The revealing mask

The best Halloween costume is the one you can see through. By that I mean that you can tell, maybe after a double take, who it is underneath. “Oh, it’s Betty being an alien stripper.”

I have made the mistake of being too opaque. A couple years back I went to an Oct. 31 party wearing an evil pumpkin head, a globe of orange rubber with a smile intimating criminal madness. Only my eyes were visible. I was instantly the most hated person at the party. The bearded guy whose jumpsuit bore the word “Unabomber” was in poorer taste, and there was one completely naked man (OK, he had running shoes on). But even my close friends were driven to great anxiety at not being able to see my face. Finally, they were drunk and threatened to remove the pumpkin head by violence.

Their irrational fear filled me with a feeling of immense power. My anonymity became a challenge. I fed on their morbid thoughts. “I can’t even look at you,” said a friend, “because I’m imagining you’re smiling that same creepy smile underneath.” I grew outraged that they’d turned me into a stranger, and an untrustworthy one at that. I began questioning the basis of all my friendships. Were they all about faces? Wouldn’t they let me be whomever I wanted for one night of fun? If your friends won’t hang with you when you’re an evil pumpkin head, who will?

The Residents, on the other hand, have spent the last 30 years being opaque -- and embraced. Ciphers in the world of pop music, the band performs only in identity-obliterating masks, outsize headgear in the shape of giant eyeballs and skulls. Unlike KISS, they have never been photographed out of costume; indeed, the Residents may change personnel all the time and no one would know. They may be a one-man band, like the Monkees. There may be no Residents at all.

The one thing that is certain about the Residents: They make creepy, brilliantly stressful music. Their early-’70s video work, including “Third Reich ‘n’ Roll,” is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Residents’ 1979 LP, “Eskimo,” is one of the most important recordings ever made, a collection of warbling synth anxiety that’s more human than Kraftwerk but as psychotic as Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady.” “Duck Stab” is the great 1977 new wave album that Devo didn’t dare to make because the album lacked any irony whatsoever. Their 2002 disc, “Demons Dance Alone,” is similarly quavering and depraved.

Or maybe it is ironic. Who knows? Without faces, it’s impossible to tell. And in this way, the Residents reveal the lie in all of pop culture -- indeed, in life itself: Despite their compelling music, the Residents will never be popular because we only anoint with celebrity those we think we know. Stars buy our adulation by letting us into their lives. They become our false friends. But how much do we really know by seeing them on “MTV Cribs”? What if the Residents were on there -- a bunch of silent characters in skull and eyeball heads? It could really be them, but you wouldn’t even care.

The Residents have pulled off what no one else has since the Unknown Comic: greatness without a face.

I left that party, and everyone was relieved. I drifted up Speedway in Venice Beach, still in my mask. After a while, a guy yelled down to me from a balcony: “Mike! Mike! Come back up here, man!” He was talking to the wrong guy, but I went up to his party anyway. At least he was talking to the real me.