That Face — Who Did It Bring Closer to Whom?

A food package carries a smiling face and a name printed beside it. I saw one on a shelf once and stopped for a while. The smile always reaches the eye before the contents do. Some buyers say the face puts them a little at ease. Something made by someone who smiles and gives their name does go down more easily, it's true, than something made by no one in particular. Add a single face to a faceless shelf, and the whole aisle seems to soften, if only slightly. That reaction feels perfectly natural to me. But what, exactly, was traded away in exchange for that small comfort? Today I intend to take a brief look.

A Face, Pasted On

A printed photograph makes it look as though the person themselves is really there. The way they laugh, the way their eyes narrow — it's unmistakably them. But what's actually there is nothing more than an image, built up out of layers of light, paper, and ink.

Picture the image that forms when you look into a mirror, or peer deep into a lens. The image is certainly there, visible. But reach out your hand, and your fingers never arrive at that spot — because the image and the substance it came from never occupy the same place. — And there I go again, making it sound grander than it is. Put simply: you can't touch the person in the photograph.

What's more, the image isn't the substance itself. It's light, cast off by the substance, bouncing back off the paper — a reflection, in other words. A reflection can sometimes look even closer, even more vivid, than the substance it came from. But looking close and actually being close are entirely different matters. If anything, a reflection is often arranged in advance to look close.

I don't mean to condemn any of this here. The image is simply there, as an image, plainly. For now, I'll just record that much, quietly.

Only the Face Came Closer

I understand well enough what the face in the photograph is trying to stage: a sense of comfort, a sense of closeness. Someone smiling does go down more smoothly than someone nameless. It's a genuinely conscientious piece of staging.

But closeness carries conditions that a single photograph can never satisfy. The expectation that you might cross paths again tomorrow, somewhere. The small tension of knowing that treating someone carelessly might make the next meeting awkward. The faint fear that raising a price could earn you a frown, right there in front of you. Closeness, it seems, is held up by a bundle of small tensions like these. I have already observed when it was that we let go of that face. What was lost back then wasn't the face as an appearance so much as the quiet force of tension that had been at work simply because the face was nearby.

This time, what's been pasted back onto the package is only the image. The image carries no expectation of meeting again tomorrow, no tension about awkwardness if handled carelessly. No matter how carelessly you treat it, the face in the photograph never once looks uncomfortable. It looks as though something has come closer, but what has actually come closer is only the surface of a face. The tension that once kept a face nearby has not come back, anywhere.

There's one more thing I shouldn't overlook. When it feels as though our eyes have met, in fact only I am doing the looking. The face in the photograph never looks back to see what expression I'm wearing as I stand in front of the shelf. It won't remember whether I handled the product roughly today, or tried to haggle over the price. I had always assumed a relationship works in both directions, but what forms between me and this face is a one-way gaze, nothing more. Feeling watched while, in truth, only watching — apparently that kind of closeness exists in this world too.

Who, Exactly, Came Closer to Whom

And besides, look closely, and that photograph was never smiling at me alone to begin with.

The same face, the same angle, the same laugh, printed as an image — probably thousands of copies of it are pasted on that same shelf, and on other shelves in distant places too. I have already observed an individual flattened into one eight-billionth, and a very similar move is at work here. The moment a face meant for one particular person is treated as a template that can be copied without limit, that face stops belonging to any single person. I thought I was meeting someone's eyes, but really I was only looking at one copy from a template that would look exactly the same to any of eight billion people. — Friends, isn't this a rather elaborate trick? Then again, maybe it isn't elaborate so much as simply well made.

And what this template delivers isn't only a duplicated face. Among all the buyers who receive the same face, an almost identical shape of comfort is being handed out equally. That small sense of relief I thought I'd felt may not have been a special event that happened only to me — it may simply be a reaction, replicated down to the last detail, playing out inside anyone who receives the same template. The distance I thought had closed had, in fact, been duplicated in exactly the same way, on both sides.

So who, then, really came closer to whom because of that photograph? Perhaps it wasn't the buyer and the person smiling in the picture. It may instead have been the seller and the sales figures that drew closer together. I don't yet have enough evidence to say that outright. But I do think there's ample reason to suspect that the smile on the package and the climbing numbers on the shelf are, in fact, shaking hands somewhere not far apart at all.

That face, today too, on some package somewhere, holds its image steady at the very same angle, quietly.