A Film Canon

Freaks stands as the canonical deconstruction of censorship (and, specifically, of the imminent Hays Code), characterising the 'transgressive' as everything that forces us to extend or complicate our sympathetic powers, as well as our capacity for merciless self-observation. Browning's central gesture is to cast real-life 'freaks' within a narrative predicated upon their humanity, simultaneously offering and refusing their bodies as sites of entertainment; or, alternatively, separating our sympathetic and voyeuristic investment in their activity, such that we are forced to take full responsibility for the latter. In doing so, he deconstructs mass entertainment itself, characterising its exploitative subtext in terms of a repressed entity whose possible return inspires (misplaced) gestures of oppression. The result is something distinctly other than entertainment, a disorientation that finds clearest expression in the narrative evolution of the term 'freak' - from the pejorative, to the administrative (that is, as a neutral shorthand in circus logistics), to the exclusive. Nevertheless, this exclusivity belies the radical continuity that exists between 'freakdom' and 'normality' - or between circus and outside world - evident in the protagonist's confidence that he will eventually be able to move from one to the other, as well as in Browning's final implication that physical 'beauty' is merely a further category of deformity.