What's in a Face?

[arrowwhiskers]

Okay, so I've been putting off writing about this, but it's been weighing on my mind terribly and I think to make it go away I need to record my ideas and see what other people might have to bring to it.

Yesterday, keeping with a new personal goal of walking home once per week, I stopped by Starbucks to get my first cup of commercial coffee I'd bought in several days. I was tired and caffeine-headachy, and it felt extremely convenient and on-the-way. As I approached the café, I noticed that there was a man sitting at one of the outdoor tables, seeming to sip from a small straw.

He had no face. Although I didn't get an -excellent- look, it appeared that his mouth and much of his jaw had been gouged out, and thus his upper lip had been pulled down to create the roof of his mouth. This projected his nose and (eyes? I didn't see if he had any, though he must have)...forward, basically making it look as though his head had folded into itself. Slightly disconcerted, but not really thinking about it, I entered the Starbucks, stood in line, and waited for my coffee. As I was waiting, I noticed that the deformed stranger had entered the café, and was standing near a group of people nearby. I don't think he knew them, but again, my observation of him and the others was somewhat stilted.

What I remember foremost is that my hair started to stand on end, and I got a strange smell/taste in my mouth. The man wasn't looking at me, as far as I knew, but he was close, and it made me really uncomfortable. I turned around nonchalantly a couple of times, took quick, passing glances at his deformity, before hastily staring the other way. For reasons I can't even begin to explain, I was terrified. I couldn't wait for my coffee to come soon enough, so that I could grab it and remove myself from the situation, get away from the man. It was almost like an inner frenzy, like a confined panic. It was making me literally feel ill.

And even as the feelings caught onto my adrenaline and rushed through my system, I was appalled by how wrong it was. The man was probably perfectly nice; he had probably suffered an unfortunate disease or accident. I was alive with sympathy for him--and it was as though there were two sides of me in desperate conflict. On one level I wanted to approach him, to talk to him, to find out what had happened to him, maybe make friends with this poor unfortunate creature. Assuming most people reacted at least similarly to how I did, the man must shoulder an enormous social pressure, to create tension and disgust wherever he goes, for reasons that are likely not his fault at all. I wanted to help him, to try to relate to him. However, that was only a little voice of conscience within me, greatly overshadowed by the deep instinctual discomfort and fear that grabbed hold of me. I wanted to say hi to him--but even transient glances at him made my heart race and my stomach clinch. It was a serious ordeal being in the same area as him--even for the few minutes I withstood it. I felt deeply disturbed and ill by the time I left the shop with my coffee, and it took the remainder of the walk home before I could mentally revisit the situation and think about it in a more direct, logical manner.

Why did he disturb me so much? What is is about a face? People with damaged limbs, huge scars--twisted bodies--inspire sympathy, and perhaps are a bit awkward to interact with at first, but I have never, ever felt so gravely affected by someone's appearance before. It was as though his contorted features made him a monster, a perverted being, someone unsafe and unnatural, and it's just not true. However, faces -do- seem to have a sort of telling power. I remember (I think it was) in driver's ed, we watched a video about a drunk driving crash victim who had been burnt all over. First it was a torrent of words and admonishments-- don't drive drunk, it hurts people, it ruins lives, etc. Such sentiments have been voiced countless times by thousands of teachers, counselors, parents, and others. It was nothing new, nothing shocking. However, when the footage played and a burnt face appeared, masklike and shiny, the room of students stood aghast. While the victim's words were not any different from those so often reiterated, they held a strange power coming from the inhuman face. It was a message that sobered all who received it, and awoke some deep instinct in their souls.

Why is this?
Why are faces so important; why do they have power to make one a monster?

He was not a monster. But my mind--the most basic of instincts--treated him thus. And even now, I'm hating myself for it, innately inspired or not.

Rarely in my life have I ever felt so shallow.

Comments

[sana-gale.livejournal.com]

It's an evolutionary trait to react in such a way to the unfirmiliar.
Just as it's an evolutionary trait to seek out faces as signals for social situations. Idunno, I don't know if I would have reacted the same way but it's not like you feeling so awkward was horrible. It's good that you thought beyond his disfigurement, that's what saves that fear from making you a bad person.

[arsinyk.livejournal.com]

Well, here's my take on it:

I think faces have a power that the rest of the human body doesn't, because so much in communicated through them. They are the center of what makes a person "who they are". With their head they think, observe the world around them with four of the five senses (and to a lesser extent the fifth), indicate emotion (smiles, frowns, tears, etc) and communicate through words. The head is where everything from images to food enters the body. The head is our basic "portal" both out of our own minds *and* into the mind of another person. It's the most basic way we identify someone--through their face, hair color, or voice--and most important way we have of perceiving this identification. The face is the first thing you look at when you meet someone. When you're paying attention to someone, you look at their face. And without a face (or at least head), someone dies. You can cut off their arms or legs without killing them. Cutting off the torso would also cut off the head, but even if it didn't, it's usually covered by clothes and doesn't have the same potential for expression and observation.

When someone's face is deformed somehow, that's your initial impression of them. If someone's head is deformed, that could (potentially) affect their ability to world around them (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, brain). If their brain was damaged, who knows what's going on with them? Intellectually, you know that if their brain *was* affected, it probably didn't turn them into a psychotic killer. On a gut level, you don't know that. Their ability to communicate--verbally and through facial expression could easily be impaired. If you can't communicate properly with them, again, how do you judge them? How do you know what they're thinking? Again, intellectually you'd guess that they're probably thinking "Meep, everyone is scared of me ;__; *lonely and depressed*", but on a gut level, you're not so sure. You look at them and, instead of seeing a familiar facial structure that you can recognize and read, you see a distortion of that, which you instinctively interpret as a distortion of all things associated with their face, like thought or perception.

Furthermore, you can't just look away if you want to interact with them. You can avoid looking at a deformed limb by looking at someone's face because that's where you *should* be looking anyways. If it's their face that's deformed, where do you look? If someone's limb is messed up, you can identify them by their face instead of their deformity. When the face is deformed, there's nothing left.

"The brown haired man who has a face like this and is tall and thin and happens to be missing his right arm." That can only one person (assuming he doesn't have an identical twin).
"The brown haired man who's tall and thin." There are numerous people who fit that descriptions.
"The brown haired man who has a (deformed) face like this who's tall and thin." That's only one person, but now you're remembering them by their deformity.

Faces have the power to make someone a monster because faces are so important to human interaction. Everything to do with basic interaction revolves around faces. At least in our culture, paying attention so someone's face is a sign of respect and an acknowledgement of them as an actual person. Looking at someone's face means your paying attention to what they're communicating, both verbally and through expression. If someone's hiding something, they avoid looking at you directly because you might see it in their face. Teachers want students to look at their faces, not out the window. Girls want boys to look at their faces, not their chests. (If breasts could talk/smile/cry/see/etc, girls would be perfectly happy to have guys focusing on them.) So if someone's face is deformed, your basic means of interacting with that person is "deformed", and that's a scary thing. Without a face, they cease to be properly human, and if a person isn't "human", they're dangerous.

Not that it's right that people perceive others that way, but it's natural and something that takes a lot of awareness and effort to overcome.

[arsinyk.livejournal.com]

Oh, and have you ever seen The Singing Detective? It's this amazing six part series about a murder-mystery novelist who has some sort of skin disease (bad summary, but it's been a while since I it). The thing I remember most about it was that at the very beginning, I could barely stand to look at the main character, but after a while, I got used to the skin disease and was able to see his actual face beneath it. It was an interesting experience.

[evilsimon.livejournal.com]

...I'm not sure how I'd react. On one level, my eyes are so bad that I no longer trust them. I try not to meet people's eyes unless I'm very comfortable with them, and they with the fact that my eyes don't focus. So on one level, I can totally disallow anything physical by merely removing my glasses -- my vision is gone, leaving me to only make judgements by sounds and blurry shapes. On the other level, I've learned not to meet people's eyes for long periods of time, because it's disorienting for other people to see my eyes wandering separately.

lkdjfls. I express myself badly. But what I mean, I guess, is that I can understand the gut panic, but I've never been in a situation where I couldn't effectively remove such a gut thing from my sight, and just focus on people as people.

Now that I'm getting contacts...I guess I won't have that option any more.