Speaking at her inaugural lecture as Professor of Film and Culture, Karen Randell introduced a public audience to her research discussing ‘performance, prosthetics and the returned veteran’, from film and television, focusing on the work of Lon Chaney in silent Hollywood horror film and the contemporary American TV series, Boardwalk Empire.

Guests including industry experts, fellow academics, students and Professor Randell’s family gathered at the University’s Postgraduate Centre, to hear her thoughts on the representation of disfigurement in the media, including how the iconic face of Eric (Lon Chaney) in the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera, echoes that of the early plastic surgery used to treat wounded World War One veterans.

Disfigured henchman Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) in 2009’s HBO series Boardwalk Empire provides, she argues, an anachronistic representation of the WW1 veteran to continue to highlight the post war anxieties of the disfigured, and that the character’s tin mask is more likely to be found in a post WW1 hospital, than a prohibition era ‘Speak-Easy’.

Professor Randell said: “The number of traumatic amputees that the allied forces currently have is around 35,000 young men and women. This may be surprising to many people because you don’t see these veterans represented as a norm in popular culture.”

“This is nothing new. After World War One thousands of young men survived amputations and mutilations thanks to the progress in medical practice, however, popular culture was reluctant to represent these men directly.”

Comparing the differences and similarities of these two representations, Professor Randell suggests that the reveal of disability in Boardwalk Empire was portrayed as “fairly normalised”, rather than as a “grotesteque spectacle” as in The Phantom of the Opera and she argues that this is “particularly striking as it is fairly rare in mainstream popular culture”.

Her work will be published in a monograph, Lon Chaney: Performance and Post-War Visual Culture in 2016.