Give Me Somethin’ to Break: On Hollywood’s Face-Smashing Obsession
John Kidwell dives face first into a recent trend in horror cinema that views the face as a locus of power and anxiety.
I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t care for Curry Barker’s Obsession. I held back most of my opinions in a previous newsletter which discussed the recent trend of internet-native filmmakers making huge, financially lucrative splashes in theatrical horror filmmaking. No surprise, then, that when I received a pitch from John Kidwell for an essay on Obsession I wasn’t exactly thrilled. But his specific angle on the subject matter o—a tendency for recent horror films to feature brutal scenes of face-smashing—and it’s cultural precedents and consequences, opened me up to the idea. It’s to the benefit of John’s piece that he doesn’t really tell you whether or not he thought the film was a masterpiece. Instead, he finds a way to stay focused on small filmmaking details with big cultural resonances. Such an approach makes the piece less about this specific film than about a phenomenon that taps into something visceral and imperative to the everyday lives of the kinds of people who continue, after more than six weeks, to flock to cinemas to watch it.
— Chris Cassingham, Substack editor
If what Emmanuel Levinas said about the human face is true — that it “orders and ordains” us — then sudden, violent facial destruction signals a rapid descent into disorder and chaos. Such a downward spiral is frequently reflected in contemporary horror cinema, which rarely passes up an opportunity to feature someone’s nose getting caved in, their teeth shattered, their likeness reduced to a messy pile of flesh and bone. The trend is so pervasive that the intended shock value diminishes with each newly ruined visage; no matter how realistic the gore looks or how crepitant the bone-crunching sounds, the flattened face just doesn’t hold the visceral impact it once did. If face-smashing has graduated from trope to cliché, why do filmmakers keep resorting to it?
To understand this trend, we must first trace its pathology. The seed of this phenomenon was arguably planted in David Fincher’s Fight Club back in 1999, the same year Fred Durst threatened to “break your fuckin’ face tonight.” Of Jared Leto’s obliterated pretty boy mug, Edward Norton says he “felt like destroying something beautiful,” an ominous foreshadowing of Norton’s own facial destruction in the finale, suggesting that his destructive urge is little more than projection. His alter ego having seized his entire persona, the narrator’s only means of regaining his selfhood is by deconstructing his self-presentation.
Fight Club didn’t start an immediate wave of face-smashing scenes, though by the end of the 2010s, films like Drive, Evil Dead, Hereditary, Midsommar, Joker, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had popularized the trend. Not coincidentally, Hollywood’s newfound propensity toward facial destruction roughly coincided with the rise of social media. In the age of Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, identity is paramount. As people spend more time curating online personae, it’s understandable that anxiety about the face might increase. For a new generation of audiences, the ruination of all distinguishing facial features signifies nothing short of identity erasure.
Fear of facial disfigurement isn’t exactly new, in life or in movies; its cinematic depiction dates at least as far back as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). However, the recent increase in this particular kind of violence — featured in Longlegs, In a Violent Nature, Smile 2, Talk to Me, Weapons, and Obsession — suggests these fears may be more profound and widely held than ever before, tapping into the current zeitgeist like a hammer claw to the nose.
Amidst increasing workforce automation and dwindling employment opportunities for young people — the target audience for horror movies — and the ubiquity of the internet in their daily lives, the demand to curate a public identity only escalates. Additionally, studies consistently show a strong correlation between physical attractiveness and income, so it logically follows that in today’s hyper-competitive job market, whether they’re seeking nine-to-five jobs, starting their own businesses, or joining the gold rush of online content creation, young people face unusually high pressure to adhere to certain beauty standards. Though every culture has its own conventions of beauty, for those seeking to stand out — in job interviews or on TikTok — conforming to these conventions is often a matter of survival.
A film like Ari Aster’s Midsommar adds the additional element of impending obsolescence to this face-oriented anxiety. The violent ättestupa ceremony — during which younger members of the Hårga commune gather at the base of a cliff and watch members over a certain age jump from the top in communal self-sacrifice — is one of the first signifiers to the audience that this Swedish commune is no utopia. The first sacrifice dies on impact, disfigured beyond recognition, but when the second survives his self-sacrifice, he is finished off with a mallet to the face. The broader implication of the ättestupa ceremony, whose primary purpose is to eliminate older members who no longer meaningfully contribute to the commune, is that the individual’s value wanes as they get older. Aster repeatedly cuts back to his horrified American protagonists after each graphic demolition, demonstrating the of-the-moment cultural awareness he would deploy in subsequent films.
Physical attraction is also central to courtship and coupling, and the shallow design of dating apps attaches special importance to the face. To young men (especially those influenced by the Manosphere and red pill ideology), dating can feel like a form of natural selection — a zero-sum game with a biologically predetermined outcome. This is the world that Bear (Michael Johnston) is attempting to navigate when we meet him at the start of Curry Barker’s Obsession. Desperate to win the love of friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), Bear enlists the help of the occult in the form of the One Wish Willow, a novelty wish-granting toy he purchases on impulse. After fumbling the bag on the ride home from trivia night, he impulsively breaks his One Wish Willow and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world.
Nikki’s instant transformation from oblivious friend to obsessive lover confuses her friends and coworkers — especially Sarah (Megan Lawless), who harbors a secret crush on Bear and acts as an emotional refuge when Nikki’s behavior becomes more erratic. At the height of Nikki’s erratic behavior, Bear sneaks away to meet up with Sarah, who has just received her final college application response in the mail, though she turns the conversation to Bear and Nikki’s relationship to delay another potential rejection. Sarah doesn’t think Nikki is good for Bear, and when he asks if she believes she would make a better partner, her eyes flutter seductively. Sudden violence interrupts this flirtation when, seemingly out of nowhere, Nikki shatters the window of Sarah’s car, grabs her head, and repeatedly slams her face into the steering wheel until it is an unrecognizable sludge of bone and sinew.
In the context of the film’s examination of the “crazy girlfriend” trope, Nikki’s intention is clear: to protect her and Bear’s relationship from an external threat. Less clear is Barker’s motivation in dispatching Sarah in such a severe (and played out) way. Shooting Sarah isn’t enough; Nikki must reduce her facial features to an oozing void, implying that only by erasing Sarah’s physical identity can Nikki neutralize her emotional threat. Ironically, this violent act is what finally convinces Bear that his relationship with Nikki is unsalvageable.
With the grisly image of Sarah’s smashed face, Obsession highlights increasingly common anxieties, particularly within the image-conscious Hollywood ecosystem. A face is a future, whether you’re a prospective college student or, as suggested in a recent Guardian article, an actress. Is Hollywood’s current fixation on facial destruction a subconscious response to the paradox of marketable beauty and facial expressiveness? Perhaps. But if the prevalence of face-smashing in contemporary cinema speaks to unspoken anxieties about the face (both within and outside the industry), it may also indirectly address similarly latent desires. In horror movies, the build-up to a violent or otherwise disturbing action is usually more nerve-wracking than the act itself; we can let out a perverse sigh of relief once the knife finally enters the victim and severs the tension. Barker shoots Bear and Sarah’s final conversation in medium close-up shot-reverse-shot, carefully framing Sarah to maximize the amount of negative space behind her head; a tried-and-true strategy, it builds anticipation without explicitly telling the audience what is about to happen. Protracted though Sarah’s death may be, with it comes a kind of warped catharsis: she no longer has to fret over her college prospects or compete for Bear’s affection, just as we no longer need to worry about whatever threat looms beyond the frame.
In her essay “Masochism and Subjectivity,” Kaja Silverman writes, “I will hazard the generalization that it is always the victim—the figure who occupies the passive position—who is really the focus of attention, and whose subjugation the subject (whether male or female) experiences as a pleasurable repetition of his/her own story. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the fascination of the sadistic point of view is merely that it provides the best vantage point from which to watch the masochistic story unfold.” By focusing on Sarah’s brutal death in such prolonged, sadistic detail, Barker reorients the audience to the subjugated position, illustrating a twinned fear of and desire for facial oblivion. This dialectical framework may be key to understanding the face-smashing phenomenon, where anxiety regarding the inflated currency of facial identity—social, professional, and personal—is inextricable from the desire for its permanent forfeiture. In a world hurtling toward catastrophe, there may be no greater comfort than the implicit knowledge that the nightmare will soon be over, leaving nothing but a heap of flesh and bone.
— John Kidwell's writing has appeared in Guernica, The Drift, Bruiser, and Animus. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.