{"id":146323,"date":"2020-07-23T13:16:20","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T17:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=146323"},"modified":"2020-07-24T18:52:51","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T22:52:51","slug":"cantilever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/07\/23\/cantilever\/","title":{"rendered":"Cantilever"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her column, Corpus<\/em>,\u00a0Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For a while last year, back when such things were possible, I was clocking chins on the subway. Weak chin. Strong chin. Strong chin. In between. This started when an orthodontist explained to me how you can pull a person\u2019s whole mouth back and rewrite their profile. She recommends the procedure for people who have a fulsome, protruding mouth, horse teeth if you want to be unkind about it, which is a consequence of large teeth in a small mouth. With nowhere for all your big, beautiful teeth to fit along your jaw, they fan out, reaching for daylight.<\/p>\n

The orthodontist fixes this by pulling four teeth, one each from the left and right side of both the upper and lower jaws, usually the first molar right behind the canines. Then, she uses braces and head gear to pull your remaining front eight teeth back into the holes. The whole mouth backs up, retracts, makes itself scarce. She showed me pictures. Mostly, the people looked better before, with their sweet excessive mouths, but one teenage girl was a stunner after. Her before picture shows a reasonably pretty girl with nice eyes and teeth so full that her lips are turning inside out a little, showing their slick undersides. Her after picture shows a teenager suddenly made exceptional. I was startled, looking at it. The first picture was of a girl who would not grow up to be remarkably ugly, and the second was of a girl who would grow up to be remarkably beautiful. I eyed this orthodontist with new respect and wariness.<\/p>\n

I had made this appointment because my bite was bothering me\u2014one tooth was knocking against another uncomfortably\u2014but when I asked whether my discomfort had anything to do with an overbite, the orthodontist was more than happy to show me her slideshow of remade faces. \u201cYours is not an overbite,\u201d she said, and explained that my teeth were simply mismatched with the rest of my skeleton. It was as if the teeth of some larger human had been dropped into my me-sized bone structure.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could correct this,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It had been some time since I fantasized about having a different face, but the outline of my profile was my first serious dissatisfaction with my appearance. When I was thirteen I accidentally glimpsed myself perfectly from the side by swinging the medicine cabinet open and noticing the secondary refraction in the bathroom mirror. I was horrified at my convexness, which I\u2019d never quite seen fully before. My mouth protruded and my chin fell slightly away underneath it. My nose was an entirely different nose than the one I thought I had. It was sculptural. It had a bump in it. It didn\u2019t look like any other nose in my family; not like my mother or father, not like my grandparents or my many cousins. Where did this statement nose come from? I looked like the wrong half of a moon.<\/p>\n

For a brief time, when answering the depressing question (if you were going to get plastic surgery, what would it be?) Southern California girls used to ask each other in high school,\u00a0I would say that I wanted my nose bump eradicated and a stronger chin. What I was responding to at the time was a dawning awareness, at thirteen, that appearance, and particularly faces, are all tied up with our fortunes in this life. I wish that were not true. People tell children it should not be true, and ideally everyone makes their personal efforts to render it untrue, but ask any thirteen-year-old and she will tell you: the face matters. It\u2019s a kind of destiny, which is ironic because for the most part it\u2019s just a patchwork of the past, of all the faces that came before us.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a Roman nose,\u201d more than one perfect stranger has said to me, more or less without preamble. Something to comment on. Strangers like to guess \u201cwhere I come from,\u201d and my nose, which I can\u2019t trace to any ancestor, seems especially to indicate something about my ancestry to people, though it never signals with any consistency. The Roman nose, if we want to call it that, is a particular trigger for people\u2019s physiognomic, essentialist tendencies. It has, over time, been called a Roman nose, an aquiline nose (from the Latin word for eagle-like, as in beaky), a royal nose, a hook nose. In Hindu mythology, it was a sign of heroism and nobility; in ancient Egypt, royalty; in the post-Enlightenment West it was \u201csuperior and powerful\u201d; in Nazi Germany this nose was understood to be a \u201ctell\u201d for Jewish ancestry, though the physiognomists of the Victorian Era insisted it was a mark of Aryanness; in America, it became inextricable from white settlers\u2019 understanding of Native American features, a \u201cnoble warrior\u201d staple; in late-twentieth-century Hollywood it became emblematic of the \u201cuntrustworthy Arab.\u201d In fact, this nose is all over the world and always has been. In 1943, at the height of its anti-Semitic, racialist nasal pseudoscience, Germany issued a postage stamp of a Nazi German official, Reynhard Heydrich, in profile. He had the nose, too.<\/p>\n

Physiognomy, which dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, codified what seems like a reflexive neurological error: associating peoples\u2019 outward appearance with their inner being. \u201cFor there are mystically in our faces certain Characters that carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures,\u201d wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici. <\/em>Beauty without signifies beauty within, and so on, but also much more specific alignments: a nineteenth-century Italian doctor who suggested that criminality was inherited and could be identified by \u201chawk-like noses,\u201d or the supposition that a prominent brow and receding hairline indicated melancholy, or that certain eyes bespeak someone who \u201cseizes everything with facility but investigates nothing profoundly.\u201d Physiognomists claimed the power to predict someone\u2019s future by looking at their bone structure; they professed to read faces like mystics read palms.<\/p>\n

There is a version of this that sounds, possibly, like innocent fun. Like magazine horoscopes or the kinds of personality tests you download from the internet. Curious, I ran my own face through an online physiognomy index, which told me that my mouth (protruding, as confirmed by the orthodontist) indicates that I am \u201cvigorous, ambitious, emulative, jealous and impulsive,\u201d seldom deliberate, prone to an \u201cunstable life\u201d as well as \u201centanglements with the opposite sex.\u201d My short chin predicts my loneliness in old age, my tendencies toward extremity and tactlessness; my nose bump indicates that I should \u201cbeware of divorce or emotional problems at the age of 44 or 45.\u201d Some of this is right, though it\u2019s too soon to tell about my midforties.<\/p>\n

Later in the Religio Medici<\/em>, Browne suggests that there are \u201cProvincial Faces, National Lips and Noses.\u201d This is what people seem to be after when they look at my profile and guess: Iranian, Italian, German, Spanish, Argentinian, Jewish. But this element of physiognomy, its dangerous conflation of the face as a map of inner virtue and the face as a map of racial ancestry, made it, increasingly, a violent practice. Physiognomy offered a veneer of objectivity and rationalism to racism and genocide, particularly in this country, where it was used as \u201cevidence\u201d that African Americans were an inferior race. In the latter half of the twentieth century, it was more or less agreed by all to be a disgraced, dead practice. But after several decades, physiognomy has reappeared with the advent of facial recognition technology.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, Chinese researchers declared that they\u2019d written an algorithm that could identify a criminal face type based on \u201clip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle.\u201d According to the New York Times<\/em>, a company named HireVue markets technology that screens videos of job applicants and predicts their personalities, and an Israeli start-up called Faception \u201cuses machine learning to score facial images using personality types like \u2018academic researcher,\u2019 \u2018brand promoter,\u2019 \u2018terrorist\u2019 and \u2018pedophile.\u2019 \u201d (What facial images predict a \u201cbrand promoter,\u201d one wonders?) Same problem; new dystopia. This is \u201cjunk science,\u201d as experts point out, just as it was junk science a hundred years ago\u2014not a science at all, just an ugly human habit: looking at a face and turning it into a divination tool for your own ends; believing there are kinds of faces that correspond to kinds of people.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t notice this until she pointed it out, but all the pictures the orthodontist showed me were of either Asian or Black patients. \u201cWhat you have,\u201d she said, gesturing at my face. \u201cAlmost never in white people. I\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t tell what she was apologizing for\u2014whether she was sorry for the implied racism of the blanket statement, or sorry for noting that my bone structure is a \u201ctell” courtesy of my nonwhite ancestors (did she think this would offend me?), or sorry for having to mention race at all. Flummoxed, I just looked at her. Anyway, I now like my mouth and don\u2019t want it to get smaller\u2014and I like my nose. The truth is that I would have a convex profile no matter what. If you moved my mouth back, my whole face would look like a cantilever.<\/p>\n

Still, I asked to see more pictures, and to see both the shots from the front and the ones in profile. I was fascinated by the before-and-afters because they were so dramatic, less like looking at two versions of the same person than like looking at cousins with a resemblance. It\u2019s morbidly fascinating to know that you can change physical architecture so drastically, move the planes of our faces around like walls in a fixer-upper. If we now live in an age when computers purport to tell by our faces who we are, we also live in an age where we can remake our faces to lie to the computers.<\/p>\n

For a time I thought of this thing the orthodontist was proposing as somehow less vain than elective plastic surgery, more medical. Pulling teeth isn\u2019t really surgery, after all, and braces aren\u2019t really in the same category of intervention as fillers or tucks, though it now occurs to me that their effect is more permanent. The change I saw between the before-and-after photos seemed less about enhancing beauty than manufacturing a structural difference between old face, new face. But why pursue a new face? What were these slideshow people after? What had I been after, back when I fantasized about a bump-less nose? The reversion to conventional proportion, perhaps, or neutrality, if not beauty? Whose neutral? Which beauty?<\/p>\n

In an essay for The New Yorker<\/em>, Jia Tolentino documented the rise of a \u201csingle, cyborgian face\u201d among women, made popular by social media and made possible by a new range of minimal-intervention cosmetic surgical procedures: fillers, injections, and so on. The face is hyperfemme, with huge eyes, full lips, and a slim, rounded jaw, \u201cdistinctly white but ambiguously ethnic,\u201d signaling a \u201crootless exoticism.\u201d It is a face with no specificity, no history.<\/p>\n

The aspiration to trade one\u2019s features for those of a single, photogenic face shared by many takes to an extreme a longstanding human curiosity: to edit one\u2019s face as an attempt to erase, salvage, or inscribe\u2014to manage one\u2019s own unmanageable, inherited, irreversible narrative. We cannot know the precise ways in which our faces become our destinies, only the histories they bring with them. Any intervention represents a blind casting forward: Stave off that midforties divorce! Become the stunner you almost are! Get rid of your dreaded uncle\u2019s cleft chin and so avoid becoming your dreaded uncle!<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to dismiss blind, hopeful casting forward. People change their faces for all kinds of reasons, some of them fiercely important or medically necessary or even radically political. Most people have vanishingly little control over how the world will meet us\u2014we do what we can to feel safe and right and like authors of ourselves. I am just transfixed, I suppose, by the way that faces and bodies stubbornly remain sites of intimate divination\u2014of authorship and of origin, of all the faces that made yours, of all the beauty and error that made your beauty and error. I\u2019ve never treasured a compliment more than when my mother said to me offhandedly that my feet are the same as her father\u2019s, small with peculiarly square toes. I was thrilled. He died when I was three; I didn\u2019t think I had anything of his.<\/p>\n

What would it be like to wake up one morning, as I imagine these young people in the orthodontist\u2019s slideshow did, untethered from the face with which you entered the world, untethered from your brother\u2019s forehead or your mother\u2019s teeth? I imagine them looking in the mirror at their own faces made new, like the other side of the moon.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jordan Kisner\u2019s writing has appeared in<\/em>\u00a0n+1,<\/em>\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times Magazine,<\/em>\u00a0The Atlantic,<\/em>\u00a0GQ,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Guardian, The American Scholar,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,<\/em>\u00a0among other publications. Her debut essay collection, <\/em>Thin Places, was published this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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