10.54103/2036-461X/17384




Dutch director Sacha Polak’s Dirty God (2019) is the first narrative film with a female lead whose scars are real, and arguably the first to tackle the assumption that scars (especially on a woman’s body) are shameful or tragic. Vicky Knight, who plays Jade, a young woman rebuilding her life after an acid attack, has talked about the revelation of seeing her body on screen after enduring years of abuse because of her appearance. Polak ‘saved my life’ she says, by enabling her to see her scarred body as beautiful, ‘a piece of art.’ Like any art form, film has the potential to be transformative, and in interviews both Knight and Polak have repeatedly spoken of their work in those terms. This article uses Dirty God to think about what is at stake in the dismantling of stereotypes and the reclamation of beauty — a goal shared by many disability rights campaigners. Made at a time when escalating cases of acid violence in London were making headlines around the world, Polak’s film prompts comparisons with Katie Piper’s Beautiful (2011) and other survivor memoirs. Privileging imperfection over repair and fragility over strength, it challenges existing portrayals of disfigurement and, in the process, offers a more radical understanding of beauty and authenticity.




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Suzannah Biernoff
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Diversity
Sacha Polak's Dirty God and the Politics of Authenticity
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2023-01-24
2022-02-17
2023-01-24
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Cinéma & Cie
Suzannah Biernoff
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/17384
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Birkbeck - University of London
2036-461X
39
Diversity
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36
Sacha Polak's Dirty God and the Politics of Authenticity
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/17384/17536
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                                                                                       Sacha Polak’s Dirty God and
                                                                                       the Politics of Authenticity
                                                                                       Suzannah Biernoff, Birkbeck — University of London




                                                                                       Dutch director Sacha Polak’s Dirty God (2019) is the first narrative film with a female                   Keywords
                                                                                       lead whose scars are real, and arguably the first to tackle the assumption that scars                 Disfigurement
                                                                                       (especially on a woman’s body) are shameful or tragic. Vicky Knight, who plays Jade, a
                                                                                                                                                                                                     Beauty
                                                                                       young woman rebuilding her life after an acid attack, has talked about the revelation of
                                                                                       seeing her body on screen after enduring years of abuse because of her appearance.                             Burns
                                                                                       Polak ‘saved my life’ she says, by enabling her to see her scarred body as beautiful, ‘a                Stereotypes
                                                                                       piece of art.’ Like any art form, film has the potential to be transformative, and in inter-                Diversity
                                                                                       views both Knight and Polak have repeatedly spoken of their work in those terms. This                            DOI
                                                                                       article uses Dirty God to think about what is at stake in the dismantling of stereotypes               https://doi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       and the reclamation of beauty — a goal shared by many disability rights campaigners.           org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       Made at a time when escalating cases of acid violence in London were making headlines                  461X/17384
                                                                                       around the world, Polak’s film prompts comparisons with Katie Piper’s Beautiful (2011)
                                                                                       and other survivor memoirs. Privileging imperfection over repair and fragility over
                                                                                       strength, it challenges existing portrayals of disfigurement and, in the process, offers a
                                                                                       more radical understanding of beauty and authenticity.




                                                                                       I am flesh, bones
                                                                                       I am skin, soul
                                                                                       I am human
                                                                                       Nothing more than human

                                                                                       I am sweat, flaws
                                                                                       I am veins, scars
                                                                                       I am human
                                                                                       Nothing more than human
                                                                                       (Emmanuel Adjei, Human)

                                                                                         The opening shots of Sacha Polka’s Dirty God glide like a caress over an
                                                                                       expanse of bare skin [Fig. 1].1 A hand passes lightly across delicate tendrils of
                                                                                       scar tissue and the strange, pale landscape resolves into the surface of a body.
                                                                                       Human, by Iranian-Dutch singer Sevdaliza, completes the title sequence with a
                                                                                       choric commentary.
                                                                                         We meet Jade as her mother Lisa (Katherine Kelly) is picking her up from


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                              21
Fig. 1
‘I am skin, soul’: Title
sequence from Dirty God
(2019). Screenshot




                           the burns unit of an East London hospital. Their taxi drives past shuttered shop
                           fronts, Victorian railway arches, pedestrians, bus stops: people going about their
                           everyday lives. Jade looks silently out of the window, her face expressionless
                           beneath the transparent facial orthosis (TFO) that she has been told to wear
                           while her scars heal. At home she is greeted by the inconsolable screams of
                           her tiny daughter Rae (two-year-old Eliza Brady-Girard). Dirty God is about the
                           physical and emotional aftermath of an acid attack, but it is also a film about
                           living on a Hackney council estate, going clubbing, falling in love, and the fragile,
                           fallible bonds between mothers and daughters.
                              In interviews on the festival circuit and in the British press, first-time actor Vicky
                           Knight talked openly about the impact of seeing her scars on screen. Having
                           been seriously burned in an arson attack on her grandfather’s pub in Hackney
                           when she was eight, Knight had endured ‘being called a monster’ through her
                           school years. Polak ‘saved my life’, she says, by enabling her to see her scarred
                           body differently, as ‘a piece of art’ rather than something to hide.2 Like any art
                           form, film has the potential to be transformative — for the makers as well as for
                           viewers — and both Knight and Polak have spoken of filmmaking as a way of
                           working through difficult experiences.3
                              This article uses Dirty God to ask what is at stake in the dismantling of
                           stereotypies and the aesthetic reclamation of the disfigured body — a goal shared
                           by many disability rights campaigners, and a recurring theme in the Pride and
                           body positivity movements.4 From its overwhelmingly positive critical reception,
                           it is clear that part of the answer to this question, for reviewers and funders, is the
                           film’s authenticity. Dirty God is the first feature-length drama with a female lead
                           whose scars are real, and the first to tackle the pervasive assumption that scars
                           (especially on the female body) are tragic or shameful. Covering the Rotterdam
                           Film Festival for Screen in January 2019, Fionnuala Halligan called it ‘a giant
                           move forward in terms of representation’.5 For Changing Faces campaigner
                           Ryan Foal, who was born with a cleft lip and palate, it is ‘the finest cinematic
                           portrayal of life with disfigurement to date’.6
                              Despite its presence in mainstream cinema since the 1920s,7 facial
                           disfigurement has been largely neglected by film scholars, who have focused
                           instead on the filmic significance of ‘the face’ in general.8 The most recent



22                                                                              Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
example of this tendency, Noa Steimatsky’s The Face on Film (2017), approaches
the face as ‘a privileged locus, as a measure — even as essence — of the cinema’.9
The non-beautiful is not part of her critical lexicon, and most of the faces she
analyses are conspicuously normative (if not luminously beautiful). While there
are passing references to the faces of the suffering, maimed, and dead of two
world wars, visible in newsreels and documentaries, they ‘demand a separate
enquiry’.10 As a historian rather than a film theorist, my aims are different from
Steimatsky’s. This article is part of a larger project that examines the stigma
of facial difference through cultural tropes that are so familiar that they have
become invisible. Rather than asking what the face means for film, I am using
film — and its contexts and legacies — as a way of thinking about the cultural
mechanisms of stigma.11
   Disfigurement (facial and otherwise) is also under-researched within disability
studies: a significant omission given the inclusion of disfigurement in the 1990
Americans with Disabilities Act and the 1995 UK Disability Discrimination Act —
legal recognition of the fact that having an appearance at odds with conventional
standards of attractiveness makes it likely that you will experience (often daily)
prejudice and discrimination.12 The major studies of film and disability, including
Martin Norden’s The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in
the Movies, focus on sensory and motor disabilities,13 a tendency mirrored in
the disability studies literature and in database and collections projects like
the British Film Institute’s Disabled Britain on Film and Vanderbilt’s Films:
Portrayal of People with Disabilities search tool.14 Norden, whose study is the
most ambitious of these sources, limits his remit to ‘severe visual, auditory,
or orthopaedic impairment’.15 Disfigurement — as a social disability often
unaccompanied by physical impairment — is neither defined nor historicized.
   In November 2018 the British charity Changing Faces launched a campaign
to end negative stereotypes of people with disfigurements in the media and
entertainment.16 In the #IAmNotYourVillain campaign video, five young people
talk about their earliest memories of being bullied because of their appearance.
Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984), Voldemort
in the Harry Potter series (2001-11), DC’s Joker, and Scar from The Lion King top
the list of hurtful names. ‘It would be quite nice to have a hero or a good person
with a visible difference’, says one of the young contributors. As a direct result of
the campaign, the British Film Institute (BFI) no longer funds films through the
National Lottery that include negative depictions of visible difference.
   When Dirty God was released in early 2019, the BFI’s Film Fund director Ben
Roberts welcomed it as ‘a fantastic example of [an] authentic, empathetic and
positive portrayal’.17 But what, exactly, does it mean to call Knight’s performance
‘utterly authentic’ as Mark Kermode does in his review for the Observer18
Authenticity is one of those concepts — like beauty and realism — that seems
to operate on an intuitive level, but in fact rests on a host of assumptions and
conventions that change over time. One of the challenges taken up here is thinking
about authenticity more contextually, as a value that reflects particular historical
coordinates. For Polak and her collaborators, these coordinates include a new


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                       23
     interest in imperfection as an aesthetic value, and a changing funding landscape
     in the UK in which questions of representation are explicitly linked to policies of
     diversity and inclusion.
        In On Being Authentic (2004), the philosopher Charles Guignon identifies two
     main components of the Romantic conception of authenticity.19 The first is the
     assumption that there is an essential self, deep within each of us, which can be
     discovered through self-reflection, introspection or contemplation. The second
     assumption is that once we find this authentic self, it is possible to live in a
     way that gives it full expression. Asked in a BFI interview if she had any advice
     for other young people, Knight put it this way: ‘You want to be like everyone
     else, and it doesn’t work. Just be yourself. There’s only one of you’.20 These
     convictions rest, in turn, upon a modern, western understanding of the self
     as something bounded and self-encapsulated — very different from the more
     porous and fractured inner and outer selves that one finds in early Christian
     and medieval texts, for example.21 Authenticity, then, is not a new ideal. What is
     new, as Guignon and others have observed, is the ‘burgeoning industry’ that has
     ‘grown up in recent years with the aim of reforming and transforming people in
     order to make them authentic’.22
        Most formulations of authenticity — from Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) to
     Phillip C. McGraw, or ‘Dr Phil’ as he is known to viewers of his television chat show
     — share an emphasis on the personal: self-knowledge, self-actualisation, self-
     expression.23 In his concluding chapter Guignon asks, instead, what authenticity
     might look like as a ‘social virtue’.24 This article can be read as a response to his
     question. It is not about the film itself — as a cultural text to be interpreted – so
     much as the social, institutional and political spaces around it: the historical
     moment in which Jade’s story coalesces and is embodied, and the factors that
     shape the film’s reception. I map some of the discourses and tropes surrounding
     acid violence and disfigurement in the early decades of 21st century Britain and
     locate Dirty God in a cultural sphere that is shared with media representations
     and autobiographical ‘survivor’ narratives. Although I argue that authenticity is
     negotiated, constructed and performed in these spaces rather than given and
     innate, this is not meant to imply that that it can’t also be a meaningful personal
     goal. In the final part of the article I trace Polak’s interest in disfigurement
     through her previous film, the documentary Nieuwe Tieten (New Boobs, 2013),
     which chronicles her experience of risk-reducing surgery when genetic testing
     reveals that she is carrying the BRCA1 gene mutation. Both films touch on the
     medicalisation of disfigurement while illuminating the practical ways in which
     visible difference is negotiated on a daily basis.
        Like all creative projects, Dirty God has several beginnings. Asked in interviews
     how she came up with the idea for Jade’s story, Polak describes an incident that
     took place at Lowlands, a music festival held every summer near Amsterdam.
     She noticed a young woman with burns scars in the crowd: ‘I looked at her and
     I flinched, and I saw everybody around her doing the same thing’ she recalls.25
     Everyone was watching and it struck her that it must always be like that: ‘I
     realised you’re never allowed to forget having such an injury’.26 Jade’s story



24                                                      Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
started to take shape several years later, in 2014, while Polak was living and
working in London.27 With co-writer Susie Farrell she began interviewing young
female burns survivors. Jaf Shah, the director of ASTI (Acid Survivors Trust
International) put them in contact with Katie Gee, who in 2013 had battery acid
thrown at her while working as a volunteer in Zanzibar. They talked to Gee and
women who’d had similar experiences ‘about how they felt about themselves, if
they thought they would find a new partner in life, what the hurdles were.’28
  Wanting to cast someone who could relate to the story, Polak and Farrell
approached Lucy Pardee, the agent who found Katie Jarvis for Andrea Arnold’s
2009 film Fish Tank. Pardee sent them a video that Knight had posted on social
media when she was eighteen: made on her iPad, the five minutes film had
gone viral, attracting the attention of producers at Betty, a small UK production
company that had been acquired by the Discovery network. Knight had accepted
their invitation to take part in a documentary, only finding out when the filming
was over that the series would be called Too Ugly for Love? The experience was
‘humiliating’ and when it was broadcast in 2014, Knight ended up being targeted
on the virulently antifeminist website Sluthate.29
  It took Pardee a full year to persuade Knight to audition for Dirty God.30 By
then, people were starting to talk about the alarming rise in attacks involving
corrosive substances in the UK. London Metropolitan Police data record an
increase of more than 500% between 2012 and 2016, from 73 reports up to 469.31
Although the victims (and perpetrators) were mostly male, it was the stories of
young female victims that dominated the popular press.32 As the public faces
of the epidemic of acid violence, their scars became signifiers of a pathologized
masculinity and its devastating effects. Dirty God shares the news media’s focus
on the disfigured female body, but unlike the tabloids — which detail exactly
what happened, and what it felt like — Jade’s story is told without flashbacks.
Nor is the perpetrator, Jade’s ex-boyfriend, fleshed out for us. He has a symbolic,
hallucinatory presence in the film, appearing to her as a totemic birdman, plumed
in raven’s feathers, but Polak denies us the voyeuristic thrill of watching the
attack or seeing its immediate aftermath.
  Dirty God diverges in other significant ways from media representations of
acid violence, providing an alternative to their narratives of pain and isolation.
Jacob Johanssen and Diana Garrisi have shown that the tabloid newspapers, in
particular, focused on the victim’s experience and feelings rather than on the
wider contexts of acid violence, or society’s response to it.33 There was little
discussion of the mediating roles of social relationships and community, or the
institutional contexts of healthcare and policing. The British tabloids are known
for their sensationalism, but in these articles we see sensation itself becoming
a kind of currency.34 Their actual subject is not violence, but pain: indescribable,
unprecedented pain.35
  Dirty God is not about pain; it is a closely observed study of human relationships
— between friends and lovers, mothers and daughters. The tabloid accounts, by
contrast, ‘create a scenario of loneliness’.36 A typical article in The Mirror from
June 2015 features an interview with Becky, whose partner paid another man


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      25
     to carry out the attack that left her with burns to 40% of her body. ‘I couldn’t
     bear the way I looked’, says Becky of her scars. ‘I knew they would never fade. I
     thought, “Who will want me now?”’.37 This tendency to subjectify emotional and
     physical pain — to see it as personal and private rather than social or structural
     — conforms to portrayals of domestic violence in popular culture, which either
     blame women for being victims (for making bad choices, for provoking abuse),
     or present male violence as ‘natural’.38 Jade, however, is neither an archetypal
     ‘victim’ nor a conventional ‘survivor’.
       In July 2017, the Guardian columnist Deborah Orr wrote an article responding
     to reports of five acid attacks in East London the previous night. The Home Office
     had convened a joint summit with the National Police Chiefs’ Council earlier
     that month and a petition calling for greater regulation of corrosive substances
     was gathering signatures online. Orr’s piece reflects on the collective anxiety
     provoked by attacks that felt both extreme and symbolic: ‘In a culture of
     individuality and identity’, she writes, ‘this is a crime that attacks individuality
     and identity. It changes people — how they look, how they feel — for the rest
     of their lives’.39 At that point, the lack of a consistent pattern was particularly
     bewildering, with statistics indicating that people over 75 made up a significant
     proportion of the victims. ‘Who would throw acid at an elderly man or woman?’
     she asks. ‘Or at anyone?’ Throwing acid, Orr concludes, is a ‘narcissistic crime
     […]. The perpetrator gets to feel powerful [and] at the same time they irreparably
     devalue the victim’.40
       Understanding these crimes as symbolic acts — as a symptom of cultural
     narcissism or pathologized masculinity — helps to contain the generalized fear
     they provoke. The attention to young, attractive, female victims in the news media
     has also meant that healing is likely to be seen in terms of the restoration or
     reclamation of female beauty. Survivor narratives have played a significant role
     in voicing these themes. There have been several widely publicised accounts,41
     but Katie Piper’s memoirs and television documentaries have had the widest
     reach in the UK: Channel 4’s four-part documentary series Katie: My Beautiful
     Face was watched by 3.3 million people in October 2009, and 2011’s follow-up
     series Katie: My Beautiful Friends attracted 1.7 million viewers.42 In her 2011
     autobiography Beautiful (A beautiful girl. An evil man. One inspiring true story of
     courage) and the sequel Beautiful Ever After (2014), beauty and the unbeautiful
     are dichotomous but unstable concepts, tethered to physical appearance as well
     as the state of the soul.43
       Beautiful opens with a description of a mirror. Piper hasn’t seen her face
     since the surgery for her burn injuries and her psychologist hands her a small
     plastic mirror with the advice to take her time. ‘That normal little mirror became
     a window into hell’, she writes. Instead of seeing a scarred but recognizable
     version of herself, she is confronted with something that doesn’t cohere into a
     whole. Her skin is ‘like meat hanging in a butcher’s window’, or ‘like candle wax’;
     her eyes ‘like two cartoonish globes’; her lips ‘like sausages’. ‘Where’s my face?’
     she screams inside her head, ‘my beautiful, stolen face’.44
       Before her modelling and television career Piper trained as a hair and beauty



26                                                     Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
therapist and her vocational investment in physical beauty is a sustaining source
of optimism. ‘Helping other women feel good about themselves’ was something
she took to instinctively.45 But she was also aware that self-improvement
was a fool’s game: ‘surrounded by beautiful people’ she became ‘more and
more obsessed’ with how she looked.46 Piper’s writing is shot through with
ambivalence: beauty is a source of power, solidarity, self-care and affirmation,
and at the same time an unobtainable, oppressive ideal. Founded in 2009, the
Katie Piper Foundation has provided make-up support as well as advice on hair
replacement for people whose injuries have caused permanent hair loss. This is
not just about camouflage or ‘passing’ as non-disfigured; it is about learning ‘how
to look and feel great with hair styling, manicures and false eyelashes’.47 The
(re)construction of beauty, in this context, is a therapeutic process rather than a
fixed ideal. Sometimes it is simply about feeling ‘a little bit less ugly’.48 Familiar
rituals of beautification — depilating her legs, painting her toenails — allow Piper
to reclaim her body. She starts a photo diary and calls it ‘My Pictorial Journal to
Recovery’.49
   Sacha Polak visited Piper’s charity when she was developing the screenplay
for Dirty God and there are points of overlap between Jade’s story and Katie’s.
Young, blond and attractive, both women are the victims of pathologically
jealous and controlling partners. And for both, acquired disfigurement prompts
filmic comparisons. Piper likens her appearance to the Phantom of the Opera
and Hannibal Lecter.50 One night, while she is painting her nails, she catches
sight of ‘something’ in the little mirror on her manicure box. With its ‘puckered
skin and dead eyes’ it looks back at her like ‘the face of a character from a
Hammer Horror movie’.51 Polak addresses the legacy of cinematic monstrosity
more indirectly, by evoking the innocent gaze of Jade’s daughter. ‘Monster’, says
Rae when she visits her mum in the burns unit for the first time. Wiping away a
tear as she tells her friend, Jade remembers her mother’s attempt to reassure
the frightened child: ‘She’s a nice monster Rae. Like In the Night Garden’.52 You
can look like Quasimodo, says Jade’s Polish friend later, ‘but what a kid sees
is a knockout. That’s what a mum is to a kid’,53 Beauty, she implies, is simply
unconditional love.
   There are other, more significant, differences between the two accounts.
Piper’s surgeon is her guardian angel, presiding over her morphine dreams and
guiding her towards hope and ‘new beginnings’.54 For Jade there are no guardian
angels, no surgical fixes. ‘So I’m left with this fucking dog’s dinner’ is Jade’s
angry retort when her female surgeon says she is healing well and they don’t
need to consider further surgery.55 Later, at home, she finds an ad on Google for
‘cheap plastic surgery in Morocco’.56 Phoning the number on the website, she
sets in train an inevitable sequence of betrayals and disappointments. Morocco
is a turning point, not just because there is (of course) no surgeon, but because
it brings Jade and Naz (Bluey Robinson) together. Their mutual attraction has a
history that is left mostly unspoken, and as they stand together on the balcony
of the hotel room they are sharing with Jade’s best friend (and Naz’s girlfriend)
Shami (Rebecca Stone), the conversation turns existential. ‘My god’s different


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                        27
Fig. 2                    to your god’, Jade confides quietly. ‘My god’s a dirty god’.57 It’s hot. Shami is
Leaving hospital: Vicky
                          sunbathing by the hotel pool way below, they kiss, and he strokes her scarred
Knight as Jade in Dirty
God. Screenshot           breast and arm.
                            Healing, for Jade (and arguably for Knight and Polak) means learning to
                          see beauty in imperfection and fragility. This is different from Piper’s rituals
                          of beautification, which have more in common with psychoanalytic accounts of
                          femininity as a masquerade.58 Recent attempts to promote a more diverse image
                          of beauty — Rick Guidotti’s ‘Positive Exposure’ project in the US, for example,
                          and Rankin’s ‘Portrait Positive’ campaign for Changing Faces in the UK — have
                          shown that glamour and attractiveness are remarkably versatile and pliable
                          commodities, particularly in the hands of professional stylists and fashion
                          photographers.59 While these campaigns are empowering and valuable, one of
                          the critiques of body positivity has been that it makes individuals responsible for
                          ‘self-care,’ rather than society. It is, in other words, a typical neoliberal solution
                          to a systemic problem. Self-esteem is not just a personal quality, insists Sarah
                          Banet-Weiser, it is a ‘cultural and economic currency’ inflected by class, gender,
                          sexual orientation and ethnicity, and also of course an extremely lucrative
                          market.60 Like beauty, it is something you are expected to work at, invest in and
                          perform.
                            But for Knight — who is gay and from a working-class background — beauty
                          is not about conforming to a middle-class, heteronormative ideal.61 Knight
                          herself rarely wears makeup and in extreme close-up the haptic sense of
                          seeing/touching bare skin creates an intimacy that would be difficult to achieve
                          with cosmetics. It is hard to think of another film that treats real scars as so
                          aesthetically interesting. In his review on the Changing Faces website, Ryan
                          Foal describes the title sequence as ‘beautifully lit and shot like an intricate
                          landscape’, inviting the audience to look closely at Jade’s scars and to ‘recognize
                          [their] beauty’.62 And because we see her body at such close range, there is no
                          moment of shock when we encounter Jade sitting on the edge of her hospital
                          bed in a leopard print sweatshirt and TFO, her hair tied back neatly in a ponytail,



28                                                                            Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
waiting to go home [Fig. 2]. The absence of a delayed reveal sets Dirty God apart
from virtually every other filmic portrayal of facial disfigurement. As Kermode
remarks in his review, Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens’ slow close-ups
of Knight offer an ‘arrestingly tactile’ alternative to the conventions of cinematic
disfiguration.63
  Jade’s appearance is also partly the creation of award-winning Danish make-up
effects designer Morten Jacobsen (who was nominated for a British Independent
Film Award for his work on Dirty God). Jacobsen extended Knight’s scars, which
come up to her right cheekbone, so that they would cover the right side of her
face [Fig. 3]. The result is an amplification of reality, a prosthetic augmentation
that blurs the line between fact and fabrication. This has not discouraged critics
and industry professionals from welcoming the film’s honesty. In her review
for Sight & Sound, Nikki Baughan called it ‘bitingly authentic’.64 Foal, who has
written eloquently about his own experiences of prejudice, shame and the ‘soft
bigotry of low expectations’ observes:

         In an industry where disfigurement marginalisation is commonplace,
         casting an actor with burns to play a character with burns feels
         oddly radical. […] As someone with a facial disfigurement, there is           Fig. 3
         often a sense that our stories don’t belong to us, and that our faces         Dirty God quad poster, 40
         and bodies only exist as tropes in movies to elicit fear or pity.65           inches x 30 inches (UK)




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                         29
       Like beauty, authenticity is a term that has become politically inflected in
     recent decades, ritually invoked in discussions of literature, film, theatre, visual
     art, political populism, and social media (where being outed as ‘fake’ can end
     a career). In Authentic™ (2012) Banet-Weiser links the rise of authenticity as
     a dominant cultural value to the expansion of brand culture in 21st century
     America (although many of the trends she identifies are global). ‘In a culture that
     is increasingly understood and experienced through the logic and strategies of
     commercial branding’, she writes, ‘in a culture characterized by the postmodern
     styles of irony, parody, and the superficial, the concept of authenticity seems to
     carry even more weight’.66 Her account is useful for the attention it gives to the
     myriad ways in which contemporary authenticity is materialised and embodied.
       Ogilvy & Mather’s campaign for Dove soap exemplifies the ambivalence that
     Banet-Weiser identifies as part of brand culture. ‘Evolution’, the first in a series
     of viral videos, was released in October 2006 and shows a young, conventionally
     attractive but unremarkable white woman being transformed by make-up
     artists and stylists, then photographed and her image digitally enhanced to
     create an image of airbrushed perfection. ‘No wonder our perception of beauty is
     distorted’, runs the tagline. ‘A catalyst for widening the definition and discussion
     of beauty’ according to the Dove website, the 95 second video got millions of
     hits on YouTube and won awards in the Viral and Film categories at Cannes
     Lions 2007.67 Banet-Weiser uses Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty as a case
     study of ‘commodity activism’, a form of activism that promises empowerment
     through personal transformation rather than through civic participation or
     collective struggle. She is not saying that authenticity™ is inauthentic — just a
     myth pedalled by the advertising industry, a product of economic determinism.
     Rather, she sees consumer capitalism in more complex terms, as a ‘nuanced,
     multilayered context for identity formation’ and ‘an explicitly cultural space’.68
     Brand managers, designers, and creative producers are part of this culture, and
     so too are consumers.
       Like Banet-Weiser, I want to question the traditional idea of authenticity as
     something given — a quality that some people (or some images or performances)
     possess, and others lack. Performative, stylistic, and rhetorical, authenticity
     is negotiated at every stage of the creative process, from script development
     and funding applications to lighting and makeup. Even the prosthetic scars on
     Jade’s upper cheek confound the usual binary opposition of the authentic vs.
     the inauthentic. ‘I felt like for the film you need to exaggerate a bit’, Polak says,
     explaining that Jacobsen used prints of Knight’s lower face, so the fabricated
     scars are real too, in a way. She adds that the makeup truck — where Knight
     spent an hour, sometimes longer, at the beginning and end of each day of
     shooting — was a ‘sort of her little world’, where she could listen to music,
     relax, joke around.69
       Authenticity is also not without risk or cost. Knight has talked about how
     hard it was being the centre of attention on set after so many years of trying
     to hide her scars. She has described her distress at the camera ‘being so
     close’.70 The vulnerability that comes through in her performance is genuine,



30                                                      Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
but this emotional labour is also a form of capital. It adds value by converting
‘experience’ into a commodity. The authenticity of Knight’s performance also
made it necessary for everyone else on set to navigate the risk of exploitation.
When they were filming in Morocco some of the crew members asked Polak
what she planned on doing with Vicky afterwards, whether she was going to pay
for her therapy. If you work with someone who is vulnerable, who has been hurt
in the past, Polak told me, ‘you make a promise to take care of them afterwards.
It’s not only for the shoot, it’s really a lifetime promise’.71
   Dirty God, which received export and distribution funding through the BFI
Film Fund in 2018 and 2019, reflects a new strategic focus on diversity and
inclusion in British film and television production. Launched in June 2016,
the BFI’s Diversity Standards address issues of underrepresentation both on
screen and behind the camera, primarily (though not exclusively) in relation to
the protected characteristics named in the UK Equality Act 2010, which makes
it illegal to discriminate against someone on the grounds of race, disability,
sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, age, pregnancy or
maternity, marriage/civil partnership or sex/gender. Film funding applications
now need to meet at least two out of four criteria: one relating to on-screen
representation, another addressing diversity in the context of recruitment and
creative leadership, the third focusing on training opportunities, and the fourth
concerned with audience development. Envisaged as a flexible framework that
could be used for feature films, television and online content, film festivals and
other audience-facing activities, the Standards are a contractual requirement
for all BFI funding. At the time of writing they have been adopted by Film4,
BBC Films, BAFTA, BIFA and Paramount Studios, and all producers working in
the UK are being encouraged to voluntarily adopt the Standards by the end of
2022.72
   Jennifer Smith, the BFI’s Head of Diversity since 2017, insists that the
Diversity Standards are not a tick-box exercise or a rulebook. She sees them
as a catalyst, an ‘agent of change’, with the potential ‘to make behaviours
different, to make people think about portrayal and representation’.73 She also
acknowledges that ‘there is a nuance around portrayal that often gets lost’ in
public discourse. This is where stakeholder consultation — in forums like the
BFI’s Disability Screen Advisory Group — can play a valuable role in initiating a
discussion about what a ‘good’ portrayal looks like. I asked Smith if consensus
was likely. She immediately said no, ‘there won’t be consensus. There will be
huge debate, but the point about visible difference is that it’s [currently] a hidden
debate’ rather than a public conversation.74 While the practice of ‘cripping up’
— where nondisabled actors play disabled characters — has been spotlighted
in the media, the Diversity Standards articulate a more nuanced understanding
of authenticity. Applicants for funding have to reflect on their casting choices,
storylines, locations, themes and narratives, and are invited to ‘describe where
there are complex and non-stereotypical representations of characters, talent
or contributors who are normally relegated to two-dimensional roles’.75
   Authenticity, then, is the result of countless creative, pragmatic and ethical


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                       31
     decisions. It is also, I have suggested, a form of capital, requiring investment
     and entailing risk. If we want to know how a film like Dirty God challenges
     disfigurement tropes, authenticity in casting is certainly part of the answer, but
     so is the way the film aligns with changing cultural values and funding priorities,
     and with Polak’s own trajectory as a filmmaker. When I asked her if Dirty God
     was a personal project, she told me that in the Netherlands, journalists would
     often bring up the film that preceded it, Nieuwe Tieten (2013). Documenting
     her experience of testing positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation associated
     with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, there are obvious parallels with
     Dirty God. Talking to her, one senses that Polak grasps the existential weight
     of Jade’s situation: her refusal to accept the surgeon’s decision that this is a
     ‘good result’, her compulsive search for another opinion. Both are intimate
     portraits of scarred female bodies, and in both films mothers and daughters
     are a central axis. Polak’s mother died of breast cancer when she was eleven
     months old, but she comes to life on screen in family photos and videos, and in
     the journal entries she wrote after her diagnosis. Yet when I ask Polak about the
     connection between the two films, she replies briefly, ‘it’s not like 1 + 1 is 2. It’s
     more complicated’.76 Jade is not Sacha, but arguably Polak’s own experiences
     make Dirty God a more nuanced, more direct, and also less grim film than it
     might otherwise have been.
       Nieuwe Tieten shows us that weighing abstract calculations about life and
     death against the physical immediacy of mutilation (the term is used several
     times) is not straightforward. Polak’s fear of disfigurement is as visceral as her
     fear of dying. Filmed partly by her stepmother, who is also a confidante and
     interlocutor, Polak involves us in the agonizing process of reaching a decision.
     In one consultation with a surgeon, she and her boyfriend are shown a ring-
     binder of post-operative images. The first patient has had a mastectomy without
     reconstruction (‘we want to avoid this’ says the consultant, briskly turning the
     page); the next image is ‘not the prettiest’, but a reasonable outcome using
     prosthetic implants. Another photograph shows fabricated nipples: buds of skin
     and scar tissue colored by a tattoo artist. Still undecided, she goes to meet
     other women who have had breast surgery; one lets her feel the firm dome of
     silicone implant beneath her skin.
       In the end, Polak opts for a procedure that uses tissue from her abdomen
     to form new breasts. After the first six-hour operation, she films herself in the
     bathroom mirror. Incision lines run across her newly constructed nipples. The
     horizontal wound that bisects the skin of her abdomen is surprisingly large. ‘I
     look as if I floated in the canal for a few months’, she says dryly. Loss runs through
     both films like a current, but so does humor, and an instinctive avoidance of
     sentimentality. Making films, Polak says at the start of Nieuwe Tieten, is simply
     something she can do. It is a way of figuring things out, a way of coping. The
     experience is similar for Knight: acting — and seeing herself on screen — is a
     process of clarification, of working through. Pointing out that her family was
     never offered counselling after the fire (in which her two cousins died), Knight
     says making Dirty God was a necessarily difficult but healing experience. ‘It’s



32                                                       Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
given me another window to look out. I see myself as human now, and not as a
monster. I love my scars. […] I think they tell a story’.77
  There is an awkward moment at the end of a Dirty God Q&A where Polak
interrupts the host as she is winding up the event. ‘Can I say something?’ she
asks, leaning into the microphone. Indicating that she is speaking for Knight and
her co-star Bluey Robinson, who sit next to her on the platform, she says ‘we’ve
all worked really hard on this film, and it took us a long time. This film is very
fragile and vulnerable’.78 Her comment does more than signal authenticity: it
claims fragility and vulnerability as ethical and aesthetic values. This is not just
a harrowing or inspirational or realistic portrayal of an acid attack survivor; it is
a film that makes demands on us because, like Nieuwe Tieten, it documents an
unpredictable, risky process in a way that is unusually honest. In complicated
ways, it reflects Polak’s experience of mortality and mutilation as well as
Knight’s, while creating a compelling fictional world in which the membrane
between fantasy and reality is always porous. It is a film that challenges the
available cultural representations of disfigurement and tells a new story about
what it is like to live with visible scars. But it also reflects very particular
anxieties about acid violence and — like the British tabloids and Katie Piper’s
memoirs — uses a woman’s body to explore them.




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                       33
Notes
 1
    Dirty God (Sacha Polak, 2019).
 2
     Ellie Harrison, ‘Vicky Knight: “My First Film Saved My Life — I Don’t Want to Die Anymore, I Want to
Outlive My Bullies”’, Independent, 23 November 2019 <www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/
features/vicky-knight-dirty-god-interview-fire-burns-survivor-a9213661.html> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  3
    New Boobs (Nieuwe Tieten, Sacha Polak, 2013); Tom Seymour, ‘Interview’, Guardian, 17 May 2019 <www.
theguardian.com/film/2019/may/17/i-hid-my-scars-for-years-i-thought-i-was-only-good-for-horror-
movies> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  4
    Suzannah Biernoff, ‘Beauty, Ugliness and Ideas of Difference: The Politics of the Personal’, in A Cultural
History of Beauty in the Modern Age, ed. by Paul Deslandes (forthcoming, New York: Bloomsbury, 2022).
  5
     Fionnuala Halligan, ‘“Dirty God”: Rotterdam Review’, Screen Daily, 24 January 2019 <http://www.
screendaily.com/reviews/dirty-god-rotterdam-review/5135749.article> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  6
    Ryan Foal, ‘Campaigner Ryan reviews Dirty God’, Changing Faces, 1 December 2020 <www.changingfaces.
org.uk/story/campaigner-ryan-reviews-dirty-god/> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  7
    The American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog lists 16 movies with plastic surgery themes between 1922 and
1930. Unlike the disfigured villains of classic horror cinema, films like Skin Deep (Lambert Hillyer, 1922),
Back to Life (Whitman Bennett, 1925) and Face Value (Robert Florey, 1927) use plastic surgery as a vehicle
for social restitution, often following the return to domestic and civilian life of facially wounded First World
War veterans. Joe Kember, ‘Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular
Culture, 1917-1927’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 10.1 (2017), 43-65.
  8
    The notable exceptions are Angela M. Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror
Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), which includes a discussion of disfigurement in
classic horror cinema; Fran Pheasant-Kelly, ‘Facial disfigurement on screen: James Bond and the politics of
portraying the post-9/11 terrorist’, in The Disfigured Face in American Literature, Film, and Television, ed.
by Cornelia Klecker and Gudrun M. Grabher (London: Routledge, 2022); Karen Randell, ‘Masking the Horror
of Trauma: The Hysterical Body of Lon Chaney’, Screen, 44.2 (2003), 216-221, and ‘Mad Love: The Anxiety of
Difference in the Films of Lon Chaney Sr,’ in Screening the Dark Side of Love, ed. by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and
Karen Randell (London: Palgrave, 2012), 69-81; Joe Kember, ‘Face Value’; Philip Kirby, ‘Battle scars: Wonder
Woman, aesthetic geopolitics and disfigurement in Hollywood film’, Geopolitics (2018), 1-22, and Suzannah
Biernoff, ‘Theatres of surgery: The cultural pre-history of the face transplant’, Wellcome Open Research,
3.54 (2018) <https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14558.1>.
  9
    Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1.
  10
     Ibidem, 76.
  11
      Suzannah Biernoff, ‘Loving the monster: The Elephant Man as modern fable,’ in The Disfigured Face
in American Literature, Film, and Television, ed. by Cornelia Klecker and Gudrun M. Grabher (London:
Routledge, 2022), 133-150. See also Biernoff, ‘Theatres of surgery’.
  12
      Jacob K. Dey, et al., ‘The social penalty of facial lesions: new evidence supporting high-quality
reconstruction’, JAMA facial plastic surgery, 17.2 (2015), 90-96; Frances Cooke Macgregor, ‘Facial
disfigurement: problems and management of social interaction and implications for mental health’, Aesthetic
plastic surgery, 14.1 (1990), 249-257; Nichola Rumsey, Ray Bull, and Denis Gahagan, ‘The Effect of Facial
Disfigurement on the Proxemic Behavior of the General Public’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 12.2
(1982), 137-150; Clifford I. Workman, et al., ‘Morality is in the eye of the beholder: the neurocognitive basis
of the “anomalous‐is‐bad” stereotype’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1494.1 (2021), 3-17.
  13
     Martin Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (Rutgers University
Press, 1994); Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, ed. by Christopher R. Smit and Anthony
Enns (University Press of America, 2001); Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić, The Problem Body: Projecting
Disability on Film by (Ohio State University Press, 2010).
  14
     Disabled Britain on Film, BFI Player <https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/collection/disabled-britain-on-film>
[accessed 20 July 2022]; ‘Films: Portrayal of People with Disabilities,’ Iris Centre, Vanderbilt University
<https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/resources/films/> [accessed 20 July 2022].
  15
     Norden, xi.
  16
     ‘I Am Not Your Villain’, Changing Faces, 16 November 2018, <https://www.changingfaces.org.uk/get-



34                                                                             Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
involved/campaign-with-us/i-am-not-your-villian/> [accessed 20 July 2022]. Co-developed with members
of the Changing Faces community, the video was runner-up in the ‘amplifying unheard voices’ category in
the 2019 National Campaigner Awards, <https://smk.org.uk/what-we-do/awards> [accessed 20 July 2022].
  17
     Andrew Pulver, ‘BFI to Refuse Funding for Films with Facially-Scarred Villains’, Guardian, 29 November
2018         <www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/29/bfi-to-refuse-funding-for-films-with-facially-scarred-
villains> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  18
     Mark Kermode, ‘Dirty God review – stirring story of an acid-attack survivor’, Observer, 9 June 2019, 32.
  19
     Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London, New York: Routledge, 2004), 146.
  20
      Dirty God star Vicky Knight and director Sacha Polak,’ BFI Interview, 5 June 2019, YouTube <youtu.
be/_KIemlQBHQU> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  21
     Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (London: Palgrave, 2002). Guignon, 12-15.
  22
     Ibidem, 5. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York:
New York University Press, 2012), 10.
  23
     Guignon, 151.
  24
     Ibidem, 151.
  25
     Harrison.
  26
     Seymour.
  27
     Sacha Polak, BFI interview, ‘Dirty God’.
  28
     Harrison.
  29
     Stefan Pape, ‘Vicky Knight on Her Acting Debut in Dirty God’, HotCorn, 7 June 2019 <https://hotcorn.
com/en/movies/news/dirty-god-interview-vicky-knight-sacha-polak/> [accessed 27 July 2021]. Debbie
Ging, ‘Alphas, betas, and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere’, Men and Masculinities,
22.4 (2019), 638-57.
  30
     ‘Dirty God’, BFI Interview.
  31
     The MPS data obtained by the BBC provides a breakdown of recorded acid attacks in the capital over a
15 year period by age, gender, ethnicity, borough, hate crime and outcome. 74% of the suspects and 67% of
the victims were male. ‘Everything You Know about Acid Attacks Is Wrong’, BBC Three, 17 November 2017
<www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5d38c003-c54a-4513-a369-f9eae0d52f91> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  32
      Jacob Johanssen and Diana Garrisi, ‘“I Am Burning, I Am Burning:” Affect, Acid Attacks and British
Tabloid Newspapers’, Journalism Studies, 20.4 (2019), 463–79 (464).
  33
     Johanssen and Garrisi.
  34
      Martin Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community through Language (London, New York:
Routledge, 2006), 15.
  35
     Johanssen and Garrisi, 463.
  36
     Ibidem, 471.
  37
     Ibidem, 471.
  38
      Pamela Hill Nettleton, ‘Domestic Violence in Men’s and Women’s Magazines: Women are Guilty of
Choosing the Wrong Men, Men are not Guilty of Hitting Women,’ Women’s Studies in Communication, 34.2
(2011), 139-60 (144-45, 148).
  39
     Deborah Orr, ‘Acid attacks are a crime without pity, and a mirror on our unforgiving times’, Guardian, 14
July 2017 <www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/14/acid-attacks-capital-london-crime-anger>
[accessed 27 July 2021].
  40
     Ibidem.
  41
     Katie Gee, ‘Setting The Beauty Standard After An Acid Attack’, Newsweek, 20 September 2018 <youtu.
be/nYzvu6QimLg> [accessed 27 July 2021]; Reshma Qureshi and Tania Sing, Being Reshma (New Delhi: Pan
MacMillan India, 2018).
  42
      Kate McMahon, ‘Katie’s Face Brings 3.3m to C4’, Broadcast, 30 October 2009 <www.broadcastnow.
co.uk/katies-face-brings-33m-to-c4/5007516.article> [accessed 27 July 2021];
  43
     Katie Piper, Beautiful (London: Ebury Press, 2011) and Beautiful Ever After (London: Quercus, 2014).
  44
     Piper, Beautiful, 1-2.
  45
     Ibidem, 9.
  46
     Ibidem, 22.
  47
     Ibidem, 313.
  48
     Ibidem, 145.



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 49
     Ibidem, 144-45.
 50
     Ibidem, 129, 243.
  51
     Ibidem, 145.
  52
     00:47:22-00:47:56. Created by Andrew Davenport and narrated by Derek Jacobi, In the Night Garden
was first broadcast on the BBC children’s channel CBeebies in 2007. Combining live action, puppetry and
animation, the daily episodes introduced a generation of British pre-schoolers to Iggle Piggle, Upsy Daisy,
Makka Pakka and their friends in the magic forest.
  53
     01:29:08-01:29:25.
  54
     Piper, Beautiful, 87, 281.
  55
     00:22:50
  56
     00:27:27
  57
     01:09:29
  58
     Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the masquerade: Theorising the female spectator’, Screen, 23.3-4 (1982), 74-
88 and ‘Masquerade reconsidered: Further thoughts on the female spectator’, Discourse, 11.1 (1988), 42-54.
  59
        ‘Portrait Positive’, Changing Faces <www.changingfaces.org.uk/get-involved/campaign-with-
us/previous-campaigns/portrait-positive/> [accessed 27 July 2021]; Positive Exposure <https://
positiveexposure.org/> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  60
     Sarah Banet-Weiser, ‘Am I Pretty or Ugly? Girls and the Market for Self-Esteem’, Girlhood Studies, 7.1
(2014), 83–101 (85).
  61
     Polak, BFI interview.
  62
     Foal, ‘Campaigner Ryan’.
  63
     Kermode, 32.
  64
     Nikki Baughan, ‘Dirty God’, Sight & Sound, June 2019, 56.
  65
      Ryan Foal, ‘Ryan’s Story: “Learn To Question The Ideas That Cause You Shame”’, Changing Faces,
29 September 2020 <www.changingfaces.org.uk/story/ryans-story-question-ideas-that-cause-shame/>
[accessed 27 July 2021] and Foal, ‘Campaigner Ryan.’
  66
     Banet-Weiser, Authentic, 10.
  67
     Ibidem.
  68
     Ibidem, 215.
  69
     Polak, BFI interview.
  70
     ‘Actor Vicky Knight, Breakthrough Brits 2019,’ BAFTA, 7 November 2019 <www.bafta.org/supporting-
talent/breakthrough/vicky-knight> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  71
     Polak, BFI interview.
  72
      ‘BFI publishes initial findings on Diversity Standards’, BFI press release, 21 January 2020 <www2.
bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-press-release-bfi-publishes-initial-findings-on-diversity-
standards-2020-01-21-v1.pdf> [accessed 27 July 2021].
  73
     Jennifer Smith, personal interview, 22 October 2021.
  74
     Smith, personal interview.
  75
      BFI Diversity Standards, July 2019 <www.bfi.org.uk/inclusion-film-industry/bfi-diversity-standards>
[accessed 27 July 2021].
  76
     Polak, BFI interview.
  77
     Seymour.
  78
     Polak, BFI interview.




36                                                                         Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God
