February 10, 1998

REVIEW: Face-Off

This movie was about the pain, unwisdom, and final impossibility of identification with another, and thereby the good obverse: the precious sovereignty of identity with oneself. It is built on the tension between essence and appearance, content and form, which is the founding melodrama of Western metaphysics. Recall the dynamics of Plato’s ideal Form coming down to earth in the form of the copy, or Kant’s objects-in-themselves and -for-themselves. I predicted to myself, at the beginning, perhaps a polemic against cosmetic surgery, or the futility of the “role model” ideology. I was wrong.

First, the freefloating, unexplained terror of Nicholas Cage’s villain must be explained: it cannot. The movie gives us no clue why the West Coast is to be exterminated. We should assume it to be the real objective threat we face, which, in the absence of a crystallized mutually-assured-destruction scenario, remains as inexplicable as the Cold War ever was. This imminent violence has a subjective and personally experienced counterpart in the similarly mysterious crackpot scheme to neutralize the former with a sacrifice of (or is it to?) identity. John Travolta’s hero is coerced into, by being given, this one option.

Levi-Strauss the structuralist, in his search for binary oppositions, might have found its counterpart in the subjective threat posed to the doctor, to replace the missing face-identity when the villain’s coma comes to an end. As if identity were a surgical procedure! Here the drama begins in earnest.

Both hero and villain step out of allegedly their lives into the template of the other’s, only to find too close a fit for comfort. It is disconcerting to them: Travolta’s villain finds himself almost sorry for having killed the hero’s little boy, and at any rate comforts the wife in her time of need and straightens out the daughter with a bit of swapmeet psychology, the “correctness” of which—as if psychology were an exact number, or more precisely, a price—Adorno explained as a result of the division of labor in the individual. Cage’s hero finds himself confronted with a little boy—just the right age!—and the sexual plaything / superbitch he probably always wanted. The terror has by now been neutralized, the bloodthirsty gods of identity appeased: the West Coast is safe for democracy. After an appropriately barbaric scarification ritual, both characters bear the trace of sublimated catastrophe. They appear not to feel like themselves today.

But whence spiritual mutilation? What about the angst? What about the strain of living a damned lie? What about the agony of being deprived of one’s precious identity? Cage’s hero comes close to despair in prison, but he has lived out at least one illicit sexual fanstasy. Travolta’s villain has done at least one good deed, but he has also come close to compassion under the influence of hearth and home. We should begin to wonder. “No, the characters are just acting. They are still out to kill each other.” But who knows their motivation now? The villain has confessed that he wants to go straight. The horizon of his evildoing recedes further into the future, after he does some more good deeds just to establish his credit. The hero has confessed that he wants to take up evildoing. He has taken up evildoing. His possibility of reconciliation is foreclosed in the present. He has to assault another prisoner, fuck another woman not his wife, do some more drugs, in order to keep up his reputation.

So far, this is in line with Lacan’s mimetic desire, which has the subject imitate the other only in order to cancel out and replace it. Some form of this dialectic, perverted into a more or less typical winner-take-all, cops-versus-robbers line of thinking probably guided the writer, but became inconsistent at the beginning, when the hero and villain really switched places. We were beyond simple desire for the other from the beginning.

This movie is about the exchange process. The contradiction whereby this proidentity, antiidentification movie destroys the message it meant to promote, is not arbitrary and sloppy writing, but it reveals the film’s original intent as the opposite of what is apparent, in order to reinforce the lesson we learn every day at work: human beings—even (or structurally speaking, especially) heroes and villains—are ultimately interchangeable. Identity is dethroned where identity reigns at all. Personality, the essence of individuality, is no proof of essence, even to the individual who possesses it. Here, the hero-villains shimmy out of personality like 70s swingers out of their pants when exchanging significant others. Neither the spouse nor the innocent child—both of whom were objects of sexual and filial trade—can tell who you are. Neither hero-villain suffers more than the original would have, neither hero-villain breaks character, and neither one is missed. Identity is a surgical-technical procedure after all, proving it an extreme form of appearance, wherein quantitative change can make for qualitatively different experience. Thus edified in her desire to do something about her physical appearance—it was not for no reason that she was made plain and homely—John Travolta’s hero’s wife should have made a corresponding visit to the plastic surgeon.

films movies identity structuralism essence appearance