Two Nouns #22 -- Mask Off
Faces are how we know we are safe. The basic human instinct, as I understand from evolutionary biology, is to scan other faces for signs of anger, hostility, and arousal. A face can be put on a spectrum of friendliness. When people smile, we feel warm. When teeth are bared, or brows furrowed, our cortisol levels go up. We see. We flee. We fight.
COVID 19 has inverted this logic completely. Masked people are now everywhere, maybe forever -- face coverings are becoming the policy recommendation from governments large and small. And so the masked face is a soothing sight, the friendly barrier over which you can nod at a stranger on a pathway, or wink across the till at a local grocery. Suddenly, an uncovered face arouses suspicion. A covered smile is safest.
Herb Ritts, "Mask (Stephanie Seymour)," 1989. A bride in Cairo, 2020, Rania Gomaa, Reuters.
Under lockdown (or what the french have elegantly dubbed “confinement”), physical masking collides with masking in a more abstract way. At the start of 2020, the face industry had been aboom -- the investments that people, especially those who identify as women, make in facial improvements are worth $532 billion annually. (This is just makeup and tinctures; cosmetic surgery adds $16.5 billion.) As favorite essayist Jia Tolentino writes in The Guardian: A woman “spends lots of money taking care of her skin, a process that has taken on the holy aspect of a spiritual ritual and the mundane regularity of setting a morning alarm. The work formerly carried out by makeup has been embedded directly into her face: her cheekbones or lips have been plumped up, or some lines have been filled in, and her eyelashes are lengthened every four weeks by a professional wielding individual lashes and glue.” Here I have been generically though not deeply complicit; any success I have had in evading these tendencies is because Sephora doesn’t exist in the UK.
But search "cryo stick tutorials" on YouTube to see how intensely this trend has been accelerating. Look at the spike in marketing of facial care to male-identifying people, or the fascinating business case off the razor wars to understand that capitalism sees higher peaks yet in democratizing the obsession with face optimization. Tolentino writes, in another essay, about Instagram Face: “I couldn’t shake the feeling that technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests—rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes.”
Tyler Shields, “Batman”, 2014. Martin Schoeller, “George Clooney with Mask,” 2008.
The face wars have already shifted from beauty salons and women's magazines to digital fora -- note the filters ascendant in apps like Snapchat and Instagram, the advent and commercial success of digital makeover tech like FaceTune. If masks had once communicated a utilitarian plan to conceal identity (see superheroes, burglars), online they are about storytelling.
Quarantine has probably accelerated this new normal. Maureen Dowd and Tom Ford, of all people, have given a tutorial on how to look your best in a Zoom call. (A more profound meditation here.) The introduction of masks as a consumer category prompts another layer of potential signaling; I dread the wave of commercialized hygiene fashion to come. Will we soon see the high end materials or stylish bedazzling that has overtaken our bodily adornments in the name of fashion? Do I now need Tyra Banks to teach me how to smize above the folds of a face covering?
Infinite Jest, the epic, 1000+ page novel published by David Foster Wallace in 1996, predicted this juxtaposition of vanity-anxiety with humor and accuracy. I have remembered this passage on video-conferencing with reverence ever since I read it more than a decade ago.
Consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable…. The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking… i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and—thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries—combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention—[which] was quickly supplanted by the more inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it.
This dystopian vision from nearly 25 years past preempts and presupposes the entire maniacal spiral from corded phones to gritty webcams to Skype (LOL, RIP) to FaceTime to YouTube hair tutorials to Snap filters to smile-to-pay on WeChat to Global Entry databases to Zoom filters to House Party to Portal by Facebook (™). All the while understanding that this over surveillance and overexposure is a route to infinite anxiety. The literal solution discussed in the book-- Mission Impossible-style rubber masks that replicate our own faces -- gently recalls the modern problem of Instagram Face, or more nefarious deepfaking. (Remember how easy it is to pretend something is happening when it is not.) Slowly then all at once, the visual internet feels radioactive, even as it is primary connective tissue for the half the world that is online.
Barbara Kerne, “Athena’s Owl,” part of the Courage Unmasked radiation cancer series. Antonio Saura, “Luis No. 4”, 1982.
What’s the upside of masking right now? Safety, of course. At a recent doctor’s appointment, everyone was fully masked, and I was at ease. And the use of masks by protesters in Hong Kong somewhat rebuffed the facial recognition systems of territories in China’s political control. It’s possible that masks could reduce the phenotypic triggers of racism, by flattening all humans into a single, covered tribe. But reports suggest that people with melanated skin are actually quite fearful of wearing bandanas and scarves because it evokes a built in bias to perceive them as bandits and thieves.
Amy Stein, from “Halloween in Harlem” series, 2003. Regina King as Angela Abar / Sister Night in The Watchmen. Me.
I choose the mask, though the whole project is dehumanizing. I mourn seeing someone’s authentic expression. I want to understand how your cheek creases when you worry, how your gums shine when you smile, how your nose flares when you laugh. For now, on a screen.
Stay safe and sane out there,
Dayo