.
It’s especially notable for the casting of newcomer Vicky Knight — a burns survivor herself — in the leading role.