From Bond to Star Wars, Frankenstein to the Avengers, cinema has a troubling history of identifying evil characters by giving them welts, blemishes or scars
It’s as old as cinema itself: if you want to drive home a bad guy’s nefarious nature, give them a big facial scar. From Darth Vader to The Lion King’s imaginatively named Scar, for as long as films have existed, film-makers have conflated disfigurement with mental instability or malevolence. The trope is still going strong in Avengers: Infinity War and Solo: A Star Wars Story – physical otherness equals evil.
It goes back a long way: in 1926, Nosferatu gave Count Orlok overgrown teeth and a huge nose, while Boris Karloff is the scarred Monster in 1931’s Frankenstein. Nowhere is the trend more obvious, however, than in the baddies of the Bond films, where five of 007’s major adversaries – Ernst Blofeld, Renard, Emilio Largo,...
It’s as old as cinema itself: if you want to drive home a bad guy’s nefarious nature, give them a big facial scar. From Darth Vader to The Lion King’s imaginatively named Scar, for as long as films have existed, film-makers have conflated disfigurement with mental instability or malevolence. The trope is still going strong in Avengers: Infinity War and Solo: A Star Wars Story – physical otherness equals evil.
It goes back a long way: in 1926, Nosferatu gave Count Orlok overgrown teeth and a huge nose, while Boris Karloff is the scarred Monster in 1931’s Frankenstein. Nowhere is the trend more obvious, however, than in the baddies of the Bond films, where five of 007’s major adversaries – Ernst Blofeld, Renard, Emilio Largo,...
- 6/12/2018
- by Hannah Woodhead
- The Guardian - Film News
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