Face/Off
“But remember… Every time you look in the mirror, you’ll see my face.”
Would you rather wake up with no face or with someone else’s face? This film feels inherently like a comedy, but provides both belly-laughs and thought-provoking ideas.
The religious themes in Face/Off suggest that enlightenment is not found in repentance, but in our knowledge that we exist and are constituted as individuals through a matrix of shared elemental materials—and therefore shared consciousness. Philip K. Dick wrote in Valis that the Buddha was one who remembered their immortal identity through all of their past lives, but unwritten teachings showed that they could remember their future lives as well. Our lives shine like jewels on Indra’s Net, but like mirrors, jewels reflect our gaze. To see myself in you and you in myself is the relational substrate of our shared temporal reality.
In Face/Off, Sean Archer and Castor Troy learn that our material conditions and conscious conditions are entangled in a sort of monistic recurrence, as above so below. We are all One, divided amongst many masks, reflecting One for one another to see. “I’m not Me… I’m ME.”
Castor Troy kills who will later become his own son and Sean Archer is left with Troy’s son after wearing Troy’s face. Sean Archer steals Troy’s identity, and Troy then dives deeper into Sean’s identity. They reflect one another like two mirrors held up to each other. What I do to you, I am really doing to myself—myself in a mask in a mirror.
Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks. - Oscar Wilde, Salomé