By Chris Benedict

If the world, as Shakespeare famously suggested, is indeed a stage, then who do we think we are exactly? Is it a matter of perception or presentation? Do you shapeshift to meet certain ends, serve different masters? We wear masks and don disguises, put on performances be they ever so humble or of elaborate proportion. Exhibiting and in certain instances offering up for sale the bits and pieces of ourselves which we deem palatable or marketable, we conceal in exchange just enough of our true selves behind smoke and mirrors so that there is something unique left over to reveal to that one special person for whom we, with the requisite mixture of vulnerability and anxiety, lift the veil, part the curtain, and step out beyond the footlights, awaiting some sort of final analysis and ultimate judgment in the way of rueful scorn and estrangement or else sober acceptance and communion.

A scary yet necessary process, the culmination of which is dependent upon theories and ideologies unique to both supplicant and recipient. Richard Harrow, played with understated brilliance by Jack Huston on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” (with the occasional help of the very talented CGI department), is a former World War One sharpshooter and sniper who is befriended by Atlantic City Treasurer and bootlegger Nucky Thompson’s disgruntled and upwardly mobile underling Jimmy Darmody during his visit to a Veteran’s Affairs hospital. An unspecified injury (though fair to assume caused by shrapnel from a landmine or artillery fragment) has destroyed the left side of Richard’s face, leaving a raw and ragged socket where his eye used to be, the cheekbone beneath demolished, what is left of his mouth mangled into a grotesque and ironically perpetual grin of the damned.

The first time we see Harrow preparing to carry out a hit on one of Jimmy’s enemies, the camera sweeps appreciably back to disclose Richard perched in a sniper’s nest from an upstairs apartment building as his hapless victim prepares to dine in the restaurant across the street, the pipe organ of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” swells dramatically and swirls demonically, calling to mind “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney as Gaston Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera” whose shocking unmasking scene was (and remains) one of the most visually stunning and horrifying in movie history.

In an early episode, Richard sleeps on the couch at Nucky’s residence where he inadvertently frightens the son and daughter of Margaret, the destitute Irish immigrant turned kept woman. Margaret later regrets having made Richard feel more awkward and unwanted than he already does and kindly offers him to sit in on a family reading of “Wizard of Oz”. Richard happily plays along, rapping on his mask, enchanting the children by telling them that L. Frank Baum’s tin-woodsman has ventured out of their book and into their midst.

Harrow, you see, has had his self-worth pulverized to an equal or even greater extent as his face and is only able, on a negligible level, to present himself publicly with far less shame and humiliation than is his lot in life and cross to bear by having availed himself of the services of what actual doughboys wounded in the Great War came to refer to as “tin noses shops”.
The Masks For Facial Disfigurement Department, founded by renowned British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, was comprised of a network of studios run by surgeons and artists who routinely, and with stunning success, performed feats of cutting-edge cosmetic work to create realistic and viable if not comfortable tin prosthetics which would include, as in Richard’s case, a moustache and eyeglasses, proper pupil color and skin-tone complete with blemishes. Massachusetts native Anna Coleman Ladd, whose famous sculpture Triton Babies graces a fountain in Boston’s Public Gardens, operated one such clinic in Paris under the banner of the American Red Cross. Well remembered for her warmth, humanity, and empathy, Ladd’s studio was a strange combination of the bucolic and pathologic, the morbid alongside the arboreal.

Harold Gilles was a pioneer in the burgeoning artistry of plastic surgery, performing skin grafting, scar excision, and harelip repair in London who, with the invaluable aid of sculptress Kathleen Scott, was called upon to work minor miracles in the medium of major facial reconstruction on the battlefronts of Belgium and France. Hemingway wrote in “A Moveable Feast” of sitting at his favorite Parisian sidewalk café, content to blend into the scenery, an atmosphere of anonymity where poets could write in peace alongside elderly men cavorting with their mistresses behind unfolded newspapers elbow to elbow with wounded war veterans enjoying a café au’ lait or perhaps something stronger, something to help them cope if not forget. No one on exhibition, all free of examination, judgment or condemnation. Papa spoke of his admiration for their reacclimatization, the quality of their artificial eyes and the skill with which their faces, “iridescent…shiny…rather like that of a well packed ski run” were reconstructed.

Harrow later accompanies Darmody on a visit to the Philadelphia butcher shop of sadistic crime boss Manny Horvitz, hoping to forge an unlikely alliance against Steve Buscemi’s Nucky. Horvitz regards the half/masked Richard quizzically, wondering aloud what happened to his face. Richard’s deadpan, cryptic response-a tattered and abrasive, scraping and grating rasp- is “I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong.” It is interesting to note that Richard’s revenge killing of the Odessan-born butcher is by way of a shotgun blast to the eye, obliterating Horvitz’s face. This is not an extreme reaction to a petty grievance on Harrow’s part, otherwise he would have left behind an immeasurable trail of bodies, up to and including Al Capone who, during a meeting to discuss the options and ramifications of negating Nucky from the equation altogether, suggests (jokingly referring to Harrow) that they “have Frankenstein drill a hole in his noggin.”

No, Richard’s New Year’s Day execution of Manny Horvitz can rightfully be called a crime of passion. Angela Darmody, wife of Jimmy on “Boardwalk Empire”, is herself an outsider of sorts. Believing Jimmy to have perished in the war, she raises their son Tommy with the unwanted assistance of Jimmy’s mother Gillian (an Oedipal relationship deserving of its own separate analysis) and revisits her Bohemian, artistic proclivities, taking up painting and having a love affair with the wife of a local photographer. Jimmy’s sudden and unexpected return sets about the mere complication rather than the termination of Angela’s arrangement until little Tommy unknowingly points out to Jimmy, during a stroll down the Atlantic City boardwalk, the storefront of “Mommy’s kissing friend”. A violent melee ensues, followed by Angela’s discovery of the Dietrich Photography Studio’s overnight vacancy when she comes to follow through on her now decimated plans of running away to Paris with Mary.

She senses and finds in Richard a kindred spirit, however momentary (Harrow will from then on carry the memory with him literally and figuratively), when he comes calling on Jimmy at the Darmody’s seaside hideaway only to find him gone on an errand. Richard notices and remarks on Angela’s artwork, telling her how it reminds him of artists he had seen in Paris. Flattered and intrigued, Angela asks if Richard would sit for her. Bashfully and reluctantly, Richard agrees. Evasively coy in response to Richard’s somewhat trite attempt at small talk (he knows it to be a half/truth and seems to suspect that she does as well) about how much Jimmy loves her, Angela says (day-dreaming of and lamenting, I can only suppose, her unrealized romantic escape to Paris with Mary Dietrich) that “there is love, then there’s everything else.”

Replying to Angela’s well-meaning inquiry as to whether he has ever known true love, Richard tells her, “not in the way you mean” and proceeds to relate to her, while she sketches and listens intently, the depth and resonance of his relationship with his twin sister Emma from whom he was inseparable in youth and who delicately and sympathetically nursed his wounds after returning home from war, her altruistic feelings for her brother incorruptible. Suddenly, however, Richard found himself beholden to the horrors of war, unable to accept or reciprocate his sister’s tender mercies, looking at Emma and feeling nothing, surely as deformed on the inside, he now felt, as he was revolting on the outside, a physical and emotional freak show which he took on the road from their home in Wisconsin to Chicago where he intended to get lost and stay lost, never reading the books Emma sent to him nor responding to her letters.

Richard then turns away, removes his mask, sets it on the table beside him, looks back and resumes his pose for Angela. Wordlessly, without having to say so because further explanation would only cheapen the expression, he has brought the conversation, the confession, full circle from the metaphorical to the tangible by exposing to Angela his true face, his hidden self. The following week’s show opened with Nucky’s dedication of a war memorial attended by local surviving veterans and their families with the exception of a conspicuously absent half/faced former sniper. Richard sits instead in his attic lair turning the pages of a scrapbook containing pictures ripped from both his past and from newspapers and magazines. Childhood photos pasted next to headlines and articles about the war which juxtapose the cut-outs flaunting tableaus of domestic contentment. Reminiscing about memories from a real life that once was and scrutinizing scenes from another false one which may have been but he will never know. A close-up of Richard presumably taken just before heading off to war occupies an entire page, its opposite dominated by the portrait done and given to him by Angela, a woman who, with a gentle enough touch, was able to penetrate past the hardened scar tissue and into a heart which, up to that point, may have been only faintly beating.

Having made some uneasy peace with the past and wanting no longer to mourn an unattainable future, Richard closes the book of graven images, packs a lunch, hitches a ride to a remote forest, removes his mask, rests it on an adjacent rock, lies down beneath a tree, and puts the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Before he can engage the trigger, he is interrupted by a dog that snatches the mask in its mouth. Momentary befuddlement yielding to exasperation, Richard puts the gun down and stands up, facing the snarling animal.

An itinerant mongrel with traumatized facial features courtesy of some not too far-distant skirmish, scared and confused and probably more than a little angry at the world. Not at all unlike Richard. When he first almost-whispers “I need that mask”, Richard seems reluctant to reclaim his hold on the here and now forced upon him by this uninvited intrusion. His reiteration of those four words is louder, bolder, desperate and defiant in equal measure, and he gives chase when the dog turns tail. This leads him to two squirrel hunters who feed him, talk to him, admonish him that “these woods is for living”, and inform him that the dog is “an old soldier”. Asking what he fights for, one of the hobos tells Richard that “you’re going to have to ask him.” The question is, of course, a rhetorical one meant for himself. One to which Richard is aware-painfully, awfully aware-that there is no readily offered or accepted answer.

This vicious lesson comes home again in the form of Manny Horvitz who, double-crossing a double-crosser, arrives at Jimmy Darmody’s house on a night described by thunderstorms and malevolence with murder on his mind and leaves with blood on his hands. Not Jimmy’s. He is (Horvitz will soon learn) away on bootlegging business. The figure which emerges from the shower only to be sprayed down with bullets belongs to Angela’s lover Louise, a Communist, feminist, and novelist whom she met on a daytrip to the ocean and accompanied to a party attended by other like-minded, non-judgmental artists and free-spirits that night.

Angela leaps from the bed to Louise’s side, cradling her corpse and begging to be spared if only for the sake of her son. A confused but otherwise dispassionate Horvitz dismisses her offer to have Jimmy get him as much money as he wants in exchange for her life, scolding Angela that it was Jimmy that “did this to you” before shooting her at point-blank range and emptying the remainder of the rounds into both inert bodies before he is satisfied with the carnage.

After Jimmy is gunned down by Nucky at the foot of the storm swept war memorial, Harrow finds himself without a reliable comrade or partner in crime, and settles in as the caretaker of Jimmy and Angela’s now-orphaned son Tommy at Gillian’s whorehouse. Season three brings some redemptive promise to Richard after he avenges Angela’s massacre and meets Julia, the pretty daughter of a fellow veteran who comes to pick up her drunken, abusive father at an American Legion Hall after he is beaten soundly in an impromptu boxing match, their blossoming relationship thus far resulting in Richard’s invitation to Easter dinner, their first kiss at a VA dance, making love beneath the boardwalk one starry night, and a leisurely afternoon ramble on the wooden planks above where they pose for a tintype photographer with Tommy along for the day and completing the ‘family portrait’, a souvenir which earns its own reverent place in Harrow’s scrapbook.
Richard’s fate, in terms of both life and love, is not true to itself and without guarantee.

Contrary to common sense and naturally ingrained cynicism, I very much wanted to hold out some hope for old half/moon Harrow, dwelling on the slightly absurd yet comforting image of Richard standing on the ocean shore and stopping at a slight distance from their beach blanket to watch Julia and Tommy playing together, two ice cream cones dripping down both hands as he is lost in profound reverie.

When cracks start to show in the façade, whether through dereliction or grand design, to what degree are you conscious of or sensitive to what may ooze through and materialize beneath? Do you hastily and haphazardly mend the exterior for fear the general populace will regard the crumbling edifice as an unholy monstrosity, form a torch-bearing mob which will pursue and torment you to your eventual, inevitable, terrible end? Or allow it to fall away with the assurance that the foundation is sound and will support a structure worthy of repair, preservation and endurance, one that is accepted and celebrated by a vibrant, thriving community? Or even just be enough to win the solidarity of a chosen one?

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