Freaks Show

Thierry Kuntzel

In the parlance of the circus, sideshow defines everything that is ‘off to the side’ of the main arena, the annexed spectacle: animals, exhibitions of exotic tribes, freaks. In Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) it is this last outcast group which is in question – the seeming unity of a closed world (the circus) replaced by a split between normal and abnormal. But, if we wish to grasp the finesse of the film’s narrative game, we must leave some room within this marked opposition for a de-grading of the characters.

Hercules and Cleopatra stand out physically from the class of normal people: he by his super strength (his act consists of subduing a bull) and his appetite (to Cleopatra’s question of how many eggs he would like: ‘Oh, I’m not very hungry – about six’); she by her extreme beauty (announced by the barker, remarked on by Hans), her powers of seduction (‘A Royal Prince shot himself for love of her’), even her physical place within the spectacle, up high on the trapeze. Symmetrically, Hans and Frieda are distinguished from the freaks, in so far as they are neither mutilated nor malformed, merely reduced in size. The subtle ‘unhooking’ of these two couples in relation to the groups to which they seemingly belong immediately assigns them a privileged place in the narrative – and sets up, beyond their opposition, the possibility of a rapprochement.

While reference has been made, so far, to a physiological pseudo-norm – an uncertain zone between the supra-normality of some characters and the sub-normality of others – we must, in order to establish a moral typology, now invert the terms of our reading. We must put ourselves on the side of the freaks in order to adopt their norm (rigid, no room for interpretation, irrevocable), this law according to which ‘to offend one is to offend all’. From this perspective, others enter into the clan of freaks in an auxiliary role: Madame Tetrallini (who considers them as her children), Venus (who consoles Frieda, and tries to foil the murderous plan of Cleopatra and Hercules), Phroso (who compliments Schlitze on her act, and rejoices when the Bearded Lady gives birth), and finally Roscoe and Mr Rogers, joined to the Siamese twins by marriage. Among their enemies, a difference is established between those who ignore the freaks or are content to verbally humiliate them (such as the card players who gather in the tent), and those who exert physical violence upon them (Hercules and Cleopatra, in their decision to overpower the Lilliputian Hans, and in the earlier scene with Josephine/Joseph).

It is Cleopatra who causes the scandal. Of course, Hans should have known that he was being made fun of (he only realises this after the wedding banquet); of course, he should have grasped the trapeze artist’s cutting irony, and believed his fiancée (‘To me you’re a man, but to her you’re only something to laugh at’). But Hans had the excuse of being blinded by passion, the excuse of having been completely played (manipulated, tricked) by the object of his love. The evil is not in the desire, nor in his eventual wandering from the sphere to which he ‘normally’ belonged. Money, here, is the real freak show: Cleopatra makes Hans lend her money, lets herself be offered flowers, fruit, champagne, jewellery, she demands a fur coat ... and, in doing this, she arrives at the Machiavellian idea of marrying her little suitor in order to secure his inheritance, following a familiar strategy. It is an exemplary demonstration of Marx’s formulation in his 1844 Manuscripts: ‘Money is the distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities.’

To Frieda’s exclamation over the eventuality of Hans’ and Cleopatra’s union – ‘No! You cannot do this!’ – the latter replies: ‘You wait and see.’ Two transgressions are knotted in this challenge: against the law of physical normality, and against the freaks’ law – which Cleopatra has already decided to infringe. Cleopatra does not realise how far things can really go: having breached those limits, she has only one recourse, to enter into the freaks’ community by sealing a pact with them, represented symbolically by the gesture of drinking from the same goblet. But she refuses this advance. Thus, she will be plunged into the freaks’ world in another way – literal, atrocious, indelible – by being anatomically transformed into one of them.

Freaks is the story of a fantastic crossing of an antithesis – an itinerary which takes us from the most stunning beauty to the most freakish ugliness. The film is the implacable reversal of its first image of Cleopatra (on the high-wire, seen from a low angle by the circus spectators, whose applause we hear echoing off-screen) into her final appearance, on which the film closes: a dolly into a pit where lies a freak so hideous that the women cannot hold back their cries of terror. An identical treatment of a similar antithesis is carried out in relation to the shot of Hercules crushing an animal in the show’s opening act: in the climactic storm, he is himself a crushed animal, lacking even the strength to drag himself through the mud as he experiences the freak attack.

This formal game might seem merely rhetorical if it were not, in fact, the demonstration of a rigorous reflection on the possibilities of a specifically cinematic expression (framing, arrangement of visual motifs, use of the soundtrack) to which the film bears witness at every level. To take only one example of consistent excellence of Browning’s work, and of its systematic strength, note the double triangulation upon which the film is organised: the triangulation of relations of desire, and of looks. Relations of desire: Hans abandons Frieda for Cleopatra; Cleopatra pretends to reciprocate Hans’ feelings, but takes Hercules as her lover; Hercules is abandoned by Venus who discovers Phroso’s love. The erotic charge is even more pronounced in the scene where Mr Rogers kisses one of the Siamese twins while the other pretends to read, and then shuts her eyes in order to enjoy more fully this pleasure by proxy. Looks: while the most obvious circuit runs involves the seeing/seen relation linking two characters (as illustrated by the classic shot/countershot), Freaks submits the spectator’s eye to an intense circulation which is married to the characters’ gazes. In the initial circus scene, Hans and Frieda watch the trapeze artist do her act. Cleopatra returns to the wings, and two montages occur concurrently: the first presents an alternation between shots of Frieda seeing and shots of Cleopatra and Hans as seen by her; the second is built on the relation between shots of Cleopatra viewed level at her height, and Hans seen level at his. Relations and looks combine to express the idea that desire always fixes on somebody other than the one who should apparently be its reference point. As if, in the cinema spectacle itself, a voyeur is necessary to allow the erotic relationship (or combinatory) ... a witness who enables the narrative to function (the role of the dwarf who spies through the caravan window is, in this respect, significant), as if it were even necessary to designate the place of the spectator within the film itself: the witness-voyeur required for the phantasy scenario to unfold.

1932, The Most Dangerous Game: to pay for his desire to transform man into game, Zaroff is handed over to the dogs. 1932, The Island of Dr Moreau: to pay for her interbreeding of species, Moreau is transformed into an animal by his own guinea pigs. 1932, Freaks: the narrative’s organisation is here inscribed in a certain sub-genre of cinema known as the fantastique, historically delimited (we have yet to establish whether this structure persists diachronically). However, Cleopatra (on whom the intrigue is centred) achieves neither Zaroff’s brand of evil charm – which maintains its mad passion right to the end – nor the excess of Moreau the demiurge. Another slippage: with the exception of the revenge scene set during a storm (the editing rhythm quickens, the screen is at moments totally engulfed by darkness, the action is driven by excess to the point where a man who is only a trunk carries a knife in his mouth), Freaks is handled in a completely realistic fashion. The freaks are really circus performers, who nearly all keep their actual names in the fiction; the music is only ever circus music; and the outline of the tale could be traced from almost any old (melo)drama. In short, Freaks perpetually de-classifies itself: a film of the transgression of biological genre, it itself transgresses cinematic genre.

But no more in reality than in fiction will the law allow itself to be trespassed. A sideshow in relation to the market and the exigencies of classification, Freaks, after its failure in the United States, will remain almost totally ignored by the world at large (it was necessary to wait, for example, until 1969 for its first screening in France). Framed by two speeches from the barker, the film (the story) offers itself as merchandise which the spectator has the right to see (to know) upon payment – a marketplace close to that presented in Lola Montès (1955) – while the good narrative must mask its exchange value in order to conform to a pseudo-nature. The spectator, already situated on the side of perversion, perceives that his voyeur-status doubles as exploiter-status. Thus he is irremediably situated – he who imagined that he belonged to the norm – within the sphere of those whom the moral law considers to be the real freaks.