I was reading about the ...
Question: I was reading about the partial face transplant that was just done in France, and I had a sudden flash to a movie I saw when I was a kid. It was about a woman who was disfigured in an accident and everyone said there was nothing they could do except this one surgeon. The thing I remember most was a shot of her mouth sewed shut — everyone says I'm imagining it, but I'm sure it was a movie.
Answer: It probably says something about me that almost everything makes me think of some movie or other, but apparently I'm not the only one. The movie you're remembering (no, you didn't imagine it) is the 1984 TV movie Why Me?, based on the real experiences of Air Force nurse Leola Mae Harmon (played by Glynnis O'Connor) and Dr. James Stallings (Armand Assante), who repaired the traumatic facial damage she suffered in a car accident. The part where she had to have her mouth sewn shut in preparation for Stallings' innovative surgery was one of many images that stayed with me; I remember it being shown in a small mirror, which only made the shrunken-head effect nastier. My first thought was of the haunting Eyes Without a Face (1958) and its many trashy rip-offs, followed by the hugely entertaining and thoroughly ridiculous Face/Off (1997). Both completely ignore the reality that when you drape one person's facial skin over another person's bones, the resulting face will never look exactly like the donor: With the exception of the nose and lips, it's the architecture under the tissue that really counts. But hey, where are the thrills if people can't swap faces like living Halloween masks?
