Abstract
To negotiate the self with the social world, we must, as the character Dr Lord declares in Agatha Christie’s Sad Cypress (1940), conceal and sublimate our identities and animalistic sides, for ‘the human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask’ (1940, p. 43). In Gordon Chan’s film Painted Skin (2008), a celluloid adaptation of Pu Songling’s ‘Painted Skin’ (1740, trans. Minford, 2006), the theme of masking is literalized in the ‘painted skin’ when animal characters put on human veneers while eating and killing men as a means to gain power and for survival. Indeed, the limit of humanness is to realize how fierce the will to live is and the extent to which people would consider eating others for their own sake.
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