Facebook (‘I just don’t like your face’)
2011
In 1949 the southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Conner wrote her first novel Wise Blood. In 2011 we made Facebook (‘I just don’t like your face’). What’s the connection? … Ronald Reagan, obviously.
Let’s back up. If you read Wise Blood you may be struck by how many times the word ‘face’ crops up — and all the different ways that the face is used to describe characters, sum up situations, allude to emotions and, generally, conjure up some of the most surreal images we have ever encountered. Here are some examples:
‘His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.’ (p. 44)
‘His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth.’ (p. 57)
Intrigued by O’Conner’s text, to say the least, we decided to pull out all of the instances of the word ‘face’ that appear in the book. There are 130 in total, which you can read here:
All of the Faces in Wise Blood
We then decided that we would use this text to make our own book – our own face book! And this is where Ronald Reagan comes in. (Who better to be a face? For is he not the face of Hollywood? Of government? Of trickling economics, cold wars and Star Wars? Perfect!) The next step in the process was to find Ronald Reagan’s face, which we did in the movie The Killers.
The Killers, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same name, stars Ronald Reagan in his last ever acting role before entering politics – and the only screen role in which Reagan starred as a villain. This seemed like the perfect way to frame our textual snippets, and so we set about taking film stills out of the movie that show Ronald Reagan’s face. We then edited this selection so that it formed some kind of visual narrative. (Keeping the stills in the sequence of the film helped …) Finally, we selected ‘faces’ from O’Conner’s book to pair with these stills, layering the visual image with the poetic image.
The effect nuances the meaning of both images while generating an alternate – complex – narrative structure out of their juxtaposition, read in sequence. The the result is Facebook (‘I Just don’t like your face’).
