Circus and
carnival sideshows are an unsettling part of our cultural past. The
display of physically deformed people for the public’s
entertainment persisted for many years before laws were written
making them illegal. The so-called “freaks” were physical
inversions of everything that people considered to be beautiful or
attractive. The physical revulsion people felt in their presence
also hypnotized and fascinated them, arousing a range of emotions
from pity and awe to disgust and fear. “What if I were born like
that?” was the discomforting question many patrons silently asked
themselves while viewing those unfortunate individuals. In less
enlightened times, physiological deformity was also perceived as a
symptom of moral depravity. So the subjective and human side of the
carnival freaks became lost and made invisible while the world
projected their own anxieties onto their outer appearances. In the
1930’s, Tod Browning directed the movie Freaks with
the intention of correcting this false impression that people had.
Tod
Browning was born in Lexington, Kentucky to an affluent family. The
year was 1880. From an early age, he developed a fascination for
carnivals and circuses. By the age of sixteen, wanderlust had
possessed him and he ran away from home to live the nomadic life of a
carny. Intrigued by the tightly knit society of carnival freaks, he
quickly
made friends with them
and was impressed at how their status as marginalized outsiders
drew them closer together. While some people said they were being
exploited, they countered that argument by saying if they were not
employed as entertainers they would be locked in miserable
institutions; at least as circus sideshow performers they got to earn
some money and live as accepted as members in their own community.
Browning soon got his first job as a barker for the Wild Man of
Borneo. He also “performed” as The Living Corpse, an act where he
would be buried in a coffin and two days later, dug up so that he
could emerge as alive he ever was.
Tod
Browning eventually hooked up with the Barnum and Bailey Circus which
brought him to New York City where he found employment as a minor
vaudeville performer. He met up with the silent film maker W.D.
Griffiths and went on to direct his own features. Browning made
several horror movies, some of which starred the
Man of a Thousand Faces, the
great Lon Chaney Sr.
Browning’s
life got darker. His father died and his wife left him. He began
drinking heavily and sunk into the pit of alcoholism. Then one night
he went for a drive with two friends. He did not see the delivery
truck ahead of him because its taillights were burnt out. He crashed
into it and his two friends died. Browning suffered severe injuries
but survived to spend
a long time recovering in the hospital. He was left with a limp due
to a permanently injured leg. Some say that his genitals got severely
mutilated or even severed completely. But this has never been
confirmed.
By
1931, he got his life back together enough to begin directing sound
films. His most famous work was Dracula, starring
the eccentric Hungarian immigrant Bela Lugosi. Browning’s star was
rising so his lifelong friend, Harry
Earles, approached him to pitch an idea for a film about circus
sideshow performers based on the misanthropic short story “Spurs”
by Tod Robbins. Browning liked the idea and so did the producers at
MGM studios. Harry Earles was a midget circus performer that Browning
knew from the old days; he went on to star as Hans in the film that
was to become known as Freaks.
Production
began in Hollywood during the fall of 1931. The Russian actress, Olga
Baclanova, was cast to star as the trapeze artist Cleopatra
who the midget Hans falls in
love with. The cast was mostly composed of authentic circus freaks so
Tod Browning arranged to have her spend social time with them for the
sake of getting used to who and what they were. Baclanova later said
that at first their appearance shocked and saddened her but after
getting to know them she regarded them as friends and ordinary human
being. Some of them became
her lifelong friends.
The
film crew members were not so sympathetic. After they initially
encountered the cast, they refused to eat meals with them,
complaining that the freaks’ appearance and behavior made them
nauseous. The crew threatened to quit. Arrangements were made for
them to have a separate meal time.
Freaks
begins with a carnival barker
telling an audience he has the most shocking attraction ever then
directs them to look down into a pit. They gasp with horror then the
scene changes to show a meeting between Hans and Cleopatra. Hans is
immediately infatuated with her and his midget fiancee Frieda looks
on in despair.
The
movie cuts to a scene showing the sideshow freaks going about their
daily business. A hermaphrodite makes eyes at a man while his friend
tells him the female side loves him but the male side is jealous. A
man with no arms or legs uses his mouth to strike a match and light a
cigarette. Three people with microencephaly, otherwise known as
pinheads, roam around the caravan grounds. A Siamese twin quarrels
with her boyfriend while her sister, attached to her side, tries
to ignore them. All the while
other normal circus performers converse with them as if they do not
even notice their physical abnormalities. The
famous Johnny Eck, a man with no legs, transports himself up a set of
stairs using only his arms. Hans
continues to court Cleopatra while her strongman boyfriend, Hercules,
laughs at him. The undertone of the whole scene is one of sexuality;
it shows that the freaks have the same romantic notions as other
people. In case anybody wonders about their ability to perform, a
bearded lady gives birth to a baby girl in her trailer.
While
this scene in Freaks portrays
an idyllic lifestyle, things off camera may not have been so good.
Rumors were circulating that misbehaving pinheads were being chained
to trees or locked in closets. Food rations for the performers were
meager and of low quality; complaints were made that their paychecks
were smaller than the agreed on rate and some of their wages were
reported to be stolen. Illness and injuries were sometimes a problem
due to binge drinking midgets
and clowns.
As
the film goes on, Cleopatra learns that Hans is rich. She and
Hercules hatch a plan to murder him with poison for the sake of
inheriting his money. Then there is the most famous scene in the
movie. The circus freaks hold a wedding dinner where they gather with
Cleopatra and Hans around a table. A dwarf dances on
the table then picks up a
giant goblet and passes it around to each person. While everyone
takes a drink, one at a time, they chant in unison, “Gooble gobble
gooble goble,
one of us, one of us.” They announce that Cleopatra has been
accepted into the fold of freaks. She becomes hysterical and, in a
drunken rage she shouts at them, throws wine in their faces, and
scares them all away. Hercules carries her off
and Hans passes out from the poison she put in his drink.
At
this point the message is clear. The beautiful people are morally
sick in their inner lives while the physically deformed are happy,
honest, ethical, and possessed of inner beauty.
By
the time Hans wakes up, he is
wise to Cleopatra’s plan.
She gives him medicine, actually
poison, to help him get
better but he spits it out when she is not looking. Soon
the circus caravan heads out on the road during a thunderstorm.
Cleopatra decides to escape from her trailer when Johnny Eck and a
dwarf show up in support of Hans; they begin polishing guns and
knives as she gets scared and flees. In what may be one of the
creepiest scenes in any of
the old-time horror films, all the freaks come out and crawl through
the rain and mud after Cleopatra and Hercules who try to escape. Then
lightning strikes
a tree.
The
next scene
returns to the beginning
where the barker commands his audience to look into the pit. There
they see Cleopatra transformed into a duck, her legs missing, her
hands mutilated to look like webbed feet, her head shrunken, a beak
on her mouth, and a tiny tuft of hair, like the style worn by the
pinheads, on top of her head.
During
the test screening of the movie, some audience members threw up. Many
of them ran out of the theater. The small number of people who stayed
complained that Freaks was
a disgusting movie. The producers demanded that Tod Browning cut all
the disturbing scenes from the film. The ninety minute feature got
pared down to less than an hour as a result. Scenes
that were cut included parts of the wedding scene; originally it
showed each freak drooling into the wine goblet before they passed it
on to the person sitting beside them. The dwarf on the table was
thought to be doing a lewd and obscene dance so part of that was cut.
The chase scene ended with the tree falling on Cleopatra’s legs
before the freaks tortured here and mutilated her body. A segment
where they catch Hercules and castrate the strongman also got
deleted. These scenes were lost and most likely destroyed. The
remaining final cut lasts a mere 62 minutes with a segment tacked on
to the end where Hans apologizes to his first fiancee Fried and they
agree to get marries; no doubt this was meant to stretch the movie
out to feature length and leave the audience with a more uplifting
conclusion.
Freaks
bombed at the box office and Tod
Browning’s career as a film director was officially over. The movie
got banned in the United Kingdom because censors claimed its
depiction of disabled people was inhumane. But censors rarely
understand the content they censor and missed the point that the film
was intended to advocate for the idea that these circus sideshow
performers were real people who deserved to be treated with the same
amount of dignity as everyone else. In America, due to lack of
interest, Freaks also
disappeared for thirty years.
In
1962, it was rediscovered and
shown at a film festival in Italy. Critics immediately responded with
praise and a cult following began to
coalesce around it. In 1963,
Freaks was finally
released in the U.K. but it was given an X-rating. Its reputation
grew throughout
the 1960s as the word freak became
synonymous with cool. By
the 1970’s it was a regular feature in the midnight movies along
with such films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pink
Flamingos, and The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, all
of which were in their
own way counter-cultural celebrations of the outsider status. The
popularity of Freaks continued
into the punk era. Joey Ramone, the tall and awkward singer for the
Ramones, was born with a rare congenital disease that caused his
bones to grow
disproportionately
and disfiguring the shape of his face. He also suffered from
obsessive-compulsive disorder. He claimed that Freaks was
a major artistic inspiration for his lyrics and he went on to become
one of the most influential punk icons in history.
Critics
have found a lot to say about Freaks. One
interpretation is that it allegorically portrays
the relationship between the rich and poor during the Great
Depression. Cleopatra and
Hercules represented the morally bankrupt rich who viewed the morally
pure lower classes, represented by the freaks, with contempt. Another
interpretation is that while fascism was on the rise in Europe and
eugenics and social Darwinism were popular in America, some segments
of the population supported euthanasia for disabled people as a means
of strengthening the human race; it appears that Tod Browning
intended to make Freaks as
a protest against these poisonous ideas.
One scene cut from the
original version showed a lynch mob organizing to attack and kill the
sideshow performers. A less
sympathetic interpretation has been that Hans symbolically represents
the movie studio executives who worship the beauty
of glamorous female stars,
represented by the gigantism of the blonde bombshell Cleopatra;
however, their lust for physical beauty was causing them to be
blinded to quality as they continued to churn out junk entertainment
and fluff with no
intellectual substance for
the sake of making higher profits.
But
despite any way you might choose to interpret Freaks, its
importance can not be denied. In 1994 the film was selected for
preservation in the United States Film Registry as an artistic work
of strong cultural significance.
Since
the time Freaks was
made, laws against using physically and mentally disabled people for
entertainment purposes have
been passed. People with
microencephaly are well taken care of. Obese
women, hermaphrodites, midgets, and dwarfs have all found increasing
levels of social acceptance. Surgeons have successfully developed
methods of separating most conjoined twins. Bearded ladies were
proven to be men wearing dresses. Carnival and circus sideshows are
no more. Tod Browning died impoverished and alone in 1962, just as
Freaks was beginning
to emerge from obscurity. Maybe his vision of a world more tolerant
to outsiders has become partially true.
Reference
Skal,
David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.
Faber and Faber Inc., New York:
2001.
