#saaaaam

🫣

His hands hover over your sides. “Say it.” “...Never.” “Say I’m the tickle king.” “You’re an asshole.” He cracks his knuckles. “Wrong answer.”

What is it about masks and loneliness? The obvious answer is that they offer relief from exposure, from the burden of being seen – what is described in the German as Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conveyed by masks. To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. This is what makes masks so poignant as well as so uncanny, sinister, unnerving.

Masks amplify the way in which skin is a barrier or wall, acting as a marker of separation, singularity, distance. They are protective, yes, but a masked face is also frightening. What lies behind it? Something monstrous, something awful beyond bearing. We’re known by our faces; they reveal our intentions and betray our emotional weather. All those horror films that feature masked killers – Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, Halloween – play on a terror of facelessness, of not being able to make an appeal, to speak as we say face to face, mortal to mortal.

These films often also articulate the deforming, dehumanising, monster-making horror our culture considers loneliness to be. Here donning the mask signifies a definitive rejection of the human state, a prelude to wreaking revenge on the community, the mass, the excluding group... Masks also beg the question of the public self: the set, frozen features of politeness and conformity, behind which real desires writhe and twist. Maintaining a surface, pretending to be someone you are not, living in the closet: these imperatives breed a gangrenous sense of being unknown, of going unregarded.