Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

Freaks is a movie I think of as a Voight-Kampff test. If you're not familiar with Blade Runner or the Philip K. Dick novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', I'll explain: administering a Voight-Kampff is how you tell a human being from an android replica. The test consists of a battery of questions and proposals designed to elicit an empathetic response. The android will not have genuine emotional responses – in theory, an android has no capacity for empathy.

On its original theatrical run in 1932 and for decades after, audiences and critics alike failed that test spectacularly.

Made and marketed as a horror film, Freaks is a colorful tale of the life of a circus troupe drawn from writer/director Tod Browning's personal recollections. We see the performers' loves, their jealousies, their rivalries and personal disputes, the bonds and the enmities they form. The great bulk of the movie is light, jovial. Emphasis is placed on the various romances (most of them frustrated in one way or another) that occur within the troupe. Some of it is daring for the era, including some risque dialog that caught the censors unaware. Phroso the Clown and Venus are taken with each other, but Venus is unable to elicit a warm physical response from Phroso (“You shoulda seen me before my operation”, he says without further elucidation). Strongman Hercules is a crude Alpha-male brute who dallies with all the camp's women. He's attracted to the show's hermaphrodite but can't admit it and so is often hostile. She seems to be attracted to him as well, but never speaks it.  The circus' owner wants to marry Violet but can't get a moment alone with her, being that she is a conjoined twin. Her sister Daisy and the owner don't get along one bit. Frieda is devoted to Hans but Hans has eyes only for trapeze artist Cleopatra.  Cleopatra plays off Hans' love in order to get closer to his money.  Hans and Frieda are little people, whom Cleo despises along with all other “freaks”.

Here is where audiences freaked: the cast is an even mix of normal-bodied folk, paraplegics and quadriplegics, gaffs (performers who fake physical abnormality), little people, microcephalics (“pinheads”), hermaphrodites, and others with genuine physical malformations of many kinds from the incredibly thin to “bird people”. That alone made “normal” audiences uncomfortable. Imagine their revulsion when Browning upped the ante by presenting the “freaks” as not only human beings but beings with sexual impulses.

This is what the critics had to say when confronted by such humanity: Script opined that the film could only appeal to “the morbidly curious and psychically sick whose libidos are stimulated by contemplating the sex lives of abnormalities and monsters”. According to the Boston Herald, “Any who enjoy watching the pitiful grotesque mistakes of nature may behold them in 'Freaks' (...) the sadistically cruel plot savors nearly of perversion”. Time magazine deemed the sideshow performers to be “subhuman animals”.

Isn't society lovely? There is an instinct we all know for social survival that could be summed up as “pick on the freak”. It works like this: to be accepted by a dominant society and thus have their protection, you must publicly hurt someone scorned by that group, someone deemed lesser or undesirable. By doing so you demonstrate your own worthiness to belong. It's ugly and cruel, and we all learn it at school either by doing it or having it done to us. Pick on the freak. Browning knows it well and cannily provides a stark example in Freaks when Hercules (recently abandoned by Venus) now woos Cleopatra. The two espy the hermaphrodite (she is never named) looking on at Hercules with heartbroken eyes. Remember, Hercules is attracted to her. In front of Cleo, though, he has to demonstrate that he's 'normal' and so shows off his masculinity by delivering the hermaphrodite a vicious black eye. Cleo responds with delighted laughter.

Bringing out the worst in each other, the pair get darker from there and so does the film. Cleo marries Hans for his money. Actress Olga Baclanova essays the role of Cleo with an air of undisguised loathing for her circumstances, having to abide the presence of so many contemptible colleagues. In the film's most celebrated scene, a wedding banquet is held at which Cleo gets drunk, literally from champagne and figuratively from her success in so easily fooling her little rube. While the troupe celebrates, mostly oblivious to her as she is to them, she proceeds to demean him openly, mocking him for his size and condescending to his apparent stupidity. Watch the way she reacts when Hercules points her attention to the sideshow performers drinking a toast to her that they accept her: “One of us! One of us!” The horror! The effrontery! The sheer, nasty insult – Cleo accepted as equals by filth! Baclanova plays a beautiful transition from boisterous hilarity to stuporous incomprehension to outrage.

Further betrayals sow an anger throughout the troupe, poisoning them all. Plans are made, vigils are kept, until one night as the caravan makes it's way through a stormy night (it has to be a storm at night, doesn't it?) varying bands form and attack each other. The sequence is a veritable lesson in filmcraft by Browning and his crew, as is the wedding feast. I've hardly even mentioned the talent on display...gloriously shot and lit, captured by a camera as fluid as the ones in Dracula were not, and set in a studio-created circus grounds that are not just convincing but inviting as a living microcosm. It's easy to immerse and lose oneself here. The script is sharp, perhaps even acidic given what's known of excised material – the censors removed some thirty minutes of material, and more was scripted but never shot. The finale involved a castration, no longer extant.

Even today, some are squeamish about that finale. Some find Browning's treatment of the circus folk to be exploitative, ambivalent...they see the sideshow people crawling beneath the carriages, wet with mud and shot in the visual language of horror cinema, and they see Browning proposing the circus folk as monstrous. In Tod Browning's reckoning, everyone ends up in the mire including the 'normals'. In 1932, Motion Picture Daily wrote that one can “not simultaneously capitalize on human misfits and pretend to pity them”. It is at least a recognition of basic human dignity, but still a failure to comprehend what's right there on the screen. When the hour of reckoning comes, it is the normal-bodied and “freak” alike who attack, or act to defend others, their courses decided not by their infirmities but by the strengths of their characters, side by side as equals and companions. In Browning's reckoning, lack of human empathy lowers us all into the mire.