The smile is out, so put on the pout and say ‘cheese’
It was a swirling mass of a shindig: the long-awaited opening of Bisha Hotel in Toronto.
As guests migrated through its floors — some racking up conversational credit to be collected at the inevitable next party; others robo-asking “What are you doing for the holidays?” as the calendar year lurched — I found myself trapped behind two groups of photo-takers on the hotel’s swishy rooftop.
On one side, gearing up for pics, two ladies arranged themselves and dropped their smiles like dusk. On the other side, ditto, complete with at least one woman biting her lip like she was pondering an LSAT question.
For these women, like so many, the chance of getting a full-toothed saycheese would be like finding an answering machine in their homes. Suck cheeks. Purse mouth. Tilt head. You’re welcome!
Living as we are in a zero-smile renaissance — the default no-beam of Victoria Beckham, the stone-faced cast of Kristen Stewart, “the thunderstorm sulk” of Melania Trump (as has been described), the dependably glacial countenance of Anna Wintour and the trout-pout machinations of any number of Kardashians — it hit me: in the world of smiles, everything new is sullen again.
For one, it summoned to mind professor Colin Jones of Queen Mary University of London, whose book The Smile Revolution is based on the premise that different cultures have had different rules about smiling, and how it was only in late 18th-century France that western civilization discovered the art of the smile.
(Before that, open-mouthed smiles were traditionally only used to depict “plebeians” in portraits.)
“Technology has made it interesting for the culture of the smile,” Jones remarked at a recent conference. “The world of the selfie, the wonder of narcissism . . . it is the way in which we establish our authenticity in the world. This is then where the ‘duck face’ comes in. The idea is that you probably won’t smile, you probably won’t show your teeth. You will probably suck in and look very ironic . . . There is something going on in the way we present ourselves.’ ”
After a complicated larger history — people originally didn’t smile in Old Master paintings because of poor dental care; smiles went out of fashion again after the French Revolution, Marilyn Monroe heralded the arrival of the modern pout — we’re at a moment when too much smiling is considered, well, “basic,” as the kids say.
And it’s not only the preserve of women, to be sure. Kanye West, for instance, is a no-smile zone, having given the Tao to his stance when he told an interviewer, “I saw this book from the 1800s and it was velvetcovered with brass and everything. I looked at all these people’s photos, and they look so real and their outfits were incredible and they weren’t smiling. People, you know the paparazzi, always come up to me, ‘Why you not smiling?’ and I think, not smiling makes me smile.”
Meanwhile, Bella Hadid — a millennial poster child who’s also one of the world’s most mojo-packing models right now — says she doesn’t smile because she just feels awkward doing so: “I feel uncomfortable, sometimes, smiling in front of the camera. It actually took me until probably this year to really understand my face.” Kapish? Don’t judge a model by her scowl. Unsurprisingly, an abundance of smiling has also often spurred an unholy history of suspicion, going as far as to create a subtextual wrinkle in many a big-deal murder trial. Take the case of the Menendez Brothers, most recently rehashed (once again) in the Edie Falco-starring NBC miniseries as well as a fresh documentary The Menendez Murders: Erik Tells All. The saga in which brothers Erik, 18, and Lyle, 21, shot their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion, in 1989, has long registered for its callousness but, even more so, for the way the brothers smirked upon entering the courtroom for an arraignment and later during their two ’90s-era trials. In the new doc, though, Erik claims that he’d been misunderstood, explaining that he’d smiled because he was “in shock.”
He elaborated: “When I first came to the arraignment, I was so nervous. I walked out there and (defence lawyer) Leslie (Abramson) made a joke. It was so nerve-racking that I smiled and it was this defence mechanism that came out. But on the cameras from then to the rest of eternity, (they) have me smiling as if I think the whole thing is a joke. Ironically, that was exactly the opposite of how I felt.” (Or was it?)
It would be something that would play out in the Amanda Knox contretemps, after the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher in their shared Italian quarters in 2007. “A cold-blooded psychopath who brutally murdered her roommate or a naive student abroad trapped in an endless nightmare?” asked a recent Netflix doc concerning the infamous case, called simply Amanda Knox. Whatever its particularities, an interesting part of the case, definitely, was how much the accused’s appearance factored in from her eyes to, yes, her smile.
“People can see in her what they wanted to see,” one of the filmmakers behind the project, Rod Blackhurst, has said. “If she didn’t have a certain level of emotion, it meant ‘X.’ And if she had too much emotion, it meant ‘ Y.’ But we see that, too . . . they want to find something that reinforces what they believe.” (A gender-specific Pandora’s Box that would even play out, methinks, in the way people viewed Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential election.)
Smiling and royalty? It’s had a particularly interesting yo-yo. Queen Victoria never ever cracked one in official portraits while Her Majesty today, “even in her 90s, displays a phenomenally wholehearted count-those-teeth smile on most public occasions,” as Tatler magazine has observed.
Smiling, as a royal, is perhaps not a choice in the modern era; part of the “job,” as characterized by the full-on beam given by its newest memberto-be Meghan Markle during her maiden appearances recently with Prince Harry.
In her previous life — like many of her brethren in showbiz — she’d toggled back and forth between smiling and not smiling, as the image trail reveals.
But even a dutifully smiling royal can have their critics, as Jonathan Jones, a columnist with the Guardian, showed when Kate and William debuted their regal nuclear family photos not long back. “No one can photograph a fake smile like Mario Testino can,” he pounced, calling out “the huge cheesy grins on the faces of Kate and William,” and saying that Testino is “the world’s most horrible flatterer of wealth and status (who) makes every smile look phoney. He makes reality itself seem a glib and cynical charade.”
Going on, Jones talked of “their faces lit up by hysterical joy . . . their teeth shining like diamond walls of privilege, and their eyes betraying no signs of thought whatsoever.”
Like so much of humankind, the point, to me, was clear: you’re damned if you smile and you’re damned if don’t.