…..Are you threatening me or merely stating a fact?

Sigmund Freud’s contemporary essay The Uncanny (1919) provides a model for the feeling that the masks might have provoked when worn as intended in society, a fear that is produced by an occurrence or presence that is at once oddly familiar (heimlich) and frighteningly unfamiliar (unheimlich).9 Freud identifies heimlich as belonging to two sets of ideas: ‘on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’.10 As fundamentally uncanny objects, the masks were invented to cover the shocking reminder of violence apparent in disfigurement, and attempt to recreate a familiar, pre-war face in an unachievably realistic, and so obviously artificial, way. The uncanniness is the familiarity of intently constructed realism, an unremitting reminder of the former face that must be hidden, of what was ‘old-established in the mind which has become alienated from it only through a process of repression’.11 Rosalind Krauss has detailed the prescience of the uncanny object by declaring that ‘to produce an image of what one fears, in order to protect oneself from what one fears—this is the strategic achievement of anxiety, which arms the subject, in advance, against the onslaught of trauma, the blow that takes one by surprise’.12 In other words, the dread of the wounded face is replaced by the replication. As this article will show, the masks themselves became wearable indicators of tragedy by their suggestion of the gruesome face underneath. The masks took on themselves what they intended to conceal, inadvertently exposing, in Freud’s terms, ‘something which ought to have remain hidden but has come to light’.13

Footnote: The English definition of ‘unheimlich’ provided in Freud’s essay is, ‘uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive fellow’.

Source: Invisibility: Memory, Masks and Masculinities in the Great War by Katherine Feo, http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/1/17.full

Fig. 2.

Horace Nicholls, Repairing War’s Ravages: Renovating Facial Injuries. Various plates and attachments in different stages of completion. Source: Imperial War Museum, Q.30.460. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

You sad yet?

Hire him to shoot people through open windows. Pay him in prostitutes.

Make him babysit your mistress’ children.

Have him kill the D’allessio brothers.

Et. al.