Girldads Gone Wrong: Eyes Without a Face / The Skin I Live In

“A human guinea pig. What a godsend for him!”
– Eyes Without a Face (1960)

“The things that a madman’s love can do!”
– The Skin I Live In (2011)

Compared to the plethora of horror films about mothers and motherhood, fathers in horror seem to be left on the wayside. Unless, you count the mad scientist and his (and it’s usually his) creations as a sort of proxy to this relationship. The prototypical mad scientist is experimenting on animals, dead bodies, patients, and automatons. Creating artificial life is one thing, but what about the lines between blood? What then, when the object of obsession is his own daughter?

In Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), Dr. Génessier’s (Pierre Brasseur) mission is to repair his daughter Christiane’s (Édith Scob) face after an auto accident caused by himself. Wracked with guilt, he and his assistant kidnap women in search of the perfect graft. In the beginning of the film, Génessier poses a question to us: “Is not the greatest of man’s new hopes that of physical rejuvenation?” Perhaps for Génessier, but Christiane’s greatest hope is closer to “freedom.” Freedom from her enclosure, freedom from her father’s revolving door of facial graft victims, freedom from the life she can never live. Génessier may be the one behind the murders, but Christiane is the true engine behind everything in the story. His love for her is what warps his morality. Through this love for his daughter, everything from animal experimentation to murder is permissible.

The core of the story is Génessier’s guilt obfuscating Christiane’s own agency. Throughout the film, Christiane, legally considered dead, continuously expresses her suicidal ideations and wishes to stop trying new grafts. Génessier, in turn, overrides her, imposing his wishes for her life and his absolution. Even when one of the grafts finally takes, Christiane is still unsettled by her new reflection, deeming it to be from “the Beyond.” The totality of her existential guilt seemingly extends to her face, causing the successful graft to slowly become rejected, bringing her back to her scarred and masked reality.

This struggle between Génessier and Christiane’s wills culminates in her escape, killing him and his assistant, and freeing the animals he experimented on. Christiane enacting justice on the villa she was trapped in is cathartic, but this catharsis doesn’t ensure her salvation. In classic gothic fashion, we are left to contemplate if her past will allow her to live, or if she simply threw herself in the Seine like the other failed experiments. The coda to these events is a haunting image of Christiane walking into the world, her pearlescent mask on her face and a dove perched on her finger.

The contemplation on the nature of obsession, love, and the limits of our own bodies makes Eyes Without a Face a seminal body horror classic. The scene where the face graft is performed is still shocking today, and inspired a plethora of films featuring mad scientists’ attempts to restore beauty on their unwilling victims. Of all its offspring, none seem to capture the fantastique spirit and paternal obsession as well as Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In.

When talking about his films, Pedro Almodóvar said “I always come back to the characters of mothers.”  Fathers were distant figures during his childhood in Franco’s Spain, only coming back home when work was done for the day and leaving again promptly in the morning. It’s darkly comical that on the rare occasion Almodóvar makes a film about a father it is as menacing and nihilistic as The Skin I Live In (2011).

The psychosexual bend of The Skin I Live In plays to Almodóvar’s strengths. His narrative tendencies of beautiful residences and intense parent-child relationships and obsessive characters with guilty consciences are especially suited for gothic horror. Like in Eyes Without a Face, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is introduced to us as someone with noble goals of furthering facial reconstruction technology. Though he claims his experiments are on athymic mice, we soon learn they are actually being conducted on Vera (Elena Anaya), a melancholic woman whom he keeps locked in his practice. Both Génessier and Ledgard are driven by their love for their daughters, but the key difference is Ledgard’s primary motivation is revenge.

The Skin I Live In takes its time before revealing its hand to you. Whichever character has the moral high ground at any given moment is constantly shifting, as we continuously evaluate which of them has the most sins. The main conceit of the story is Vera herself: Why is she imprisoned in El Cigarral? Why does she look “too much” like Ledgard’s deceased wife? Is this some sick power trip? One night, as they lay in each other’s arms, the truth of their relationship is revealed. Through a series of dream sequences, we learn about the death of Norma, Ledgard’s daughter, and the role Vera played in it: Vera actually used to be Vicente (Jan Cornet), and Vicente’s rape of Norma caused her to commit suicide. Overcome with grief, Ledgard kidnaps Vicente and forces him to have a vaginoplasty. Eventually, Vicente, now dubbed “Vera,” acts as a replacement for both Norma and Ledgard’s wife.

During a routine check up, Vicente admits he did not see what he did to Norma as wrong. Ledgard may have been on to something, as it seems the only proper punishment for what Vicente did is to make Vicente “become” a woman himself. The way Vicente carries himself as Vera is calculated: a perfectly clueless and innocent girl willing to throw herself at Ledgard at a moment’s notice. For Vicente to know the true horror of what he did to Norma, he would have to endure the horror of female embodiment, giving up parts of himself in order to survive. Ledgard, ironically, displays misogyny towards Vera, believing her to be sedated enough to forget her past and fall in love with him. This hubris allows Vera to escape. Ledgard foolishly believes her confessions of devotion to him, even when staring down the barrel of a gun. His only defense is like a child’s: “But you promised!”

And like Eyes Without a Face, though Vera kills Ledgard and escapes, the future is uncertain. Vicente’s reunion with his mother is chilling. He ruined Norma’s life, and he is still able to return to his family and forge a new one for himself. Yet we are left to wonder: what would that life even look like, after years of abuse at the hands of Ledgard? What was deserved, and what was too far? Who was the real villain of this story?

The horror of Eyes Without a Face and The Skin I Live In lies in the haunting implications of their modern gothic stories. Matters of our hearts can inspire us to do great harm, bringing us to the intersection of violence and love. The futility of the great efforts Dr. Génessier and Dr. Ledgard go through serve as a warning: the universe’s karmic retribution will always keep things in check.