A remarkable face stared at me from an isolated garage window behind a dilapidated apartment complex. It gaped from behind bars, forlorn and hopeless. His impassive and imprisoned gaze locked onto the outside world.
This is Buster Keaton, icon of the motion picture industry in its infancy. The icy stare and cocked hat are borrowed directly from a scene in Keaton’s 1921 movie, The Goat, in which Keaton’s face is substituted on a “wanted” poster by a clever escaped convict, thereby managing to conceal the criminal’s own identity.
Stop the press!
Closer scrutiny of the artwork reveals far more. Gradually, we come to recognize the form of the face, the sculpted nose and the overdrawn eyes. They don’t belong to Keaton. Had the artist drawn a single glove on one hand, we would recognize that this is Michael Jackson gazing out at us!
Usually, most of us don’t feel imprisoned.
But standing before a mirror, sometimes we can see an image resembling one or both of our parents, or grandparents, peering back at us.
I wonder who else is?