I recently attended a masquerade event in which everyone was intricately masked as Guy Fawkes, a giraffe, the Saw serial killer, birds, the Black Swan ballerina, and so on. “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best” see a variety of costumes intriguing to mine eyes; yet sadly, I found no one dressed as Shakespeare. I felt the burning desire to shout “who are all of these people?!” to the plethora of characters around me. I began to mull over that concept: why do some people dress themselves so literally and yet so metaphorically? Are we masking who we are to create new identities, or are we revealing parts of our true selves? Is the Guy Fawkes imposter intrinsically a revolutionary? Is the giraffe-masked person, who is also quite tall, feeling as though he symbolically represents a giraffe? Is the Black Swan ballerina releasing her dark alternate identity or is she revealing her grace?
The next night, navigating through the streets of downtown Toronto, I spotted a couple of sumo wrestlers chatting. Apparently, in order to increase one’s fat content, a professional sumo wrestler typically eats 6000 to 20,000 calories a day — one amazing feat. These students however, were only wearing blow-up costumes and had not actually gained the required weight. Averting my gaze, I spotted two unicorns about 100 meters away. Perhaps the unicorns were going to acquaint themselves with the sumo wrestlers and have a unicorn-wrestler ball. We will never know their true intentions. The question rebounds: why have individuals chosen these particular costumes?
Jared DeFife, a clinical psychologist and research scientist at Emory University, considers some costumes to be pathologically representative of one’s personality. Twilight fans shall be amazed. According to his interpretation of vampires, a vampire feels similar to a “fragile narcissist” who “feels dead inside “and sees “nothing” in the mirror. Apparently, Waldo from the game “Where’s Waldo” is the distressed victim of stalkers.
Perhaps personality traits are altered when we wear different costumes. Would people score differently on the Five Factor model while in costume? The Five Factor Model assesses different personality traits and sorts them into dimensions such as Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. It’s a stretch to imply to that personality could be so malleable, but hey, you never know.
The choice of costumes could be influenced by history as well. Perhaps one feels that dressing in a dark witch or zombie costume is part of a collective tradition. Maybe people want to revive the old school ghastliness of “All Hallow’s Eve.”
Whether Halloween is purely fun with no deep meaning or whether it connects to one’s psychical feelings is debatable. I mean, what if you dressed up as Freud for Halloween?
