"Feast Your Eyes, Glut Your Soul": Lon Chaney, Tod Browning, Disfigurement, and the Limits of Redemptive Affects

This article argues that Lon Chaney's and Tod Browning's films subvert what have become commonplace assumptions about the affective and ethical power of the close-up and instead stage opportunities for audience reflection on responses to disability. In particular, through films that feature nonnormative faces—especially Browning's Freaks (1932) and Chaney's Phantom of the Opera (1925)—these filmmakers pinpoint the problem of basing ethical treatment of the Other on affective identification.