1:27:25
Amadeus, 1984
In the screen shots above, the 18th century Italian court composer Antonio Salieri is trying to figure out who Mozart is before he meets him for the first time. I have been obsessed by this question all my life, and written on this subject a great deal, both on this blog and in my books.
Is talent written on the face? Is character written on the face? Which is to say, is the soul written on the face?
What shows on the face? What does a face tell us?
There used to be face readers, like palm readers. Eastern doctors (TCM, Ayurveda) that diagnosed physical maladies and imbalances by reading the face. People used to fall in love with a face not just because it was pretty or beautiful, but because they felt something metaphysical—something spiritual—when looking at someone. Maybe just once.
We have forgotten.
We betray our faces by ruining them. By ruining ourselves, which ruins our faces. Our faces are now (re)designed to show nothing real or true, about us, about the soul, about talent. About anything.
I still believe in what George Orwell said, no matter what grotesque face technologies and AI “beauty” we’ve been flooded with: “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
Judging by the cosmetic erasure psyop, it seems no one deserves their faces anymore, let alone the face of another.
It is painful when things don’t line up. When things don’t make sense. When everything is incoherent. Mozart is not his music. This is what shocks Salieri and knocks him right in his stomach, changing his entire life. His sense of the entire world. Of what is true and fair. It is also, as we’re seeing now, the greatest psyop of all—brutal incongruence. Everything operates on a betrayal principle. Every aspect of life is Noir. Sucker punched.
As a child, I loved and watched Amadeus constantly. Watching it now, it is very different from what I remember. Much less mythic and flamboyant. It is also a wonderfully funny film about the clash between political regulation and the iconoclasm of art, largely because of Jeffrey Jones’ (of Ferris Bueller fame) performance as the Emperor Joseph II of Vienna. There is also Tom Hulce’s (who plays Mozart), famous laugh. Compared to Mozart, whose musical gift is enormous and effortless (according to the film), Salieri is heavy and serious and somber. Mozart likes to party as much as he likes to compose. His laugh is playful and light as a feather, the laugh of a court jester, an imp, a clown. A mad man. Mozart’s laugh haunts Salieri, who feels mocked every time he hears it.
Salieri, as an old man: “That was not Mozart laughing at me, that was God. That was God laughing at me through that obscene giggle…Show my mediocrity for all to see.”
For Salieri, Mozart and his infectious laugh is a personification of his failure as a composer. Salieri’s feels erased by Mozart’s genius. And yet he was made for Mozart’s music. He feels it and appreciates it like no one else. Mozart’s music is God. On Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, Salieri recounts: “Worshipping sound I alone seemed to hear.”
As far as the film’s fictional account of Mozart is concerned, unlike Salieri, Mozart is not manipulative, vindictive, or conniving. He is without guile when it comes to his work. He cares only about doing the best work possible. His unparalleled genius also makes him immune to normal insecurities. He doesn’t need to compete with anyone, which makes him dangerous, in the way that all truly talented and independent artists are dangerous. And this leads to his demise.
But Amadeus is a profound but very basic story about jealousy, inadequacy, bitterness, failure; the gift and spiritual responsibilities that come with talent. Mozart is both full of himself and a simple young man who cannot handle his otherworldly gifts. Who cannot take care of himself, whose house and marriage is a mess, who wants to impress his father who taught him everything. It is also a movie about the injustice of appearances. The way talent, as Salieri believes, is delivered by God into the wrong bodies, for the wrong reasons. Why wasn’t Mozart’s gift given to him? It drives Salieri insane for the rest of his life. It is heartbreaking to watch. Because it is so real. Because it is tragic.
Decades ago, in an interview, bell hooks said that Amadeus wasn’t about true genius not being recognized in its time, but just the opposite: it was about recognizing it and not wanting it to exist. This always stuck with me.
hooks: “I think that’s where envy comes in. That’s why the movie Amadeus was so fascinating because it says that sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”
Salieri talking to God about Mozart: “I will hinder and harm your creature on earth as far as I am able.”
Rewatching the film now, I think hooks’ assessment is a bit of a simplification. At first Salieri did revere Mozart’s talent, and was eager to meet him. But Mozart’s ridicule of Salieri’s mediocre compositions, as well as what Salieri perceived to be Mozart’s immorality, irreverence, and irresponsibility, made Salieri, who dedicated his life to his faith, feel slighted by God. Imagine not having that kind of talent, that kind of gift, when it was all you had ever wanted and worked for, he tells us. Imagine, as we all have, feeling forsaken and abandoned, by the world, by God. Of having our dreams taken away and having to make sense of that for the rest of our lives.
Why?
We always ask God, Why?
Being alone with that. Going to the depths of despair with that. Wrestling with that.
What is God? How do we love him? How does he love us? Are we willing to be what he wants us to be?
How does God speak to us? Through us? And why do we squander the gifts we are given? Why aren’t we given the gifts we strive for? Why do we reject the gifts we are given? Why do we resent those that have the gifts they have by trying to block those gifts from ever seeing the light of day?
And on and on.
What I like about the way Mozart is portrayed in the film, at least, is that while he is a juvenile, degenerate philanderer, etc., he also knows the worth of his talent and is afraid of no one, not even of the royal court, to whom Salieri panders his entire life. It ends up killing Mozart and leaving him destitute and forgotten (for a while), but he bows to no one. And protects his talent fiercely.
In Amadeus, talent wins until it is destroyed. Blocked at every turn. Eradicated.
At the end of the movie, Salieri, accepting his fate, refers to himself as the “patron saint of mediocrity.”
On another note, looking at the old and crazy Salieri after he’s attempted suicide for “assassinating Mozart,” as he puts it, I was struck by just how good that prosthetic make-up looked in 1983, when Amadeus was made. It is one of the convincing aging jobs I've ever seen. So good, in fact, it doesn’t look look like makeup at all, the way even Rick Baker’s (who also did Michael Jackson’s werewolf prosthetics for Thriller) breakthrough special effects for the American Werewolf in London, made just 3 years earlier, looks highly fake. Different animal though, literally.
F. Murray Abraham as the old Salieri truly looks like an old man. Dick Smith, who did the makeup for The Exorcist, the possessed Regan, did the makeup for F. Murray as the old Salieri.
F. Murray Abraham, 1985
Something to think about.
Mask technology was already highly sophisticated by then. Remember, as former Master of Chief of Disguise at the CIA (who I always talk about on this blog), Jonna Mendez informs, the alliance between Hollywood special effects and the CIA (see the Ben Affleck movie Argo. Mendez was married to Tony Mendez, on whom Argo is based, and who also worked on high-level Disguise Tech).
Acting is the art of disguise tech. Disguise tech for a living.
The 1986 movie FX (also called Murder by Illusion) drives this point home, as I’ve noted before. In the film, the US DOJ stages a fake assassination of a mafia informant using the mask technology made by a movie special effects expert.
