Face Transplant Cinema: Time (2006) & Vertigo (1958)

Face Transplant films are few in number, but a steady trickle of these films from wide range of cinematic periods, styles and cultures.  Films frequently deal with themes of identity and escaping one’s own inner demons through a vain (failed) attempt at an assumed identity.  These films are also typically moral tales in which our protagonists are punished for their attempt at escape from their own past, and speak volumes about populist notions of identity and beauty.  Unsurprisingly, one of the most recent of these films, Kim Ki-Duk’s Time, hails from South Korea.  Famous not only for its cinema, which often blends and combines genres and styles in interesting ways well-suited to the genre, South Korea is famous also for its plastic surgery obsessed youth culture (Suissa). 
Here, we will examine Time in conjunction with Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Vertigo through the lens of face transplant cinema.  Vertigo deals with issues common to many face transplant and extreme plastic surgery genre pieces.  Though not a face transplant or plastic surgery film proper, its relationship to Time renders Vertigo even more important in regard to the genre, as a kind of inverted prototype for Kim’s [fascinating, albeit lesser] film, and as a reference point, which Kim seems to have used it as, for plastic surgery films and other films which deal with identity themes.  Both of the films discussed here deal with failed attempts at reasserting masculinity by our male protagonists.  Their literal (or symbolized in the case of Hitchcock) impotence must be overcome by subduing independent female characters with identity crises.  There are many inversions between the plots of the two films, an alternative narrative structure provided by Kim, and many similarities in regard to the two directors’ technical approach.

            The respective plot of each film unfolds largely through extensive use dialogue to explain the diegesis and provide insight into the characters’ personalities and motivations.  The only action sequences in Vertigo are the 3 instances of people falling to their death (at the beginning, middle, and end of the film).  Time also has little in the way of action, aside from a rock thrown through a window and the traffic fatality at the end of the film.  Scottie’s (James Stewart) emasculation is explored through conversation "Midge, do you suppose many men wear corsets?"  Moments later, after a failed attempt at self-therapy using a stepping-stool, he falls limply into the arms of his female friend.  Midge is an independent woman who fraternizes freely with men like Scottie, alone in apartments, and represents a threat to his masculinity in the light of his frailty, his vertigo, while also playing the role of the doting mother. 

With respect to Scottie’s investigation of Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) at the behest of a “concerned” husband, Hitchcock frequently uses dialogue to misdirect and further confound his viewers throughout the film’s first hour.  The constructed mystery surrounding the “possessed” Madeleine seems more and more like a case of spirit possession, as every expert Scottie speaks with, as well as what he is told by Madeleine, seem to uniformly confirm this.  The viewers are deceived along with Scottie, when Madeleine recounts her “dream,” leading them to the mission’s bell tower, a place where his inadequacies are bound to prevent him from rescuing her.  These inadequacies and Scottie’s “weakness” are referred to repeatedly in the dialog during the inquest into her death.  Further muddying the water, are statements by characters which are truthful.  Midge expresses her distaste and jealousy when she sees Judy running out on Scottie, shortly after he has rescued her from her dip in the bay.

            In Time, Characters’ feelings spill out during arguments, propelling the events of the plot forward.  In her first interaction with her boyfriend Ji-Woo (Ha Jung-Woo), Seh-Hee (Park Ji-Yeon) jumps to conclusions, scolding Ji-Woo for looking at the attractive young waitress, “After two years, you’re sick of me, huh?”  Her insecurities resurface later that night in a bedroom scene.  Ji Woo’s impotence is presented more bluntly to the audience by Kim, when he apologizes to the pre-plastic surgery/identity change Seh-Hee, after he fails to respond to her advances, “I’m sorry, I’ve been tired lately.”  “Tired of seeing my same body every day,” counters Seh-Hee, readdressing her insecurities which inspire her decision to seek dramatic plastic surgery.

            Both films use mise-en-scène in important ways.  The Spanish mission, the Bay Bridge, the Bay, the club room with fabulous red wallpaper all provide backdrops for Vertigo’s dialogue to unfold.  There is also important symbolism in the mise by use of the lighting, location and props.  Scottie’s idealized, pure Madeleine Elster is betrayed to be a common harlot, Judy Barton, living in a cheap hotel.  The light from the green neon sign spills through her window onto Judy and Scottie’s faces, and when she first emerges as Scottie’s reconstruction of Madeleine, it is from this green light she emerges in the shot.  This is echoed in reverse in Kim’s film, as the bright lights used by the plastic surgeon shine into the camera, and the shot dissolves to white.  This is repeated, as eventually both characters undergo operations. 

In Vertigo, Hitchcock makes use of a massive department store mirror, when Scottie takes Judy shopping to begin amassing a wardrobe to mold Judy into Madeleine.  Again the dialogue gives us cues, as Scottie tries to reassert his masculine dominance over his unwilling female, "Scotty what are you doing?" and then later "No! No I won't do it!"  Judy cries as she pulls away and Scottie encroaches on her crowding her against the wall of mirrors, forced to face herself and confront the actions that got her into this entanglement.

The mirror is, as it is in any identity-themed film, important to Kim as well.  After Seh-Hee has assumed the new identity of See-Hee (Seong Hyeon-a), and reinserted herself in Ji-Woo’s life, we have a montage sequence in which she spends time in front of her mirror changing clothes and putting on make-up, causing us to suspect her identity change has done little to affect actual change within Seh-Hee/See-Hee.  Another shot in See-Hee’s apartment parallels Hitchcock’s composition.  In it Ji-Woo chases after See-Hee, who has just recovered a photo from him.  He crowds her against the wall trying to see the picture while she slyly tucks it under the mattress, a mirror in the lefthand quarter of the frame sharing the shot.

In Vertigo, the bell tower at the Spanish mission stands as a towering phallus, mocking Scottie and his inadequacy, a symbol that he must overcome in order to reassert himself.  It is also, along with Judy (reconstructed by Scottie as Madeleine), the means through which he does finally assert his dominance, forcing her to the pinnacle with him, as if what he needs to make himself a man is to overtake her free will.  When finally Scottie reaches the top of the tower with Judy/Madeleine, he conquers his fear, and in so doing reasserts his masculine identity.  They embrace, only for Judy to fall ironically to her own death, startled by a curious nun who emerges from the shadows.

The entire narrative arc of Vertigo is a thinly veiled chauvinist fantasy by which a man conquers his impotence only by overpowering women and thusly reasserting himself, strong and manly as opposed to the flaccid, corset-bound Scottie we got to know after his accident.   Female characters in both films are portrayed as petty, needy and weak.  Time, however, is not so much the male domination fantasy that Vertigo is.  In fact, it Ji-Woo who is killed at the end of the film, hit by a car while crossing in traffic, fleeing See-Hee, after himself having dramatic plastic surgery and creating a new identity for himself, rather than forcing See-Hee to fit her former mold as would Vertigo’s Scottie.  While neither film is sympathetic to its female characters, Ji-Woo’s actions are more emotionally driven, and decidedly more effeminate based on our understanding of Seh-Hee’s actions as being driven by her sense of inadequacy, a byproduct .

Aside from the death of the male protagonist at the end of the film, there are several other interesting inversions in Kim’s film.  Time transposes the role of Scottie’s role as aggressor, onto Seh-Hee/See-Hee, which ultimately causes Ji-Woo’s death, whereas in Vertigo, it is through Scottie’s aggression (in pursuit of reconstructing past traumas) that he ultimately reasserts his masculinity, ignoring any potential negative repercussions for Judy/Madeleine.

Both films differ from the typical narrative structure we think of when we talk about a Hollywood film, in which there is an initial calm, followed by an inciting incident or dilemma, rising action, climax, resolution, and return to (relative) normalcy.  Instead, in Vertigo, we begin immediately with the inciting incident, the trauma which has caused Scottie’s mental instability, an instability which denies us a genuine understanding of who this character is, something we understand less with the further trauma of Madeleine’s death and the onset of his obsession with Madeleine, her death, and reconstructing her through the woman he sees as her doppelganger.   The film ends with a resolution of conflict, when Scottie overcomes his fear and reclaims his masculine identity.  This is followed immediately by a further trauma Judy’s death (as reconstructed Madeleine), an ironic twist of fate, paralleling her (as Madeleine) “possession” by Carlotta Valdes.  While we have seen Scottie reclaim his masculinity, we are not told how he copes with this third and final death.

Kim chooses to create a narrative loop.  At the beginning of the film, Seh-Hee bumps into a woman who drops a “before” portrait of herself.  At the end of the film, this event repeats, and we realize that the woman she bumped into was See-Hee, emerging from the plastic surgery clinic for a third time, with yet another new identity, after contributing to Ji-Woo’s accidental death.  Kim rejects the finite, if somewhat inconclusive, plot structure of Hitchcock in favor of the circular plot structure of Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932).  Kim’s film is, after all, a commentary on the plastic surgery obsessed culture of South Korea, where according to The Financial Times 50% of women in their 20s have undergone cosmetic surgery, so the eternal return of Boudu seems an appropriate means of presenting the culture as an addiction, and to show that the goal (of filling internal voids) is left ultimately unfulfilled by cosmetic alterations.

Though the existence of the plastic surgery/face transplant genre seems to have gone largely unnoticed, these films are of great cultural significance and social relevance.  We occupy the same world as Hungary’s Miss Plastic, a plastic-surgery-recipient-only beauty contest that promotes vanity and artifice, symptomatic of virtue misplaced by popular culture on outer beauty rather than on the unadulterated beauty of what is real.  Lindsay Lohan just arrived on the cover of my wife’s Us Weekly looking like a bloated Goldie Hawn, the headline under her photo proclaiming in bold pink letters “Destroyed by Plastic Surgery.” (Abrahamson)  The institution of the movies itself stands as a monument to man’s inherent desire to escape his mundane daily existence in favor of another, if only for a brief while.  “Reality” television programming that promotes unrealistic body images, and even programs that revolve around and promote the idea of plastic surgery, televisions shows with names like Extreme Makeover and The Swan.  A 2007 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery supports the idea that media is a major influencing factor in people’s willingness to go under the knife. (Crockett)  These films strive to examine our relationship to our identities, and our eagerness to cast them aside in favor of a better, more glamorous, or more beautiful one.  In the movies, we frequently encounter characters who seek to run away from their troubles.  Invariably, their efforts to escape from their own troubles only result in greater and greater troubles.  Both of these films present female characters which become trapped by the situations that they have created for themselves by treating, in a cavalier fashion, such a precious and personal thing as their identity and are punished for willfully trading theirs (even temporarily) for such shallow pursuits as money and vanity.  Hitchcock’s film is overtly chauvinist by comparison; while Kim’s film fears the reversed power structure in which the woman is controlling her identity through surgery, Hitchcock’s film is about maintaining masculinity through domination and control.