Mad Love: The Anxiety of Difference in the Films of Lon Chaney Sr.

Abstract

This chapter will focus on two films from Lon Chaney’s career, The Penalty (Wallace Worsley, 1920) and The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925), to illustrate the ways in which Chaney’s “transformative masculinity,” 1 displayed throughout his film career in the 1920s, allow for a neurotic repetition of the disfigured or deformed male body to be visualized on screen. Lon Chaney’s active performance of disability gives his characters a power over the body that is often perceived by the able bodied as impossible. However, these characters do not succeed in getting their woman, and all must ultimately die in horrific or tragic circumstances because of their perceived transgressive sexuality and their refusal to accept the passive normative position of the disfigured and disabled man. In the films that I consider here, and in his entire oeuvre, Chaney’s characters are unable to articulate their love for the women that they desire in socially accepted terms. His performed bodies fail to articulate their tender feelings; rather they act as a symptom of his characters’ sexual frustration. These characters are doubly disabled in terms of bodily function and emotional expression. Here in Chaney’s films, the dark side of love is illustrated through damaged bodies that contain damaged psyches, a problematic notion in a postwar decade. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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