ALL THE BEST FREAKS ARE HERE

Tod Browning’s Freaks

This write up will contain spoilers for Tod Browning’s Freaks. In my defence, the movie was released in 1932 . Still, if you don’t want to be spoiled, this is your warning - turn back now.

Bit of a hybrid review/trip report here. On Monday the 5th March, I travelled to Northampton’s Errol Flynn Playhouse to watch a screening of Freaks in the company of living legend Johnny Mains (who has written what promises to be the definitive book on the subject, to judge by the unearthed material we glimpsed in his post-screening presentation). Throughout, I’ll weave in thoughts and facts gleaned from that talk - based on what I remember, so for whatever I get right, thank Johnny, and whatever I get wrong, blame me.

It was a treat to get to experience the movie for the first time on the big screen. The Errol Flynn Playhouse is a lovely cinema, complete with comfortable reclining seats and actual table space either side of the chair - small luxuries that transformed the elbows-in multiplex experience into a more relaxed affair - one that really allowed me to become engrossed in the film.

And pretty soon, captivated.

The plot is simply expressed, and standard melodrama fare - trapeze artist Cleopatra is having a clandestine love affair with strong man Hercules, but is also toying with the affections of Hans, a dwarf performer at the circus. When she discovers he is wealthy (as a result of his distraught former fiance, Frieda, accidentally revealing this as she begs Cleopatra to leave Hans alone, wrongly assuming that was the reason for her seduction in the first place) she conspires to marry Hans, and then poison him, in order to claim his wealth. However, at the wedding party, she becomes sufficiently drunk that when the Freaks perform a song welcoming her into the tribe (and yes, it’s as weird - weirder - than it sounds, but also sweet, somehow) she snaps, revealing her true contempt for them all. Hans realises she is poisoning him with his ‘medicine’, and fakes illness, until the clan can take it’s revenge.

Before I go any further, a word on the problematic use of the word ‘Freaks’, here. I am using it as shorthand, as the movie does, to describe the real-life circus performers the movie features - performers who in many cases had physical disabilities, and in some cases mental disabilities, and all of whom made their living (or, in many cases, made several other people’s livings) by appearing in circuses all over America. I am using it because it’s the parlance of the time, not because I think it’s a good or appropriate word to use in a modern context. One of the things this film smacks you around the face with is just how our attitudes towards disability have transformed in the last 80 odd years, and how brutal this ‘within-living-memory’ movie now seems in some respects.

In fact, fuck it, let's talk about it now, as we’re here - this movie was made in 1932. Hitler is still a year away from becoming Chancellor, but the movement he leads is already gaining significant electoral success and power.

Why am I talking about Nazis? Well, because it’s a relatively underreported fact that the Nazis road tested a lot of the mass murder techniques they’d later aim, with such brutal ferocity, at the Jewish population of Europe, initially on the disabled population of Germany. Using predictably vile propaganda that willfully misinterpreted Darwinism, they justified the ‘cleansing’ of anyone deemed ‘infirm’, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of disabled people were murdered by the Nazi state.

This would begin only a few short years after Freaks was released.

I’m not saying this to excuse the issues with Freaks, exactly - and there are a few - but rather to provide some context for just how hostile the general environment was when the film was released. Eugenics had been an utterly mainstream preoccupation since at least the Victorian era (with even renowned socialists like HG Wells approving of the idea, in principle).

In that regard, and for it’s time, Freaks is nothing short of revelatory. At least half of the films 60 minute running time stars the disabled performers, and they are treated with a level of humanity by the script that would have been unusual even in their day jobs. They have friendships, and courtships, and fallings out and petty jealousies and reconciliations. They are, in other words, portrayed as fully human. In 2018, that feels like a low bar so shocking as to be embarrassing - but, again, in 1932, it’s practically revolutionary.

They are also captivating to watch. The courtship of the siamese twins (played by Daisy and Violet Hilton) is especially well played, with one suitor intensely disliking the other twin - and the moment when both twins suitors are introduced to each other is a comedy of manners that’s kind of breathtaking in both its audacity, and in its simple human sweetness.

Elsewhere, Harry and Daisy Earle as Hans and Frieda are just wonderful - Hans with his heartbreaking pride that prevents him from seeing the brutal, callous manipulations of Cleopatra, and Frieda, whose simple dignity and love for Hans is in stark contrast to the cackling cruelty of his seducer.

In fact it’s telling overall that the ‘normal’ characters are by far the least interesting of this ensemble cast, and ultimately (with the exception of the cruel Cleo and Hercules), irrelevant in terms of the plot. While those actors may have been given star billing on the publicity and movie posters, the actual movie belongs foursquare to the titular performers. They are utterly compelling, from the early slice of life scenes, to the set piece wedding feast, all the way through to the mud soaked, stormy finale.

It’s one hell of a climactic scene, too, as they take their revenge on the real monsters - vicious would-be murder Cleo and her glib accomplice. The image of the massed group, crawling through the mud towards a cowering, whimpering Hercules is one that will linger very long in my memory, and the decision to cut away before the final vengeance is enacted for me highlighted the horror of the moment deliciously.

I’m still not sure, overall, what I think of the film - even with the illuminating and brilliantly passionate talk that followed - but I can see why the movie has it’s ardent fans. It’s certainly a phenomenal piece of cinema, and a genuine one-off. One of the many fascinating facts that I learned from the presentation following the movie was that this movie was Tod Browning’s passion project, the one he made once his direction for Dracula meant he could write his own ticket, and it single handedly destroyed his career on release. And again, for it’s time, it was amazingly, perhaps uniquely progressive.

There’s still, for me, an exploitative edge to proceedings that I find troubling. In particular Schlitze, and the performers playing his siblings. Schlitzie was born with microcephaly, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder which led to him having a very small brain and skull. Schlitzie was a circus performer throughout his entire life, an attraction at freak shows the length and breath of the US. Schlitzie was reported to be an affectionate and exuberant personality who loved being the centre of attention.

Schlitzie also had the mental age of a four year old.

Part of me can’t get past that, and the enormous and obvious issues this presents in terms of consent. For me, it renders any profit generated for others (and as a four year old, how much is the concept of money going to mean to Schlitzie?) by definition exploitative - up to and including his appearance in this singular film.

On the other hand, Schlitzie apparently and by all accounts loved to perform, and his most unhappy period was the one in which he spent extended time in a mental health facility.

And I don’t know what to do with any of that. ‘It’s complicated’ feels both trivially banal and deeply inadequate as an observation, but it’s what I am left with.

Well, that and Shlitze’s amazing smile, immortalized forever in the frames of Tod Browning’s Freaks - a face, a look of joy, that I will never, ever forget.

Yeah. It really is fucking complicated.

KP
10/3/18

FILM GUTTER REVIEW: DIFFICULTY BREATHING (2017)
UNDER THE FLOWERS: CIRCLE OF HELL ARRIVES IN SPRING 2018.

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