There is an image that I still find scary after a while 30 years.
Consider this scenario: you are five years old. Except for a candle powdered with gray dust, yours VHS the tapes now fill the two lowest shelves of a pine cabinet, with a sweet, slightly sweet smell. Make your choice. After putting on the tape and fast forward to commercials – big and small hedgehogs singing .‘King of the Road’, the trailer for Borrowersetc. – see, it begins: Beans (1997).
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The film is about Rowan Atkinson’s ID pin, Mr. Bean, which is exported to the US as a player. .‘expert’ to oversee the unveiling of .‘Whistler’s mother’ – that is, The arrangement of Gray and Black No. 1 (1871) is an American artist James McNeill Whistler. After Bean sneezes on the painting and tries to remove the snot with an inky handkerchief, he inadvertently applies lacquer thinner. And as Bean trembles with anxiety, jowls move as if his skin is stretching, Whistler’s mother’s face trembles and melts into a new one. Five-year-old me squirms in a bean bag because of a fear I can’t answer.
It is usually caused by The Musée d’Orsay in the middle Paristhis year The arrangement of Gray and Black No. 1 goes to London (the city where it was first painted and exhibited) on loan from Tate Britain, and I mark the arrival home with the dismissal of that cartoon – the one drawn by Bean instead of Anna Whistler, whose eyes seem to be staring directly at me, then, and now. I want to look at the painting in the face again and see what, exactly, it has done to me.
Am I alone in finding this face more frightening than funny? It has exaggerated features – big, round eyes and a Pinocchio-esque nose – of a caricature, not that it resembles Whistler’s mother. Could there be an element of time-honored misogyny at play: the idea that old women are hideous (á la Quentin Metsys’ Ugly Duchess), hideous enough to be laughed at? Of course, that would go along with Bean’s climactic speech, when he says even Anna .‘it was a scary old bat that looked like it had a cactus on its back, [Whistler] stuck to him’.
A caricature, or a picture of you? Big ears feel masculine. A large bald head looks like beans. However
To me, it looks like Bhontshisi hasn’t tried to reinvent himself or take himself out, he just painted a face. One looks back at the viewer with these Salad Fingers-esque sideways eyes that, because of the careless line, appear to be bloodshot or sleepless.
It’s terrifying on another level. When I was a kid, I had to deal with the sloppy Bean, and here he is in Big Trouble. Children spend their lives being told not to mess with things, and Bean’s quivering lip before he reveals his tragedy is unmistakably childish. He knows he’s cornered, as he tries to get rid of his bad mud, and he fears the consequences.
So do I find the face scary in itself or because it conveys an abstract sense of transcendence, taboo, humiliation, deception? Is it all that high? The end of the film is that – replacing the original with a poster – Bean hangs a dysfunctional work of art over his bed back in England, where it smiles at him every night, decade after decade; a kind of harmless wandering.
