Tod Browning
Freaks

"Freaks" is undoubtedly a shocking film and filled with meaning in an era like the current one where the different is viewed with suspicion and fear, let alone in the 1930s when deformed people were left to their tragic fate, if not most of the time suppressed at birth.

It's undeniable that facing "a freak of nature" such as a dwarf, a woman without arms who does everything with her feet, Siamese twins, or a needle man, can evoke in those who are considered normal by definition because they fit the classic human model, disgust, fear, amusement, pity. No one (myself included), at least at first impression, wonders if a being like this, which we wouldn't even be sure to qualify as man or woman, has feelings, experiences love, joy, anger, or pain. This is because we are overwhelmed by the initial aesthetic impact that puts everything else in the background.

In any case, we would be tempted to believe that we are facing extremely unfortunate people to be pitied, and therefore, we would tend to consider them weak individuals. Tod Browning reverses all our stereotypical beliefs with an absolutely revolutionary work considering the year it was released, so much so that in many countries the message was not fully comprehended and its projection was banned for many years.

The "Freaks" are not accomplished actors or the result of brilliant make-up, but absolutely real. The American director shows them in their everyday circus life and in their relationship with the so-called normal human beings. At the beginning and for much of its body, the film seems to channel into the usual story of the stronger and meaner individual (conventional human being) who cruelly ridicules the weaker one (freak), except that in the end, the "and they all lived happily ever after" wins thanks to the intervention of a strong, this time good, individual saving the weaker one to triumph justice and equality.

It is not so.

The Freaks have their own law; by harming one of them, you harm the whole community. They do not need the help of the normal man.

The viewer, at the moment the unsettling conclusion unfolds, finally realizes that the Freaks are normal people and with equal dignity to those without deformities, because they not only experience the same feelings of love, joy, pain, but especially because they can be, just like men considered normal, cynical, vengeful, extremely cruel, and ruthless. In this, man cannot change, because the human soul, beyond all bodily differences, does not change.

A film in which reality prevails, not rhetoric and sentimentality, is one we will hardly ever see on screens.

A film that for this reason, and not only, is absolutely a monument.