On Faces and Violence

I’ve been thinking about Voldemort, and the question I kept asking myself was, “Why doesn’t Voldemort have a human face?” The question was more than just about how Voldemort’s face was disfigured to look as strangely alien as it did in the movies. The question was about what literary purpose it serves to take away Voldemort’s human face. He was a student at Hogwarts, after all. Why did his sojourn into evil require the loss of ordinary facial characteristics?

Then I began counting the number of science fiction and fantasy stories that take away the faces of evil. Sauron in Lord of the Rings was never shown to have a human face. None of his orcish minions had human faces. Even the “reavers” on Firefly and Serenity disfigure their faces. Why? Are we afraid of depicting evil with a human face? Alien invasion movies do this on a regular basis: they provide us with an enemy that is inhuman. They way I see it, there are at least 3 possible reasons for this literary trope.

(1) Perhaps we are afraid of “facing” the reality that those who commit monstrosities and unspeakable acts are the same species as ourselves. Perhaps we are more comfortable watching beasts, aliens, orcs, and savages commit atrocities, than watching men and women commit them, who subsequently return home to their spouses and children for dinner. The thought that the ingredients for pure evil lie within us all terrifies us. That is one possibility.

(2) Perhaps it is a symbol of what evil does to an individual or group of people. There is certainly something inhuman about the evils acts portrayed in these stories. Emmanuel Levinas describes how the human face calls us into obligation. And, according to Levinas, to commit violence against another, one must be willing to ignore or metaphorically mask the face of the other. One has to pretend they are not human. And perhaps a symbol of this neglecting of the faces of others is to be depicted as not having a face oneself, and therefore inhuman. Perhaps it’s literature’s way of saying that one must be inhuman in order to be inhumane.

(3) The third possibility, for me, is the most startling. War is evil, because no matter what atrocities the enemy has committed, part of our own humanity is injured when we commit violence against others. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight evil, and kill those who seek to kill us. It just means we can’t do so unscathed inside. Another thought that I’ve had is that one reason Lord of the Rings and other fantasy movies depict evil as grotesquely inhuman is to mitigate the startling consequences of the wars that are fought. No one feels bad for killing an orc. Our hearts don’t bleed for goblins. And so we can ignore some of the more heartbreaking consequences of war by dehumanizing the “bad guys” and depicting evil forces as beasts, rather than human beings with human faces. We can pretend that we don’t die a little inside every time we cheer the death of the enemy.

Thoughts?