PrettyFakes

This week’s cover to the New Yorker (Nov. 2, 2009), entitled “Unmasked,” by the Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware, shows an artist at the absolute height of his powers.

The scene is familiar: a group of adults hang back while their children trick-or-treat at two-story homes in the October dusk. The masks on the faces of the children are aglow from the opened doors of their fawning hosts. In the yard, their parents’ faces are aglow as well—from the backlit displays of half-a-dozen iPhones and Pres.

“Unmasked” (detail)

The children are literally masked, yet still engaging the world—going forth into that terrible night, mashing down on the button at the house they don’t know, mumbling and punching each other to you go first. They are open to the world; the masks are meaningless, the toys of children, soon to be ripped off to suck in the sweet Halloween night.

(Star-struck by George Lucas as a child, I remember the year I went as Yoda: the flimsy plastic sucking down to my sweaty freckled face, it would literally clamp down your ability to breathe; after every house I would yank it off, the night air flooding my face).

The parents of the children wear a different mask; while there is nothing physical upon their faces, the reflection of their email and RSS feeds and status updates smear across their features, shutting them off from the world more than any Wolverine® latex ever could. It is, in one still image, a surpassing and comprehensive look at American society in the 21st century: we send our children out with masks to play-act traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young, forcing them to play outside and make friends with the neighbor girls, while shutting down ourselves via 3G and electrons and Cymblata and whiskey more then even our own parents could manage.

That Mr. Ware has evoked this without showing us a single costume, or a single face, or truly, anything other than basic shapes coupled with a flat-matte color palette, again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career. I say this before even turning to the four-page story of “Unmasked” itself; where three generations of women grapple with the insecurities and comforts of folly of history and home and love. In that story, the dead blank “face” of a mask is echoed by its clean, ghostly back, just as the lined face of the balding, widowed grandmother reverberates across the page from her napping, perfect grandchild.

You learn that the grandmother’s marriage was marred by an affair, of which she has only recently learned, and you realize that Mr. Ware is murmuring that our known lives are little more than these colored, plastic masks, and that only in youth is there the promise of any change or betterment. It’s bleak, this world; it’s rife with cynicism and misanthropy, as can be said of much of Mr. Ware’s work. But isn’t there just the hint of hope at the end? Isn’t there just that little bit of an idea that things could change?

Or is the gentle chiding the narrator gives her mother just another mask slipping into place?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 8:25 am and is filed under Comixx, Gorjus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.