Smile like you mean it...

Since Thursday afternoon's seminar with the good folk of Character Creation I've been pondering the semiotic nastiness of fixed grins. The notion that something as warm, reassuring, and life-affirming as a smile can become so cold, disturbing and psychotic when it lasts too long is weirdly fascinating. Conrad Veidt's slash-grinned portrayal of Gwynplaine in Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs (1928) is astonishing - almost as astonishing as his portrayal of the blank-faced assassin Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Denotation: smile, connotation: loneliness, abuse, mutilation, exile... Myth? God knows... Gwynplaine, 'cut' into a permanent grin so that he must laugh forever at his executed father, is meant to have been the inspiration for Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger and Bob Kane when they invented Batman's arch enemy the Joker in 1940, but the character's origins are in Victor Hugo's novel of 1869. It's a stroke of genius, I think, to have the ultimate sign of human happiness translated into a sign of tragedy, isolation, cruelty and/or menace. And the most recent suggestion of the Gwynplaine/Joker rictus was in the design of the Nightmare Man (played by Julian Bleach) in the Sarah Jane Adventures last week.

The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, 1928) on YouTube

It's a larf, innit? And it all leads rather nicely towards next week's subject of intertextuality...