Camus: If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.
Dr. Arthur Neuman: We all wear masks . . . metaphorically speaking
Stanley Ipkiss: [on a bridge with Tina, holding the mask in his hand] You sure you’re not gonna miss this guy? Once he’s gone, all that’s left is me.
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The Mask is a film that uses the symbolic power of the mask (a staple motif of theatre, dating as far back as the persona of the Greek tragedies and the make-up of Japanese kabuki theatre) to highlight the existential dilemmas faced by a nobody-deadbeat-loser, Stanley Ipkiss. Stanley is a bank clerk, he hates his boss, who bullies him incessantly, and he is unable to get with the object of his affection, Tina. It is when Stanley finds The Mask (somehow a magical trinket belonging to the Norse trickster god Loki has turned up in ‘Edge City’) that he is able to unleash his ‘real’ self upon the fantastical metropolis he inhabits.
This version of Stanley represents a transformation that foregrounds the uncontrollable element of the unconscious mind, allowing him to act out the desires that ordinary Stanley hasn’t the balls too, he courts and becomes romantically involved with Tina and tries to rid the city of its gangster problems. But the metamorphosis of the ordinary man into super hero poses us an existential question; what is the reality that lurks behind our conscious mind. Stanley must wear a mask to reveal his hidden self and so we can never be sure of whom the ‘real’ Stanley is. It is thus that Stanley loses sight of the real Stanley. His use of the mask allows him to conveniently disable the aspects of himself that he doesn’t like whilst uncovering the self that he wishes he were; the loud, brash, charming funny man. This is not the real Stanley Ipkiss though, and he is forced into confrontation between himself, the mask, his enemies and Tina, what we are left with is a Stanley who has undergone a rigorous existential crisis and has faced himself in order to uncover and learn about what reality and existence actually are.