Eccentric Flower:200906/Smiling Is Overrated
From Eccentric Flower
Smiling Is Overrated
There's a bigger entry before this which you haven't read yet (8 June, 3 pm). I know you haven't read it yet because an argument hasn't started yet.
I realize this is something of an overreaction, but you know what? This page makes me angry. Temporarily, at least. It will pass. But yes, that's my first reaction to it - and to Andrew Sullivan's link to it where he obviously thinks it's a swell joke.
You know, some of us have neutral expressions which we happen to think are perfectly pleasant that just don't happen to be smiles. Some of us think that smiles look patently artificial on us if they're forced, and frightening/unattractive on us even if they're genuine. I look positively at my worst when I'm smiling. So why are there so many horrible candids of me smiling? Becuase of photographers who will not give it a rest - who insist that everyone look like they are having the giddiest, most exuberant time of their lives.
Look, it's possible to be a basically cheery person and not go around smiling like a crazed person all the time. Personally, I suspect people who smile all the time. It isn't natural. I suspect people who frown all the time too, for the record. Life is mostly neutral - neither great highs nor great lows. Facial expressions should be mostly neutral too.
Now, many of the people pictured in the link at the top (who should all sue the site for unauthorized use of their images, en masse) are unhappy or crabby. Many of them are discernably crabby because they don't want their picture taken. Many of them are teenagers, who make a practice of looking sullen just because they can.
But these two promgoers aren't sad - they just have neutral expressions. And this young man isn't even all that neutral - he is lost in thought. I would call that expression "pensive."
I dislike this business of "oh, everybody's got to look happy" for the same reason I dislike any number of bump-filling, smoothing, variation-removing tendencies of our culture. If everyone looks happy, happy is bland. Happy is not supposed to be bland. Bland is bland. Of all the striking portraits of humans I have seen in my lifetime, some are happy, some are sad, some are neutral ... but very few of them show the sort of wide-mouthed, toothy, absolutely artificial clownhappyface that we get when some doofus with a camera insists "Say cheese!"
I linked to some pretty good pictures of me a couple of entries back. I link to some really bad pictures of me in this entry. Notice in which ones I am smiling and in which I am not.
I am not worried about my smile in the photo of me in your Not Smiling entry as much as I am embarrassed by that horrible sweater. I may look less perky and gamine these days but I hope to God I dress better.
Have you read the Errol Morris blog entries in the NYT from 2008 where he talks about smiling and facial expressions in photos? Well worth digging up if you can.
-- 20:28, 8 June 2009 (BST)
Y'know, I think your smiles are perfectly fine. But nobody can win this debate with you so I'm not going there.
But I know what you mean; the smile I would smile if you showed up at my door would be quite different than the one you would get if you pointed a camera at me. Because the former conveys honest joy (especially since it's been too damn long since I've seen you)...but I don't have to look at it in perpetuity.
Has this truly been on your mind lately or are the old entries dredging it up again?
-- 20:47, 8 June 2009 (BST)
...or if you'd noted that neutral facial expressions were a result of most of life being neutral, so it doesn't sound like you want everyone to walk around staring blankly all the time.
Sorry; that is, in fact, what I meant.
Rhonda: I wouldn't say it's been on my mind lately, but I thought of it when I rechecked that old linked entry, and thought of it again today when I saw that damned website.
-- 21:24, 8 June 2009 (BST)
The site is pretty funny, though I agree with you that a lot of them are just candids or people staring off. You have to concede, though, that the one of the guy with the foam finger and the two Red Sox World Series trophies is hysterical: He looks like a Yankee fan who lost a bet.
-- 21:34, 8 June 2009 (BST)
When I was twelve or thirteen, and someone (I forget where/how/why) got on me about not smiling, I spent a rather long time (weeks? months?) walking around with a fake smile plastered on my face, thinking that that was how people maintained more pleasant neutral expressions. It didn't work, though someone signed my eighth-grade yearbook with a comment about me smiling while I rode my bike. 21 years later, I'm still faintly humiliated by the memory. Sometimes I think there's something about being human that I don't quite understand.
I like to think of my neutral expression as sort of pensive, but in candid shots I mostly look vacant and stupid. The only person I've ever encountered who seemed able to interpret subtleties in my facial expressions was Ken.
-- 22:58, 8 June 2009 (BST)
Mel:
I have a perfectly okay smile, I guess, and I understand that all photographers think they have to get you to smile, so that doesn't bother me so much. The thing I object to is people who just order you to "Smile!" out of the blue when they think you don't look happy enough to suit them. It's annoying as hell, and it almost invariably is done by somebody I don't like too much in the first place, to boot. I'm sure that's no coincidence.
-- 00:43, 9 June 2009 (BST)
Nonelvis:
Facial expressions should be mostly neutral too.
I love you, sweetie, but there comes a point when you can't really dictate what other people do. This is one of those points. Perhaps I'd have less of an objection to this sentence if it were rewritten as "Facial expressions may be mostly neutral too," or if you'd noted that neutral facial expressions were a result of most of life being neutral, so it doesn't sound like you want everyone to walk around staring blankly all the time.
Sorry if this sounds nitpicky. I know it does, in fact, but it's an important distinction.
-- 20:25, 8 June 2009 (BST)