Masks
I’m currently in the middle of working on our winter issue of PinkPlayMags. This issue’s theme is Burlesque and a really interesting sub-textual topic has come up in a number of the articles: The Masks We Wear.
My sister‘s instalment this issue in her column is called just that. As I was reading it through and editing, it struck a number of personal chords on insights I’ve been experiencing of late. (Sorry, no spoilers, you’ll have to wait until the issue comes out! I’ll do a follow-up post where I speak directly about her article. I know, such a tease, eh? But isn’t that was good burlesque is all about?)
Doing a quick google for images on masks I was struck by something very intersesting: most of the images of women in masks were elegant, beautiful and mysterious in a seductive way; conversely, those of men in masks were all horrorific or of the lucha libre sort, with the odd super-hero thrown in for good measure. I took from these images that women seem to use their masks to tease and entice, whereas men use them as a warning or armour to protect themselves from prying eyes.
Well all this has me thinking. When you are writing characters, you are typically stripping away these masks so that your reader has a chance to see what really lies at the core of the people in your stories. However, they must remain in place amongst these same characters in order for them to maintain their relationships in said story. Tearing them off for all to see, often becomes a pivotal moment of character transformation, forever altering — sometimes outright destroying — their evolutionary path in the story.
Fantastic examples that spring to mind are:
Jean Grey‘s Phoenix persona: was it just her repressed passions, or her dark side made manifest?
The knights’ elaborate, mask-like helmets in the John Boorman film, Excalibur, showed the personae of the wearers.
In Twilight, Rosalie Cullen, though she acts cold to Bella at first, reveals that she actually envies Bella and is sad on the inside because of her inability to get pregnant.
Everyone of any importance on Babylon 5, as summed up by G’Kar’s word of warning to Catharine Sakai: “No one here is exactly what he appears. Not Mollari, not Delenn, not Sinclair… and not me.” I thoroughly enjoyed Babylon 5 because of the intricate masks all the characters wore — it was like they had one for every significant relationship in the series.
In Avatar The Last Airbender, Prince Zuko, is introduced as a ruthless, conceited bully who cares only about himself and looks down on everyone, when in reality, he’s just a kid who wants his father to be proud of him. His sister, Princess Azula, pretends to be a secure, strong, cold woman, but it’s revealed that she’s horribly lonely and desperate for her dead mother’s approval.
So like the masks themselves, this whole idea of hiding yourself while continually seeking to discover what’s behind the masks of others, ends up being an irresistibly delicious conflict and why they make for such compelling stories.
And yet, my personal struggle continues to be one where I long to strip off all my masks so I can just be accepted for who I am, but beyond the terror of exposing myself so completely, I think my greatest fear lies in the fact that I’m unsure who I am without them: am I merely the sum total of all my personal masks waiting to be collectively assimilated, or am I something beyond all that?
Makes for an intriguing story, doesn’t it?
Broken Mask by Bas Hessels
Jeff Harrison
Jeff Harrison 