DOUBLING YOUR IDENTITY PLEASURES

A random turn of mind took me back to some of my ruminations in my 2012 post FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE.  In this essay-- in which I was still using "focal presence" rather than what I now call a "focal icon"-- I gave two examples of narratives in which "fake phenomena" outshone the actual characters in the two stories. One is the Headless Horseman, who, as any reader knows from reading the tale, may be a boogieman spawned entirely by the imagination of Brom Bones, trying to freak out his competitor in romance, timid Ichabod Crane. Yet despite the possibility that the alleged Hessian ghost might just be Brom in a costume, the Horseman has arguably transcended his origins, becoming a diegetically-real character in other narratives.

In the same essay I also discussed the 1935 film MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. In this film, a man is murdered by some blood-letting contrivance. A year later, two apparent vampires begin stalking the family of the murdered man. Unlike the Hessian ghost, these supposed bloodsuckers, Count Mora and his daughter Luna, are apparently a part of the region's established history. The narrative twist is that the haunting horrors are just actors, hired by a detective to expose the murderer from the previous year. Yet though the actors themselves are not important, any more than the detective or his quarry. The images of Mora and Luna, of a father-and-daughter clutch of vampires, are the icons that dominate the movie-- even though, like the Horseman, they're not diegetically real.

I then had the thought that most of the "double identities" throughout the history of fiction carry the same dynamic. Brom Bones doesn't get unmasked as the headless phantom, but a million other Gothic ghost-makers do. Yet even once the hoaxers' identities are revealed, who cares about them anymore? From reading Doyle's HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, I know that the phantom hound is an illusion created by a schemer named Stapleton, and I even dimly remember his motivation behind his scheme. But readers don't remember Stapleton. They remember the giant hound.

The same thing is generally true of both heroes and villains who assume costumed identities. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne sustain more interest than Stapleton, but still, not as much as their costumed identities. The Lee-Ditko Spider-Man might be the first superhero in which there was a strong concentration on the trials and vicissitudes in the life of the hero's private life. Still, Peter Parker is only important because he's Spider-Man.

Now, it's not impossible to have someone don a mask or costume in which no new identity is created. In the 2014 essay PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, I mentioned a minor masked rustler from Zane Grey's RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE. Yet this character, name of Bess, does not sustain a separate identity; she just goes about wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she's female. This sort of action I termed merely "functional" in the narrative; it doesn't carry any symbolic value beyond its base function in the story.

By extension, then, "super-functionality" applies to all those stories-- no matter how well or badly executed-- in which a schemer creates a phantasmal second identity. To be sure, I'm not sure there's ever been a masked western badman who was "mythic" in the full sense of my use of the word. In comics there seem to be dozens of these mediocre sagebrush malefactors, often based on animals-- the Fox, the Cougar, the Tarantula, The Masked Maverick. None of them are super-functional in an epicosmic sense, but they can be considered so in an ontocosmic sense. Similarly, most of the masked champions in all popular media aren't too much more memorable than their regular identities, except for Zorro, the Lone Ranger (and Tonto), and possibly the 1950s Ghost Rider.

Indeed, the act of a character donning what in my system is called "an outre outfit"-- whether or not the outfit is meant to mask his/her identity-- is an illusion that conveys the truth within the story-- and thus this trope becomes intimately associated with that of the "phantasmal figuration." 

ADDENDUM: For a lark I scanned through all the "outre outfit" entries on my movie-blog, to see how often such uncanny works had resulted in movies with epicosmic mythicity. Tarzan got the most entries, which is interesting because his "outfit" is his near-total lack of clothes, signifying not a calculated illusion but his linkage to his beast-patrons. The Phantom of the Opera does fit the "phantasm" category, since he does pretend to be a ghost, though his imposture is not the most compelling aspect of his mythos.