mask/machine
Surgery, Dazai Osamu, and the status of the ‘troubled jester’
A.R. Sherbatov
Spoiler warning for all media mentioned in this essay, which includes (but is not limited to) I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Frank (2014), Joker (2019) and No Longer Human.
The surgeon will likely readjust the bone and cartilage underneath the skin.
The shape of the bones or cartilage in your nose can be changed in several ways. It depends on how much needs to be taken out or added, the nose's structure and available materials. For small changes, cartilage may be taken from deeper inside the nose or from the ear. For larger changes, cartilage from a rib, implants or bone from other parts of the body can be used. After these changes are made, the skin on the nose and tissue are put back, and the cuts are sewn together.
Over two years later, it still doesn’t feel real. I’m a very squeamish person and tend not to dwell on the “gory” details they talk about in Mayo Clinic passages, but I often imagine myself lying on the operating table, cartilage facing the world, the ghastly yet somehow picturesque hybrid of a Roman sculpture and an animal vivisected.
The average weight of a nose is eight grams; of a human, 62 kilograms. That means that if we follow the culturally popular but scientifically questionable experiment that demonstrated a soul to weigh 21 grams, the soul in a nose, by proportion, weighs a measly .00271 grams. The soul in the amount of cartilage shaved off during a rhinoplasty is thus negligible. And yet, as I spent the next week in recovery, taking painkillers, looping “As It Was” by Harry Styles, and watching Jujutsu Kaisen edits, I began to feel like a different person altogether. I stopped wearing a (physical) mask when I didn’t need to, while before the surgery I sometimes would wear one inside of my own house, even when no one else was around. I discovered promiscuity, how easy it is to break the heart of a man, how easy it is to ignore the desire to be one — how easy it is to put a machine back to work after splitting it apart into its quarks and leptons.
People frequently ask me why in any world I would get a facially-feminizing surgery as a transgender man. The response “someone’s got to” does not please them. It doesn’t quite please me either; I explain further. I was sixteen and not out at the time. To elaborate, it often feels as though there was a part of myself I was not out to either: a part that wanted to keep the machine working as it should, even if that meant cutting it up into pieces and stitching it back together.
Sometimes, I find myself still on the operating table, cutting away bits that are unproductive, unattractive, or otherwise undesirable. However, that leaves a question cardinal to the meta-surgical process unanswered — is the cut-up and resewn version more ‘me’ than the previous one? That is to say, does the external facade impact the self itself, or merely the sensation of it?
To answer this question, we must speak of the mask, and what it means to live inside one.
In the film Frank (2014), an aspiring yet generally talentless keyboardist named Jon is invited by an enigmatic band called The Soronprfbs to record an album with them in Ireland. The group is physically violent at times — they fight for the sake of team-building, with “Chinchilla!” as their ‘safe word’, and one of the bandmates eventually stabs Jon in the leg — and emotionally hostile towards Jon at other times. And yet, Jon is drawn to them, to the idea of gaining fame alongside them, so strongly that it oftentimes makes him seem childish.
The centerpiece of the band is its frontman, Frank, who wears a giant paper-mache head over his (actual) head. He wears it when he showers; he wears it when he sleeps. He even has a legal permit allowing him to cross the border with his head on (don’t know how he managed that). His personality is just as odd as his pretend face, calling Jon a “ginger bird” during musical exercises, leaving a remarkable impression on strangers with his charisma, and possessing a calm yet violent aura that proves vexing to even describe. Jon is not the only one mesmerized by Frank; Don, the manager of the band, tells Jon throughout the movie about how desperately he wants to be Frank, ultimately hanging himself while wearing a Frank head in the middle of the movie.
The movie is driven by one key question: What goes on inside that head… Inside that head? Everyone races, each in their own way, to either be Frank or understand him better than anyone else. And yet, despite his mysterious appearance, he cracks jokes and tries to make those around him feel comfortable with him. When Jon tells him, “But your head is still sort of intimidating”, he replies with, “well, underneath I'm giving you a welcoming smile. Would it help if I said my facial expressions out loud? [sic.] Welcoming smile.” For someone who has caused his bandmates so much emotional turmoil due to his fake head and other odd tendencies, he cares quite deeply about their wellbeing.
The essence of Frank’s character lies in its contradictions — how he is so closed-off yet so relaxed, so afraid of being perceived yet so desperate to be liked. He falls into a loose archetype of characters I will choose to call the ‘troubled jester’ — defined primarily by his alien yet somehow cheerful mask and the incongruences it causes. The troubled jester is skilled in acting blithe but is profoundly preoccupied with how others perceive him.
And, as we’ll see, the mask both builds and breaks him in the end.
Carefully holding a dainty foreign cigarette, almost as if to shelter it from the wind, I pace around the area outside the party. People I know vaguely come up to me; they introduce me to friends and friends of friends, they talk amongst themselves in my presence, they smoke, they drink, or do whatever else they feel like doing. It does not concern me in the slightest. As I pace, it feels like I am looking for something in particular — just elusive enough for me to not know what it is, yet tangible enough for me to know I could find it here.
Eventually, my eyes stumble upon the face of a short boy, and it feels like the little world I had created for myself just turned on its head. Nowadays I wouldn’t even be able to describe his face; I can’t remember a single detail making up its structure. And still, upon seeing it, I know immediately that everything has changed.
My cigarette drops to the ground without me realizing it. It’s gone by the time I do.
For a long time, I had told myself that what I wanted to look like was a mere fiction. I scribbled myself with short hair in sketchbooks and titled the sketches “dream”; I made my ex give me haircuts in the women’s bathroom at lunch. And yet, I was insistent — at least after the surgery — that there were no men who looked the way I hoped to. I should just give up. I don’t know what it was about that face, really, but I knew instantly upon seeing it that I was gravely wrong. My dreams were not fictions; nor would or should they go away. Turning myself into a generally conventionally attractive woman didn’t fix the problem, even though it made me function mostly as if the problem didn’t exist. In a sense of the term, I was a troubled jester — performing a state of giddy satisfaction with the status quo.
Protagonist Yozo Oba of Dazai’s masterpiece No Longer Human faces a similar dilemma. Yozo describes himself as a clown since childhood and constantly tries to make everyone laugh, describing these actions as his ‘clowning’ (Dazai 21). His mask, like Frank’s head, also has a physical representation, manifesting when his father asks him as a child whether he would like a book or a lion mask as a present. Reading his father's facial expressions and tone of voice he deduces that his father wants to buy him the lion mask, so at night, Yozo writes “lion mask” into his father’s notebook. The next morning, his father looks through his notebook and sees nothing of the action but another one of Yozo’s playful jokes.
Throughout the book, Yozo does some terrible things — as does the real-life Dazai, who wrote No Longer Human as a semi-autobiography — but that is not to say he does not care about being well-liked. He is extremely preoccupied with how people see him (and this is seen in Dazai’s other works as well, most notably “Thinking of Zenzo”). When a boy at school named Takeichi sees through Yozo’s trickery, Yozo begins to cling to him at all times, praying that he would not tell anyone how much Yozo was actually pretending.
In a sense, that face was my Takeichi — the ominous reminder that at least one person knows of my performances, of my true desires, of my motivations. At least one person can cut me up into pieces and take a look inside, even if he is not fully aware that this is what he is doing.
I Saw the TV Glow came out as I was in the middle of writing this piece. I do have a Twitter, which guarantees (as it does for any viral movie) that I already know essentially everything that happens in the movie before I can even pull up a piracy link. However, as friends began to tell me about the themes of repression and hiding in the movie, I resolved to watch it anyway, in hopes that it would remind me of Frank and the mask without the problems that I identified in my The People's Joker review.
The movie was, in short, everything it had been advertised to be. I do not cry at movies, but that was the hardest I've cried at a movie since I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower right before high school graduation (bad idea, very bad idea). I deeply identified with the structure of the movie — the same places are shown at different periods of time to emphasize Owen’s inability to change his reality and live authentically. A slightly different shot of the same street is shown as Owen is at different points of life, and the same shot of Owen sitting by a fire also plays at similar intervals, until he puts the fire out in the last such shot — a testament to his subduement, the final stage of repression.
Overall, there exists a mountain of different symbolisms I could discuss, so I'll just stick to what we can tie back to the mask. I'd like to first speak on The Pink Opaque, the absurd show at the epicenter of the movie. Tara and Isabel become Maddy and Owen’s escape, not out of reality altogether, but to a different and just as real one, where Owen can take his ‘mask’ off and become Isabel, where Maddy can take hers off and be Tara. The vehicle that the movie uses to convey this unveiling is death. To travel from the ‘real’ world to that of The Pink Opaque, Maddy must literally bury herself alive, erasing this version of herself in favor of the new one: Tara, who is headstrong and “doesn't take shit from anyone”.
Furthermore, as explained in the finale of The Pink Opaque, the show ends with Tara and Isabel buried alive and slowly suffocating, their hearts stored by the show's main villain in an industrial freezer. This is supposed to convey the message that as Owen and Maddy live their ‘ordinary’ lives (for Owen, this specifically represents a cisgender existence), their more authentic selves are being smothered. The usage of death suggests that saving these selves and taking off the mask is inherently a violent (more on this as it connects with Frank later) act.
Strangely, this detail reminded me a lot of another movie I quite like that references masks far more explicitly: Joker (2019). Arthur Fleck, beautifully played by Joaquin Phoenix, starts the movie as a professional clown, putting on both his physical clown mask and a metaphorical, ‘happier’ one for the job. That is, for the job, he must mask his psychiatric condition which causes him to burst out laughing at random times. Things start going wrong in his life — he is fired from his job after a mishap, the city cuts funding for his psychiatric medication, and after being assaulted for his condition on the train, he shoots three young men.
As he goes longer without his medication, he kills more and more people, until eventually he shoots ultra-famous night show host Murray Franklin while performing a comedy bit on the show, shouting the iconic line “you get what you fucking deserve!” on air. As the line is uttered and the gun is fired, it becomes clear that Arthur Fleck’s mask of happiness and stability has fully come off. The action renders him a revolutionary symbol of Gotham, with rioters taking after him in bloodshed and mayhem. This is a much more direct demonstration of the violence involved in removing the ‘mask’: as more killings unfold, Fleck’s condition becomes more apparent and, in a sense, less taboo.
Years after the main happenings of I Saw The TV Glow, when The Pink Opaque has long become available on streaming platforms and Owen has long given up in his dream of becoming Isabel, Owen finds it a childish TV show with not nearly the same impression. Its existence and reiteration as its own reality was what defined the show, so losing the character that allowed its viewers to escape reveals a mask-like character of not only Owen, but of the show itself. It underscores that the show was so good not because of the content, but because of the fervor with which it promised its viewers reality’s true subjectivity and malleability. Owen, having chalked up the promise of The Pink Opaque to be a childish dream, now sees it as just another kids’ show.
This is also reminiscent of Joker, in which Arthur Fleck faces essentially the same dilemma. At the beginning of the movie, he regularly watched Murray Franklin’s show. However, when he is asked to come on the show himself, Murray Franklin spends the time making fun of him (that is, until Fleck reveals his identity as a murderer). Both movies carry the theme of media — the object of promise — losing the dreams it once stored as the main characters age.
Frank is an interesting character to consider in this regard, as he is both a person and an object of promise. He is consumed — he gives people hope for a life beyond norms —, but he is sentient, and himself wearing one of the most literal of masks. That is one of the beautiful complexities of Frank: the way that it manages to place Frank on a pedestal, as if he is The Pink Opaque, the panacea, the pinnacle of authenticity, just to break all of those notions down. In a turbulent metamorphosis, Frank enters the movie a concept and leaves human.
There was this shitty poem I wrote in freshman year of high school called “The Imaginary Audience”. The premise was that a guy wakes up on a stage and goes about his day being watched by a crowd that represents an ‘imaginary audience’ (the gnawing feeling of being perpetually perceived and judged). The poem ends with a Groundhog Day-type closure where the day repeats, as he is always being watched and performing for others.
As he woke up, “He found himself in a large womens’ ball gown, two sizes small”. There are many deeply baffling things about this poem, mainly why the gown is both large and two sizes small (though I was 13 and very insecure in my body writing the poem, so that actually tracks), but also my eagerness and ability to portray emasculation as an ostensibly cis woman. I continue to reference the ball gown throughout the poem, supposedly as a representation of how out of place our main character feels, as though he is performing a role unbefitting of him.
Reminiscing on writing the poem made me think about how gender and emasculation connects with the media I talk about in this analysis. There is a reason that Frank, Yozo Oba, and Arthur Fleck are all represented by men. These media have tried specifically to represent what popular culture refers to as ‘male loneliness’ — in this case, defined by the inability to be emotionally transparent while also conforming to society and its needs. Behind the mask lies not a broken person who happens to be a man, but a broken masculinity altogether.
One of the most famous examples of masculinity simulated through masks is Yukio Mishima’s book Confessions of a Mask, which uses an autofiction-type structure to delve into his homosexual desires. Take the quote “How would I feel if I were another boy? How would I feel if I were a normal person? These questions obsessed me. They tortured me, instantly and utterly destroying even the one splinter of happiness I had thought I possessed for sure. My ‘act’ has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense at normality” (Mishima 105). Just as in the case of the three aforementioned media, Mishima paints the picture of a person who has failed at being successful as a man and wears a ‘mask’ to provide society with the Appearance of a ‘normal’, heterosexual man. However, he also goes beyond that to say something far more sinister: the identity of the man behind the mask has started to erode.
That is not at all to say that the mask is an exclusively masculine concept. A particularly climactic scene of Frank directly disproves that notion. Leading up to The Soronprfbs’ big show in Texas, Frank becomes more and more concerned with being likable, even trying to craft “[his] most likable song ever”. He lets go of his bandmates for causing too much violence and is convinced by Jon to do an unplugged acoustic set. The pinnacle of this charade occurs 30 seconds before the show is supposed to start, when Frank rushes into the dressing room to change into a dress and quickly put on some makeup. As he runs out, he tells Jon, “Let’s fuck.” This is not meant to be taken as explicitly queer, but rather as a symbol of how ‘likable’ Frank has become. He's without his violent bandmates, doing an unplugged show. He's weird still, don’t get me wrong, but he's weird in a palatable way. Frank and his eccentricity have metamorphosed into an object of desire, a shell of the odd and almost otherworldly frontman he once was. His feminine appearance in the scene represents that he has become nothing like what he was before: a Frank antithetical to Frank.
Jon and Frank end up not even getting through a minute of the show before Frank collapses on the ground, staring up in his dress at Jon, who is frantically asking Frank what’s wrong. Finally, Frank lets his mask crack for the first time in the movie as he utters, “M-music's shit. The music is shit.” The illusion is broken: divorcing from his community of aggressive oddballs to satisfy his hunger for likability only made him feel worse about himself and his craft. It is this crack of Frank’s mask that emasculates him as he lies on the ground in his dress, stared at by thousands of adoring fans in such a vulnerable position. Even with his gigantic paper–mache head on, in this moment he is nothing short of naked.
Of Joker, Frank, and No Longer Human, the beginning of Joker perhaps shows most clearly the apophatic nature of the mystery behind the mask, characterized by its unacceptability, unlikeability, and unmanliness. The mask is thus a symbol of acceptability, likeability, and ability to fulfill traditional gender roles. Yet, that meaning changes as Joker progresses — the clown mask becomes a symbol of violence, resistance, and community. It is not an agent of quiet anymore, gaining a place in the sphere of rebellion as seas of angry rioters don clown masks. What stays, thus, constant about the mask is its inherent dependence on the existence of an outside perception: when one puts the mask on, he is perceived as likable. Whether that means he is conforming to society or society itself is changing depends on the media at hand, but the constant is a profound compatibility between his Appearance and the preferences of others.
Resistance and violence as community is a crucial concept to keep in mind while analyzing all three media. In Frank, that community is The Soronprfbs, which Jon eventually realizes is a space he is inherently incompatible with. In the final scene of the movie, Frank takes off his head, reunites with the band, and sings a final song with them, titled “I Love You All”, as Jon watches from the sidelines and ultimately leaves the venue. Yes, The Soronprfbs are physically violent, emotionally turbulent, and generally don’t fit in. All of that has been explored in the scenes leading up to this one. This final scene is meant to highlight how the band’s chemistry and communication style exist not despite those traits, but because of them. In No Longer Human, that violent — in a more metaphorical sense of the word — realm lies in the crowd of Marxists that Oba/Dazai gets involved with, and in Joker, the followers that Arthur Fleck amasses become that crowd for him.
Each instance involves a community of people whose existence is a threat to the sociopolitical order: those labeled mentally ill, political extremists/anarchists, or both. The beauty of this archetype is that it can be applied to groups beyond this group as well. Frank could be a story about masking autism, or living as a closeted queer person, or as a functioning addict, or as a part of essentially any marginalized group, because Frank, more than anything, is a story about the violence inherent to being Different. In that sense, the character of Frank is designed to function as a common noun: every Othered person seeking to be seen as more than a violent creature is a frank in one way or another.
The ubiquity of dehumanizing Difference and Otherness is, perhaps, why No Longer Human and the anime character based on Osamu Dazai have gained immense popularity over the past four years. Wearing bandages all over his body as a result of his comically incessant suicide attempts, his mere existence is reminiscent of the Nietzschian mask: “take the masked intruder, for example: he does not wear the mask to make you think he is someone else; he wears it so that you don’t know who he is – but it is perfectly obvious that he wears it and why” (Stern 3). The allure of his character lies not in the concrete of what is beneath the bandages — which, to a viewer of Bungou Stray Dogs, would be rather obvious —, but rather the perpetual process of speculation. Thus, the Dazai character — as with that of Frank — was crafted to be instantly Other, his bandages a declaration not of what exactly litters his neck and forearms, but of the axiom that something does.
As I spent years putting these words together in one order or another, I stumbled upon an old TikTok I made a few days before my surgery. I caption the video of me posing in front of my iPhone camera with the surprisingly astute observation “excited to let go of my insecurity of my nose and [sic.] move on to insecurities I have yet to discover”. When my insecurity in my nose was all-consuming, I yearned to be able to ‘focus’ on something else. Every picture was about my nose. Every moment with friends was about my nose. Every pivotal moment of my life revolved around my nose and I was sick of it. I was sick of the reminder that I was naturally incapable of succeeding at a conventionally attractive femininity, even though that success would have gone to waste anyway. Something needed to happen next in a plot that had been buffering for years, even if that something involved more suffering and pain.
As it turns out, I would have my wish granted. Two years later, I started undergoing a series of procedures to reduce the appearance of the scars that littered my forearms. As I waited in a sterile white room for the first of these procedures, scrolling through Reels with shaky breaths and reminding myself of the short sleeves I bought from L Train Vintage in preparation, I couldn't stop thinking about that TikTok. I had finally found those insecurities yet to come; the saccharine, familiar yearning to move on to the next had grown back over my persona like a mound of weeds.
Plastic surgery, HRT, and the like are not masks. They do not serve to, in the real Dazai’s sense, hide a ‘true’ identity; nor do they serve to, in cartoon Dazai’s sense, emphasize that something is being hidden. What they change — by the understanding I gained — is not the soul, but something much more concrete: how our bodies interact with the world. The body calls out to the world; the world responds, perpetuating an endless series of transactions at least in part dictated by perceptions and forms. And yet, as more people grapple with the malleability of their body — in whatever form that may take — this web of transactions slowly breaks. Masks fall apart naturally as more individuals become self-aware of how mutable the forms that dictate their interactions are.
We all strive to one day live in a world where people aren’t Othered, where every Frank can take his mask off and tell his off-putting friends he loves them. However, in this day and age, a life without a mask in this world, while a truer one, isn't inherently easier. Mishima knew this. Owen knew this. Dazai knew this. Hell, the 2D-Tumblr-sexyman incarnation of Dazai knew this. I knew this from my own experience of being the first kid to come out in my New Jersey hometown, getting called a f*ggot in my high school’s cafeteria, watching people who swore to stick by me forever become strangers before my very eyes, and watching myself becoming a stranger to those same people. That is why media such as Frank are crucial to fostering belonging, showing viewers what it’s like to run and love among the odd, to shake hands with the Otherness, to cut it into pieces and sew it back together, to seize its power and forge a better day.
4537 words
No Longer Human
Confessions of a Mask
Bungou Stray Dogs
Mayo clinic rhinoplasty page