There is an image I still find terrifying after almost 30 years.
Picture the scene: you are five years old. Aside from a candle powdered with grey dust, your VHS tapes now fill the two lowest shelves of the pine cabinet, which smells resinous, faintly sweet. Make your selection. After you put the tape in and fast-forward through the ads – the big and little road safety hedgehogs singing ‘King of the Road’, a trailer for The Borrowers, etc. – lo, it begins: Bean (1997).
The film revolves around Rowan Atkinson’s tweedy pinball of id, Mr. Bean, being sent to the U.S. as an ‘expert’ to oversee the unveiling of ‘Whistler’s Mother’ – that is, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871) by the American painter James McNeill Whistler. After Bean sneezes on the painting and tries to remove the snot with an inky handkerchief, he inadvertently applies lacquer thinner. And as Bean shakes with worry, jowls wobbling as if his skin is elasticated, Whistler’s mother’s face spumes and dissolves into abstraction. Five-year-old me is squiggling in his beanbag with fear I cannot account for.
Usually held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, this year Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 travels to London (the city in which it was painted and first exhibited) on loan to Tate Britain, and I’m marking the homecoming with an exorcism of that cartoon face – the one that Bean draws in place of Anna Whistler’s, whose eyes seem to stare directly at me, then, and now. I want to look the painting in the face again and see what, exactly, it did to me.
Am I alone in finding this face scary rather than funny? It has the exaggerated features – large, circular eyes and a phallic, Pinocchio-esque nose – of caricature, not that it resembles Whistler’s mother. Could there be an element of time-honoured misogyny at play: the idea that old women are grotesque (á la Quentin Metsys’ Ugly Duchess), disgusting enough to be laughed at? Certainly, that would be consistent with Bean’s climactic speech, when he says even though Anna ‘was a hideous old bat who looked like she had a cactus lodged up her backside, [Whistler] stuck with her’.
Caricature, or self portrait? The huge ears feel masculine. The big bald head looks like a bean. Yet
to me, it looks like Bean hasn’t attempted a reproduction or a self-rendering, he has just drawn a face. One that looks back at the viewer with these lopsided Salad Fingers-esque eyes that, because of the sloppy linework, appear bloodshot or sleep-deprived.
It’s scary on another level too. As a child, I was surely supposed to identify with bungling Bean, and here he is in Big Trouble. Children spend their lives being told not to mess with things, and Bean’s quivering lip before he unveils his mishap is undeniably childlike. He knows he’s cornered, even as he tries to pass off his outrageous smudge, and he’s scared of the consequences.
So do I find the face frightening in itself or because it anthropomorphises the abstract concept of transgression, taboo, debasement, fucking up? Is that all a bit lofty? The film’s final gag is that – having replaced the original with a poster – Bean has hung the botched masterpiece over his bed back in England, where it smiles wonkily down on him every night, decade after decade; a kind of hapless haunting.
