Tracing The Shape 29: Michael Unmasked
Michael Myers is a composite character played by more than one actor. Nick Castle famously portrayed Michael as "The Shape," the masked and coverall-clad Boogeyman who picks his way through Haddonfield with quiet grace and fluid steps. But for one unforgettable moment, another actor went under that mask, as Carpenter called on Tony Moran to play Michael for the mere seconds when he's maskless at the very end of the film.
I remember an interview in which Carpenter said he chose Moran because he wanted a face that was almost "angelic," and indeed that is the effect if you take a moment to study Moran's features. He's got a strong jawline, smooth, clear skin, thick eyebrows, full lips, a mane of curly dark hair. If it weren't for the injury to Michael's left eye (from when Laurie poked him with a hanger) and the sheer brevity of the scene, there's a good chance you'd call him handsome.
It's easy to take in this very short scene – Michael is literally maskless for five seconds, and isn't even on camera for all of them – and see a simple subversion of expectation. Carpenter created a monster, so when you finally saw his face he wanted something, well, less monstrous. It's a far cry from the way later slashers like Jason Voorhees have been portrayed over the years, and it's a simple flip of the script. You expect ugliness, and you don't get it, and that gives you pause.
But removing the mask does more than simply throwing us off guard. If we look at what's happening around this moment, it is easily the lowest Michael has ever been, including his time in Smith's Grove. He's now been stabbed twice, with a knitting needle and a knife, and poked in the eye once. After the famous moment when he sits up and looks at Laurie, he approaches her with a decidedly hobbled gait. For the first time all night he's met genuine resistance and experienced what's probably the greatest pain of his life (and Michael, even if he feels nothing else, clearly does feel pain). He is spent.
Even when he builds up the strength to attack Laurie again, all his malevolent spells and careful movements go out the window. He just lunges, hands on her throat, desperate to inflict some kind of suffering now that she's wounded him not once but twice. This is a bully who's finally been stood up to by the kid he's picking on. He's flailing.
The mask coming off is a natural progression of that dynamic, and when it does slip away, your heart almost breaks because of the way Moran plays this extremely brief piece of performance. Michael's face is a distorted mirror of what it was in the beginning of the film, when his father pulled off his clown mask and revealed a boy dazed, lost in what he'd done, free of all the constraints of a normal life and devoted entirely to the new world he'd just created in his head. Michael spent years thinking of that moment, dreaming of a day when he could reclaim it, see if it still felt right, see if he could still find meaning in it, and now he's been hobbled and bled and beaten by a teenage girl. He has lost all sense of drive beyond animal instinct, and when the mask comes off we see that same vacant look from when he was a kid, but there's something else there.
Michael, for what might be the first time in his life, is afraid. I don't think he's afraid of Laurie necessarily, but in his own twisted world he is afraid that everything he has created, everything he clings to, is tumbling down around him. He looks lost again, but not in some kind of adrenaline-drunk reverie. Now he just looks drained of direction, of energy, of hope, and his only salvation is to get the mask back on, hide all of that insecurity away again.
I firmly believe, somewhere back in my soul, that if Michael doesn't get the mask back on, he doesn't survive Loomis' bullets. That doesn't mean I think the mask is magic, but I do think its very presence imbues Michael with a fortitude that might otherwise be lost. Here in this moment, when it's briefly pulled away from him, the spell of The Boogeyman comes down not just because the mask is gone, but because Michael's effort to enforce his will – itself a form of magic – on the wider world is lost. The Boogeyman is reduced to a shuffling, half-blind shell, if only for a moment.
Michael has lost, but in losing, and ultimately admitting a certain kind of defeat even if it's not final, he will eventually grow even more powerful.
Next Time: Loomis the Damned!
