I wouldn’t say I’m a big John Woo fan — I’ve only seen a couple of his more famous Hong Kong films, and most of his Hollywood films, like Windtalkers (2002; my review) and Paycheck (2003), have been letdowns — but I have always been a fan of Face/Off (1997), a wonderfully implausible and movingly melodramatic sci-fi action flick that made my top ten list for that year.
I have always been intrigued by the way Woo has discussed, for example in this Premiere magazine interview, how the images in his films of doves and people pointing guns at each other and so on reflect both his Christian beliefs and his love of Mad magazine’s ‘Spy Vs. Spy’ comics. And FWIW, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I thought to myself, “I don’t just like this film, I love it” — it’s when Nicolas Cage tells Joan Allen the story of their first date.
Why do I bring this all up now? Because The Times reports that a real-life face transplant is in the works:
FIVE men and seven women — all severely disfigured — have been shortlisted in the “face race” to receive the world’s first face transplant.
In the next few weeks the 12 applicants will visit the renowned Cleveland Clinic in the United States, which will select the first recipient of a new face from a cadaver. The clinic received approval for the pioneering operation from its ethics board last year, though regulators in Britain and France had rejected the surgery.
But Maria Siemionow, who is leading the project, admits that the chance of the donor’s body rejecting the new face could be as high as 50 per cent. The clinic’s “consent form” says that the surgery is so novel that doctors do not think informed consent is even possible. The transplant does not guarantee they will ever look “normal”, and their appearance could even get worse, according to the form.
At the interviews Dr Siemionow, 55, will ask would-be transplant recipients to smile, raise their eyebrows, close their eyes and open their mouths. Then she will ask: “Are you afraid that you will look like another person?”
As part of her preparations, Dr Siemionow rented a video of the 1997 film Face Off, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, in which two characters swap faces. But Dr Siemionow says that unlike the film, the transplant recipient will not resemble the face donor because the underlying bone structure remains the same.
The unprecedented surgery touches on the deepest human feelings about identity. Some ethicists contend that facial disfigurement is not life-threatening and therefore not worth a lifetime on immuno suppressant drugs, which can be justified for other organ transplants. Dr Siemionow and other doctors argue that many disfigured patients are tormented by shame and depression. “For many patients, being able to go back to their normal lives is worth the risk of taking lifelong immuno suppression,” she says. “Many of those patients do not leave their houses.”
There’s a fair bit more to the story. Apparently experiments have already been performed on animals, and the doctors know they can perform the necessary microsurgery because it has already been used in 26 hand transplants since 1999 — and that’s just in the U.S. But as I understand it, at least one hand-transplant recipient — a New Zealander who got a new hand in France in 1998 — had his new hand amputated again, due to an identity crisis of sorts; presumably something similar could happen here.
And just for the record, losing a hand is very near the top of the list of things that I would rather not have to experience. I do too much typing, and even though I haven’t taken piano lessons since I was 13 or 14, I would at least like to keep my options open.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a face. But I do remember that there were times, when I was a boy, that I would stare at the mirror and wonder if the physical features I saw there really were the “me” who was conscious of seeing those features.
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