K. Austin Collins recently wrote about the upcoming film Chained For Life. I couldn’t help but be intrigued. A European director is making a movie about disfigurement, and casts an actor with an actual disfigurement in the role. The actor works with the beautiful actress as they make their way through this strange process where art mirrors life, however distortedly. Plus the actor is played by Adam Pearson, an actor with a real facial disfigurement. He had a memorable role in Under The Skin, a strange, disturbing science fiction movie starring Scarlett Johansson, and which I’ve watched twice already. All this is right up my alley. Maniacal geniuses? Movies within movies? Sign me up! But there’s another aspect of the film that draws me to it, one I often don’t think about.
The director of Chained For Life is named Aaron Schimberg. It’s a personal film for him, for specific reasons. In an interview, he says:
This is only my second film, but I’ve written a lot of scripts, and all of them deal with disfigurement in some way. Often it’s the focus, sometimes it’s more secondary. It’s a personal interest of mine – I was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, and to not write about it feels more unnatural than grappling with it. With “Chained for Life,” I didn’t set out to make a film about disability per se – the word isn’t even in the film. I just wanted to make another personal film.
You may not know I was also born with a cleft palate. You may not know that because I hardly ever talk about it. I rarely think about it, and don’t really consider it to be an especially important aspect of my personality. But Schimberg, an artist like myself, has made the same thing a central feature of his art. For him, “to not write about it feels more unnatural than grappling with it.”
What I find so compelling here is that, while I share Schimberg’s experience of being born with this same defect, I do not share his feeling about it. I have never written about having a cleft palate. Doing so would seem strange not to me, honestly. I regard my (very mild) facial disfigurement rather impersonally, as if it were a mole on my thigh.
Why is this? How can two artists, born with the same defect, view it so differently? Was Schimberg teased about it more than me? As I wrote in another entry, I was homeschooled for almost my education. During my brief stint in public schools, I recall exactly one time when another kid teased me about my lip. And it’s not even a bad memory, since a friend immediately came to my defense and told the kid to scram. If I had had more experiences like that, would I be more aware of my disfigurement?
Or is it something more fundamental? Does Schimberg regard his palate as an outward expression of his inner self in a way I simply don’t? And if so, why? Why not?
I don’t know where I’m going with this. Mostly I jot down stray thoughts here to give you an idea of what’s on my mind. But there’s something here, I think. Something about what inspires artists, and what parts of their lives they regard as material for their work, and what just passes by. It’s nothing you can predict, no matter how you might want to.
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