Scars shouldn’t scare you
They’re the trademark of every over-the-top screen villain, but …
Freddy Krueger was her earliest memory. “I got compared to him when I was growing up,” says Tulsi Vagjiani, a 39-year-old plane crash survivor, who’s being featured in a new campaign challenging Hollywood’s attitudes to facial disfigurement.
In 1990, 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% burns, the 10-year-old 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. The demonic baddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series would be few people’s idea of a positive role model. The makeup 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.
Regressive franchise
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 burnt 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 blood-weeping 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 makeup departments to be an extremely unsettling villain, as he proved amply, armed with little more than a bad haircut, in No Country for Old Men.
Bond is one of the most regressive film franchises, falling back on this shorthand time and again, drawing the primitive association that whatever’s twisted or corrupt about these characters on the inside is somehow externally reflected in their facial features. (This is particularly ironic given that, in the books, 007 is described as having a 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 DC’s 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 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, CEO of Changing Faces, an advocacy group calling for a mindset change.
“It’s particularly worrying to see that children don’t tend to make this association until they are exposed to films that influence their attitudes towards disfigurement in a profoundly negative way.”
“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. “To call him Scar, to give him a scar across his face and aim that film at children is crazy. What did they expect to happen? This made me feel so upset and cross at the time. Scar is a lion and not a person, but children still made the connection.”
It’s not that Hollywood should be airbrushing out all visible differences, so much as considering the impact of using scars and disfigurements purely to augment their most negative characterisations. 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 goes to a mainstream school, can make a world of difference in encouraging more enlightened attitudes, just as Mask (1985) did before it.
However, these films could make further strides in representation than they did. They’re controversial among special-interest groups for casting actors without disfigurements in the central roles.
Voldemort jibes
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. Even the extraordinary and moving qualities of the 1980 film can’t inoculate it from all criticism: Merrick was presented as a freak-show victim with no control over his life by director David Lynch, whereas the real-life man chose to exhibit himself to escape the poorhouse.
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? Anyone different-looking at school now has Voldemort jibes to contend with as well.
“Harry wouldn’t be who he is without his scar,” says 14-year-old Sam, who was born, like Marcus, with a cleft affecting his lip and palate. “Voldemort is more like a monster and it’s clear that he’s the villain, so that’s not great. He’s shown as being scary because there’s something wrong with him and that’s not right. I was called Voldemort by a group of boys at school and I just walked away. I didn’t react because if you say anything or rise to it, it only gets worse.”
The #IAmNotYourVillain campaign comes at a time when diversity issues have never been more prominent. Changing Faces argues that, alongside the drive to reflect all ethnicities, sizes and sexualities in characters that make it to our screens, filmmakers need to remove the stigma from facial disfigurement, along with many other medical conditions and disabilities, too. — ©The Daily Telegraph, London
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