As Unclear as the Prosthetic Nose on His Face
Bradley Cooper is the driving force behind the movie Maestro which gives the life of musical genius Leonard Bernstein the treatment of a feature length film. By all accounts this endeavor is a passion project for Cooper and, as has been attested to by Bernstein’s children, he took pains in telling the story in a way that is accurate and in the spirit of the composer, his loves and accomplishments and various identities including being Jewish and bisexual. But the story now is about the nose.
The nose in question is not Bernstein’s or Cooper’s but the prosthetic one that Cooper chose to wear in his portrayal of the iconic composer. A substantial backlash centers around the idea that an actor who is not Jewish who puts on a fake nose to play someone is engaging in something akin to the reviled practice of blackface, an actor coloring their face in order to look like a person who is black. Blackface was widely practiced with disrespect in minstrel shows not only on small stages but by stars as impactful as Al Jolson whose act revolved around the caricature a black man and the stereotypical music and mannerisms that went along with it. Because of this history even someone with good intentions who “blacks up” their face for any purpose crosses a serious line. Now Cooper is accused of a version of this called Jewface.,
I am not a fan of the term, honestly. In many ways it implies that the issue is one of parallel fairness - if blackface is wrong then this must be wrong too - which only undercuts the seriousness of both. Furthermore, I am not prone to look for antisemitism under every cushion. When swastikas and putrid flyers are on doorsteps and violence is called for and, G*d forbid, carried out against us, there are a lot more blatant examples to choose from. My first thought was let’s not go there. But something really feels off here.
For me, what rankles is that Bernstein’s nose is not such a salient feature. He is not like Jimmy Durante (not Jewish by the way) who was known as Schnozzola or even Barbra Streisand. No one would have looked twice at Cooper or thought the nose was missing had he gone au natural. And unlike Helen Mirren playing a pivotal Jewish and Israeli figure, Golda Meir, the nose wasn’t part of a larger project of making such a recognizable star into a completely different person. Cooper felt he needed the nose in particular and this says something about the penetration of a stereotype that does, in fact, have its own painful and exploitative history against Jews.
Whether in literature, caricature or public calumny European Jews are depicted as hooked nose in a way that differentiates them from the less pronounced features of those around them. The nose as a marker differentiates Jews and makes it impossible to blend in to the point that those who do not fit this or any other physical stereotype are accused of being deceptive. These attacks culminated with the Nazis and their systematic employment of facial measurements in their pseudoscientific racial investigations. More than a feature, a Jew’s big nose, real or imagined, was a signifier of all the infernal inferiority of those who are not quite human.
None of this brutal hatred goes into anything related to Maestro or anyone involved in the project. Still, the decision to wear the prosthetic is simply a sign that old stereotypes linger even if they are more complicated now than they were. When our features are emphasized as minority groups, it is a reminder that there is always a simplistic way to portray us and a more complex way to be seen. Identity is always more than skin deep and harder to discern than what is found on the face.