Clown Face

One weekend when I was about three or four, my parents took me to a seasonal Bozo the Clown train ride. Their thinking, it should be noted, was rational: trains + clowns = good kid fun. But here's what actually transpired: Little Adam boards train car with family and rides around track, enjoying himself. Little Adam sees tunnel ahead, gets a bit nervous because of the dark. Little Adam makes it through dark tunnel without crying. At end of tunnel, just as train emerges from somewhat-scary dark tunnel into the relief of sunlight, Bozo the Clown, official host of the train ride, pops out from behind tunnel's exterior to say a happy hello. Little Adam loses. his. shit.

I don't mean "loses his shit" in the traditional, "Aw, poor baby, here's a hug" way. I mean, Little Adam lost his shit at Bozo, screaming bloody terror into the poor underpaid hired clown's face. Little Adam lost his shit at his parents, who tried to console him. Little Adam continued losing his shit through the crowds, to the parking lot, into the car, and all the way home.

Fast forward a year or two later, and my parents decide to take me to Barnum & Bailey circus, along with my sister and grandparents. Things go OK--I've got my popcorn, there are acrobats doing cool things, there are trick-performing animals I'm far too young to recognize as probable victims of confinement and torture. Then, out come the clowns. This time, instead of breaking down, I broke bad. I persuaded someone--my parents, breaking a rule out of desperation? My much more indulgent grandparents?--to buy me a toy gun with a cork on the end, tied to a string, that could shoot out. I, future human rights activist and peacenik professor, spent the rest of that circus performance pretending to shoot the clowns dead. (Before I had kids, I might have asked why, after the Bozo incident, my parents were so quick to try again at the circus--didn't they get the hint about clowns? Now that I'm a parent, I get it: some experiences are so well-marketed as kid-friendly, so bound up in our notions of What Kids Like, that you can find yourself accidentally tormenting your kid in the unexamined hope that maybe next time he will just love the bouncy house, birthday party, ski slope, or whatever "normal" activity it is that your kid has decided to totally hate).

I'm far from the only kid who was scared of clowns. In fact, clowns constitute a not-quite-iconic (a la vampires, werewolves, witches, and zombies), but nevertheless persistent genre in horror: most famously in Stephen King's It and the Batman villain the Joker (for whom the balance of ridiculousness and scariness can vary significantly, depending on whether he's a drawing in a Silver Age issue of Detective comics or Heath Ledger), but also at any Halloween emporium near you.

But to me, the various touches that are usually added to these villainous clowns to make them scary--the fangs, the scars, and so on--are redundant. Clowns are already scary. But why?

One could start with the simple fact that clowns are disguised, and disguises make the known into the unknown, which is where most horror resides. The concealment of the face, whole or partial, frustrates our automatic attempts to "read" faces as friendly or hostile, happy or sad; it prompts us to dark imaginings of what's really behind the mask. Just think of the moment in Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader finally takes off his helmet, and sad, chalky old Anakin is revealed. Or recall when Peter Jackson's excellently terrifying on-screen versions of Tolkien's black riders, the nazgul, appear without their hoods, as ghostly kings. These are moments when pleasurable fear evaporates, usually replaced by pity. We're supposed to have some pity for Anakin, and the black riders, because of how the temptations of dark forces and rings have overcome them. But I think we really pity them, in these maskless moments, because of how swiftly and irreparably their dark mojo has abandoned them.

Clowns have a special kind of mask, though. Their mask is a smile. And that, to me, is way creepier than a hood or helmet. Alexandra Howson's survey of sociological scholarship, The Body in Society, describes "face work" as a form of labor we all engage in, making sure that our facial expressions fit with the "feeling rules" around us. For many of us, in everyday life, this means smiling when we're not really happy--when our boss asks us to volunteer for the weekend event and we reply, "I'd be happy to!" or when politely asking the person at the gym who has been hogging the treadmill for over an hour while talking on his cell phone when, approximately, he thinks he might be finished with his workout. As a student of mine, Scott Barrett, pointed out in a recent paper, studies show that there are many variations of the human smile, and the vast majority of them do not reflect authentic happiness. In fact, the smile of a chimpanzee, our close relative, is usually actually a "fear grimace" that indicates the individual feels threatened. The painted-on smile of the clown, especially when paired with a tear or an angry glint in the eyes, reminds us of the vulnerability and even the aggression that often lies just beneath the surface of our own daily smiles. Vampires and zombies are scary for the ways in which they are not like us. But clowns are scary because they openly dramatize the face work we do everyday, the falseness, the dark undercurrent beneath our routines.

Clowns are also, of course, entertainers, paid to smile--making the notion of face work as "emotional labor" quite literal. They smile to make us smile. Here, too, they merely make somewhat more explicit something that was already a central feature of daily life under capitalism: the servile smile, the customer service smile, the smile that's there not because I'm happy but because my job is to make you happy, or more accurately to make you think I care whether you are happy, care whether you smile. According to Arlie Russell Hoschild in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, this kind of face work can actually accelerate the appearance of wrinkles and other signs of aging on the human face. Here, the connection to the more traditionally morbid themes of Halloween  finally appears: the clown, like all of us, is smiling his way into the grave.

Clearly, Little Adam on Bozo's train wasn't thinking through this kind of cultural critique of clowning. But by that time in my life, I'm certain, I'd seen plenty of false smiles--especially since a disproportionate number of those smiles are directed at kids, obligated as they are to live in a world in which every stranger is smiling at them, all the time. I had seen the "I'm about to give you a shot" smile at the doctor's office, the "Ack, this kid just barfed on the plane but I'll smile at him because he's just a poor kid" smile, and various other facetious smiles we grown-ups bequeath to future generations. That's the key word here: "future." I think maybe my five-year-old self looked at Bozo's painted-on, desperate-to-please smile, and some part of me said, it's a lie. And then another part of me said, it's your future. Is it any wonder I started screaming?