The disappearance of faces

Like everyone, I look nothing like my photos. I don't look like the profile picture illustration I use up here either, which in theory is supposed to resemble me. Then again, I don't do a job where image matters: if you want to read me it's not because I remind you of Brad Pitt, and if you don't want to read me I doubt it's because I don't look like him.

The problem is no longer looking like yourself. It's looking like your publishable version.

I open any social media platform and I see the presenter who's older than a sarcophagus and can no longer close her eyes she's pulled so tight, the American influencer who after getting his nose done is planning the teeth, then the ears, then God knows what else; I see Shakira at the World Cup and read people convinced it isn't Shakira, because she doesn't look enough like the mental image they'd built up from scrolling her Instagram profile. It's a shattering shock to discover that people at 50 don't look like they did at 30.

A friend tells me the Clavicular case is alarming — the looksmaxxing guy who goes from parties to a hospital wheelchair, promises twenty-somethings they'll achieve success with a better jawline while destroying his own face to prove it. He's probably right (my friend, not the dysmorphic). Clavicular is a problem. I'm just not sure he's the problem we think he is.

I'm not young anymore and I don't let myself be influenced by someone who, faced with going bald or impotent, would choose impotence. And when they ask him to rate Jason Statham he says 8 out of 10, even though he's bald, and the mean interviewers fire back: and his dick probably works too. Strictly speaking, it's the only coherent and generationally legible part of all this: why would the least sex-interested generation in history prefer an erection over hair? Hair photographs so much better.

The columnists already have their diagnosis ready: dysmorphia emergency, a generation of males staring at themselves in their phones, mass narcissism. The problem with these false narcissists is that they've never liked themselves so little.

For decades we found it perfectly normal that women lived ready to end up in Vogue even just to work as bakers: make-up, heels, dye, extensions, waxing, fillers, botox, diet, skincare, surgery. Now that men are starting, and instead of breast implants they're getting their jawlines redone, we cry the beginning of the end. Maybe it is. But it's certainly the end of that specific privilege of being able to walk around scruffy and in slippers. The last remaining advantage was not having to wear make-up — now that the algorithm serves me men's make-up tutorials, I don't feel great about it.

Even cinema, which is built on faces, seems to have stopped believing in them. It's not just that there's no longer a Brad Pitt, a Tom Cruise, a Paul Newman, a Lauren Bacall, a Monica Vitti, a Nicole Kidman. It's that even Nicole Kidman no longer looks like Nicole Kidman. It's not (only) cosmetic surgery's fault. I don't want to be preachy. People can have as much work done as they like. Joan Rivers used to say that if you didn't like how she looked after all the surgery, it was only because you hadn't seen her au naturel.

It's not that contemporary actors are ugly. They're often better-looking, more toned, more polished, more symmetrical, more international, more photogenic than those who came before (Italian actors excluded: that's a lost cause). It's that they seem less necessary.

You'll tell me Chalamet is the new DiCaprio, that Jacob Elordi is the new great-looking one. And yet it seems to me that the old-school star used to set the standard. Today the actor is instead asked to conform to an image born in some online channel, or in some surgeon's office (Barry Keoghan knows something about that). It'll end with us not even being able to say someone has a face like a backside. That'll be redone too, and identical to all the others.