Billy Idol - Eyes Without A Face

Where Stevie wonders: What if our sense organs were combined?

“Did you bite your tongue during the night?” My wife Karen asks. 

It’s a logical question as I am a chronic nocturnal teeth grinder. I wear a mouth guard and have done so for seven years now. It has definitely helped preserve a semblance of sharpness to my incisors, but being that my jaw still wants to imitate a mortar and pestle in the dead of night, it often uses my tongue as unwilling accomplice, mouth guard be damned.

But this morning my tongue is thankfully damage-free. My best guess is that maybe, having grown accustomed to daily bumps and bruises, it extended itself out of habit. Or perhaps my tongue had grown a bit claustrophobic, wanting to escape its dark and pasty home.

“I didn’t even know I was sticking it out,” I say, sucking my slithering appendage back in my mouth.

“Maybe your tongue wanted to have a look around the room,“ my wife says, joking.

After I laugh, I begin to wonder: what if we had eyes on the tip of our tongues? And in order to see, we had to stick our tongues out and point them in the direction of where we wanted to look?

I pose this question to my wife, though, being a medically trained nurse, I expect her answer to remain within the confines of science.

She mostly goes along with my ridiculous tongue-eyes concept.

“Well, I suppose the tongue would need to have a far more complex nervous system,” she ponders. “Having to feed both sight and taste impulses to the brain.”

“And,” I add, “I imagine there would be some hygiene issues that would have to be sorted out.”

I’m assuming that even if our tongues had eyes, they would still continue to be involved with the ingestion of food and drink. Wouldn’t the chewed up bits of sandwich and pizza get stuck in our eyes? And would we have to be careful not to chomp down on our eyeballs when eating? There definitely are some serious cross-sensory complications to this intriguing concept.

I stand against the sink, coffee mug pressed against my chin, deep in thought. “Hmm,” I say. “I wonder whether the tongue-eyes would be in addition to our traditional eye placement or if it would be instead of.”

“If it were in addition,” Karen says, looking especially doctorial in her onesie, “they’d have to offer views that our current eyes wouldn’t be able to emulate.”

I had to agree. It would seem to be redundant to have tongue-eyes if we had upper face-eyes as well. In my vision of these tongue-eyes, they would have to be the only eyes, and the rest of our facial features would be shifted upward, with our noses near the forehead. Maybe our heads would be eventually be smaller? Would our mouths become larger to accommodate the tongue-eyes? Would the eyes retract when eating?

And then, taking this absurd idea to its illogical conclusion — what if our tongue-eyes needed glasses? Would we end up buying designer tongue glasses? Could we wear tongue-eye contact lenses? And how much more would our vision insurance cost? And would it even be called vision coverage? Would ENT doctors be ENTET (ear/nose/tongue-eye/throat) doctors? Thus putting the optometry profession out of business?

I am finding more questions than answers. Perhaps I’m thinking about this all wrong. Maybe it would be better if our eyes had tongues!

I know this probably grosses you out, the whole imagining what having tongues sticking out from our eyes might look like. Would we simply have tongues projecting out from our eye holes like antennae with eyeballs at the ends? Or would our eye-tongues move toward the top of our heads, for better 360 degree view? Sort of like this? (Imagine the antennae on my hat as tongues.)

Steve showing off his birthday present - the eyes-tongue prototype for this piece

I propose this alternate eye-tongue concept to my wife.

She’s having none of it. She is convinced the tongue-eye is a much better design. I disagree. I don’t go into the whole internal debate I’ve been having in my head (it’s best no one has to experience that — well, except you, the reader), but I have convinced myself that the eye-tongue is far superior and I will not argue about it any longer. We agree to disagree.

Plus, with my mouth guard needs and my nocturnal grinding, there’s no way I could survive long with tongue-eyes.

I know you’re probably thinking, Steve, what have you been smoking? And that would be a logical question. But logic is the antithesis of what I’m trying to explore here and I’m dead sober right now and in fact this whole conversation happened at 8am. And I was still in the middle of drinking my first cup of coffee.

Your second question might be: how is this connected to the earworm again? 

Okay, here’s the connection.

During this whole eye-tongue facial reconstruction/recombination conversation, a song lyric looped in my head:

Les yeux sans visage

Eyes without a face

Got no human grace

You’re eyes without a face

Although the French line was more of a garbled mess. And instead of “Got no human grace” my brain transposed it with “They’ve found a brand new place.” Which fits better with the whole tongue-eye/eye-tongue rabbit hole I’d dug.

Of course those words are from the incomparable Billy Idol, from his song “Eyes Without A Face,” on his 1983 best-selling sophomore album Rebel Yell.

According to Wikipedia, “Eyes Without A Face” became Idol’s first top 10 Billboard hit single. This surprised me as I assumed that earlier MTV and radio staples, “Rebel Yell,” “White Wedding” or “Dancing With Myself” would have been bigger hits.

“Eyes Without A Face” is a great song though, deserving of its success. Which continues to this day, as it’s recently been having a resurgence, with singer-songwriter Angel Olsen covering this song on her 2021 all-covers EP Aisles. It’s a great interpretation of Billy’s moody tribute to the 1960 French Horror Film of the same name by director Georges Franju. Olsen’s version is even moodier and creepier than Idol’s, which I think was the right direction to go.

Also, in 2021, an independent horror film titled Eye Without A Face was released (probably straight to video), though it has nothing to do with the 1960 original and with a 3.6 out of 10 star rating on IMDB, I imagine it’s not worth trying to find on streaming. Here’s the link in case you want to know more about it.

The above trailer or highlight reel of the film that inspired the song, Les Yeux sans Visage, gives a good representation of what the entire film is all about. I suppose it’s officially a spoiler video, so if you intend to watch this classic French horror film, maybe don’t hit play. I find that this video works just as well to illustrate the greatness of Billy Idol’s song as the award winning MTV version. Although in this we don’t get to see Billy’s sneering lips, his spiky blonde hair, sweaty face, perfectly-white teeth and deepest blue eyes. So, maybe the 80’s video was the right choice.

While researching the history of both the song and the film, I discovered the following on Rock Music Wiki:

The video (for “Eyes Without A Face”) was released in June 1984 and subsequently nominated for MTV Video Music Awards for "Best Editing" and "Best Cinematography". It was shot over an exhausting three-day period on a set with fog machines, lighting, and fire sources. Immediately after the shoot, Idol flew to perform in Arizona, where he discovered that his contact lenses had fused to his eyeballs, attributing this to the harsh video shoot and dry plane air. He was taken to a hospital where the lenses were removed, his eyes bandaged for three days, and his scraped corneas grew back.

Reading this, I can’t help but wonder: What if Billy had had tongue-eyes back in 1984? Would he have suffered this injury? It seems clear to me that if he’d had eye-tongues, then there’d be no way could he have damaged his corneas.

I suppose the true story is a better one for the record books though. A fitting irony, that after filming the “Eyes Without A Face” video, Billy had literally become a face without eyes for a few days.

So, where do you stand in the all-important eye-tongue/tongue-eye debate?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

And if you have ideas for future earworm pieces, or want to maybe write one yourself (!!!!), email me at ambidextwords@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading and feel free to share the substack with your friends!