Tod Browning | Freaks / 1932

inside, outside and beside the tent

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon (screenplay, based on the story “Spurs” by Tod Robbins), Tod Browning (director) Freaks / 1932

 

One might outrageously argue that the word “queer” was invented for just such a movie as Tod Browning’s Freaks, not because several of its characters suffer from conditions such as dwarfism, sacral agenesis, microcephaly, conjoined birth, hypertrichosis, and loss of limbs, but because almost every figure in the film, all of them being circus people, are inevitably seen as outsiders, both within and outside the film which has momentary captured their images.

     Historically, the carny folk of US traveling circuses also spoke versions of what was called carny cant in the US or polari in Europe, the latter a private language also used throughout the early part of the 20th century by homosexuals to protect themselves from their conversations being overheard by lurking straights. And the curse of being anything other than heteronormative applies equally to the figures of this film as it does to anyone with the sexual differences represented by the LGBTQ community, some of which might be applied to the characters in the movie as well, particularly since Roscoe (Rosco Ates), the stuttering circus clown, must also nightly appear each in drag and the Half Woman-Half Man character (Josephine Joseph) is represented as a hermaphrodite, half attracted to and half loathing of  men such as the macho Hercules (Henry Victor).

     If at first sight the various deformed figures of Freaks appear frightening, even after a few moments of watching the little people Hans and Frieda (brother and sister Harry and Daisy Earles), the sideshow labeled “pinheads” Pip (Elvira Snow) and Zip (Jenny Lee Snow), Half-Boy (Johnny Eck, born with a truncated torso), the microcephalic suffering Schlitzie who wears a dress throughout the movie, the “Siamese twins” Daisy and Violet Hilton who marry different men who don’t get along with each other, and the several others appearing in this work all become full human beings with whom we sympathize; and if you simply deal with them on their terms as ordinary individuals as opposed to visual aberrations, you quickly grow to accept of them as fully as Venus (Leila Hyams), Madame Tetrallini (Rose Dione), Roscoe, and Phroso (Wallace Ford), the more common-looking beings of the film. Even the bearded lady has a baby.

     At the time of the original filming in 1931, some employees at MGM were so disturbed by the presence of the characters performing on the lot and at the employee canteen that the producers were forced to create a specially-built tent for the actors’ dressing rooms and eating spaces, and truly ironic situation since the movie itself presents them as tent dwellers.

     The original critics were appalled by the film, and censors, even in pre-code Hollywood, demanded serious cuts which included important scenes in the film’s climax when the circus folk attack and castrate Hercules and turn his villainous partner Cleopatra into a “duck woman,” one eye gouged out, the flesh of her hands melted to look like a duck web, her legs removed, and her torso permanently tarred and feathered to make her look like a duck. The censored and cut frames are apparently forever lost. England banned the film for over 30 years, and most observers found the film to be grotesque and manipulative.

      Yet years later, critics such as Andrew Sarris could describe Browning’s film as extraordinarily compassionate, with other commentators recognizing its elements of horror, while realizing just how free this film actually is from its voyeuristic possibilities. Not only do the able-bodied sideshow performers treat the “freaks” as equals and friends, as critic Jon Towlson argues in his Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present (2014), if the movie begins with scenes presenting the characters as “freaks,” “Browning begins to undercut the voyeuristic aspects of the tradition freakshow by showing the freaks engaged in the activities of everyday life, dispelling the initial shock and revulsion, and encouraging the viewer to see the freaks as individuals who have overcome their disabilities.” It is most interesting, that the director never allows his film’s audiences to actually enter the tent proper and watch the performers as the gawkers might. We catch glimpses only of the side show, with characters to whom he are introduced to more straight-forwardly in their caravan encampment.

     As the movie moves forward, it is particularly the most seemingly fit heterosexuals in this film, Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) and Hercules who become almost unbearable to watch in their obvious attempts to delude the wealthy dwarf Hans that Cleo is actually in love with him. Their goal is only his money, even before the woman who truly loves Hans, Frieda reveals that her fiancé has inherited a significant amount of money.

    Even Hans’ carny friends are convinced when Cleo marries him that she has become one of them, in one of the key scenes of the film, passing a large loving cup of alcohol as they chant: “We accept her, one of us. We accept her, one of us. Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble.” Her horrified reaction to their acceptance and her abusive language against them all, makes everyone realize that she, in fact, has never truly wanted to be included among them and hates them all. They also soon discover that she is gradually poisoning Hans, Frieda entering the scene to help Hans realize what is happening. The recovering Hans eventually plays along with Cleopatra’s and Hercules’ dreadful actions to get his revenge.

     Some critics have seen the relationship between the near powerless carny people and the powerful normative abusers as a statement, particularly in the context of the recent Great Depression. of a class struggle. Melvin Matthews argues that the movie “is essentially the story of the little people (average Americans) versus the big people (the rich and businessmen). The film makes it clear that the big people, personified by Cleopatra and Hercules, scorn the Freaks. Such a disdainful attitude was reflected in the real-life social outlook of some business tycoons during the Depression.”  And even critics such as J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum argue that the work deals with class disparity, with “slaves breaking their chains and triumphing over their masters.”

     On the surface these arguments seem fairly convincing, until we again recall what I commented at the beginning of this short essay, everyone in this carny world are outsiders and are perceived as queer for that very fact, including the greedy and evil individuals within the carny community, Cleopatra and Hercules. If they end up as a castrato and a duck woman, now truly “freaks,” they were just as much outsiders in the beginning, already “one of us,” as the freaks proclaim in derision.

     The real evil of these two is not their own freakish behaviors, nor even their jealousy and dismissal of those around them, but in their attempting to pass as normal heterosexuals in a world that has already excluded them. Hans, in fact, is the rich business man who retires from that world—primarily in shame for his own desires to also join up with that false normative reality.

     Only through Frieda’s love is he redeemed and permitted to rejoin the superior world of the “freaks,” the queer society which is so much more loving and accepting than the heteronormative world beyond the traveling tent show in which these characters are protected, allowing insiders in only if they pay to openly express their derision and shock.

      The “freaks” perform, accordingly, in a matter that one might describe a very early notion of “camp,” exaggerating their own natural conditions and deformities to mock the notions of the pretended normality and superiority of the outside world. And, accordingly, they turn their very differences into something of power and financial support. The performing “freaks” as presented in Browning’s work bear a great similarity to those performances 30 some years later of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, employing the very motifs of love, daring, and survival into an exaggerated conceit that the outside viewers never quite know how to interpret, just like the movie itself. Is it truly a representation of horror or simply a simulacrum of the horror of daily living for those who do not live and perform beside and inside the tent?

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).