The mask - Village Magazine

November/December 2020 57

costumes protected them from ghosts whose

big night out it is. Over the centuries and as

Hallowe’en has travelled the world as a me

-

dium of disposable US cultural hegemony they

have embraced another role as entertainment

- fancy dress for children’s fun.

In a post-modern twist they have also been

used to symbolise evil – as with evil clowns,

the Joker in Batman movies, the ‘Gimp’ in Pulp

Fiction or Frank Booth in ‘Blue Velvet’.

Masks are an artiﬁce in many horror ﬁlms to

conceal the identities of a killer. Notable ex

-

amples include Jason Voorhees of the Friday

the 13th series, Jigsaw Killer from Saw, Ghost

-

face of the Scream series, and Michael Myers

in the Halloween series.

Which illustrates how complex masks are.

What else grounds a celebration of the resur

-

rection, children’s glee and ﬁlm horror, and

can cause pitch ﬁghting on the streets of the

capitals of the world, driven by aversion to

their compulsory use?

There’s a good bit of theory about masks,

certainly the heaviest of which is ‘The Way

of the Masks’ (1975) in which Belgian-born

anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, sets out

to demonstrate, through a case study, that

masks worn by certain native Americans can

-

not be interpreted in themselves as separate

objects but, as with myths, must be returned to

their transformation set: the set of masks and

their associated myths in which each echoes

and transforms the others. “My hypothesis”,

Levi Strauss laid down, “will be proven right

if, in the last analysis, we can

perceive between the origin

myths of each type of mask,

transformational relations ho

-

mologous to those that, from

a purely plastic point of view.

prevail among themselves”.

Since he was a structuralist we

won’t have to ﬁnd out if his hy

-

pothesis was indeed proven.

Or even necessarily under

-

stand what he meant.

Belgians seem to have a

thing for masks. Surrealist

René Magritte fetishised them

The Lovers ”is a series of

at least four pieces in which

Magritte features smothered

lovers. The skin-on-skin plea

-

sure is absent. The act is repugnant—kissing

through cloth

Magritte’s ‘in search of lost self’ shows that

human emotions can be adopted and dropped

like a mask – or an umbrella.

Perhaps the Belgian penchant for surrealism

grounds its place at the heart of the EU, that

centre of bureaucratic absurdity.

Belgium naturally made the widespread

wearing of masks compulsory in the pandem

-

ic, as soon as it could (before beating a dra-

CULTURE

The mask

By David Langwallner

Wear it your own way

The Lovers (left)

The Serch (below)

A

MASK IS an

object normally

worn on the

face, typically

for protection

(physical or

spiritual) of the

wearer or of

another.

Althouh it is dicult to see that masks will

ever be seen the same after Covid-, we can

see from our abortive imminent Hallowe’en,

that masks are not always compelled and

protective.

They can also be used for disguise or enter

-

tainment.

Sometimes they straddle purposes.

Hallowe’en is the eve of the resurrection of

souls.

People believed that wearing masks and