Faces are in, and must stand proxy for biography, psychology, gossip and sex

| Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian

Faces are in, and must stand proxy for biography, psychology, gossip and sex

Elections are won and royal fiancees analysed on looks alone. We accord appearance far more value than we dare admit

Such a nice-looking woman. The eyes sparkle reassuringly, the cheeks bloom wholesomely, the mouth smiles easily in an outgoing, friendly sort of way. The face does not have Diana's coy allure, but is commonsensically pretty. She clearly has the inner stability and strength for a future queen, not a "people's princess" but rather a potential icon of bourgeois monarchy.

There you are. It is the best I can do. Another royal bride has launched a thousand platitudes on the rolling surf of celebrity. What can we poor commentators do? The nation apparently craves comment. Kate Middleton's face is more than a window on a soul, it is a window on the self-absorption of an entire people. It must stand proxy for biography, phrenology, psychology, gossip and sex. The face must tell all when so much is concealed. The one feature of the fiancee of a sometime king that they cannot censor or spin is her face. Age can wither it and custom stale its limited variety, but for the time being it is the one thing about her that is vulnerable and naked to the world. It is all we have to go on.

Faces are in. Some commentators thought the last election was won and lost on a face – that of smooth, confident David Cameron against hassled, haggard Gordon Brown. According to the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, Cameron's face so embodies "total moral opportunism combined with a complete, engorged, erectile sense of his own responsibility" that he draws it cruelly inside a condom. It is hardly Cameron's fault that his skin is smooth.

In contrast, Brown's face was caricatured as a decomposing Matterhorn of introvert exhaustion. His blind eye and muscular defect were mercilessly parodied. Ridicule is no respecter of the accidents of birth or injury. We no longer subject celebrities to trial by ordeal or combat. We leave them to cartoonists. Fair? Who said life was fair? It is Brown's fault he lost the election for not being beautiful.

The taboo that personal comment should not harp on physical handicap or disadvantage is falsified by its converse: comment that harps relentlessly on beauty. We may wince at Orwell's remark that "at 50 everyone has the face he deserves", or Groucho Marx's quip: "I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception." But the reality is that BBC women of a certain age do not survive high-definition television. The prose may be fine but the pores are a problem. Brains and brawn must work their way in the world, but beauty has a free pass. If a woman's face is her fortune, it should surely incur inheritance tax.

In her biography of the Victorian admiral Jacky Fisher, Jan Morris tried to analyse the infatuation he induced in so many of his contemporaries. A humble-born, irreverent sailor with little experience of war, short and with a faintly oriental appearance, Fisher shot to the top of the most snobbish navy on earth. He dined privately with Queen Victoria and had politicians at his beck and call. He was master of all he commanded. What was so special about him?

History offered Morris no clue until she came across an early photograph of the admiral's face. She became so obsessed with it that she pinned it up in that most intimate of privacies, her wardrobe. It was of a man childlike and puckish, with dark eyes and strangely alluring lips, curled into a permanent smile. Anyone in his company instinctively smiled in sympathy. Gregarious, garrulous, tactile, always dancing, the man was irresistible, and not just to women. He was a bundle of facial charm. The secret of his success, Morris concluded, lay in one thing, and she called her biography Fisher's Face.

The pop psychology guru Malcolm Gladwell points out in his bestseller, Blink, that in virtually all contacts between individuals, the first visual glimpse is not just critical in conjuring a person to mind, it is all we get. The brevity may seem grotesque, but such facial flashes are the arbiters of most human relationships other than the closest. They are love or hate at first sight. On such flint-sparks we do what we can to form an impression.

The truth is that we accord appearance far more importance than we dare admit. We carry battered pictures of ourselves on cards and in wallets, as if they held our true identity. Young people exchange faces by internet as a simulacrum for friendship. This article is accompanied by a snapshot of its author, who cringes at its unrecognisability. He may plead for its removal – claiming pompously that it erects a wall of false impression between words and reader – but the editor is implacable.

Words can no longer stand on their own feet. The reader apparently requires that the writer pose before a camera, as if he were an illegal immigrant in the empire of prose. Something is needed to add colour to grey print, warmth to cold text, humanity to brute opinion. Some newspapers even prop up writers' faces with an entire suit of clothes, as if a column were window dressing a manikin.

My first humble job in journalism was to edit the apotheosis of the English face, the Country Life frontispiece. In those days it was a proper portrait, usually of a sub-lieutenant's fiancee, identical in hair, pearls and cashmere, with only the face to convey distinction. Over the years the feature became an anthropological record of a class of English female face, the sort described by Oscar Wilde as "once seen, never remembered". I longed one day to do a spoof frontispiece of Lucy, the hominid fossil found in Kenya, in full Bond Street rig, to see if readers noticed.

That frontispiece has, like these words, lost its presentational purity. Even a face dare not stand on it own. The Country Life girl is no longer a head wholly filling the frame but is surrounded by the clutter of middle-class status – by clothes, dogs, flowerbeds, interior design and, increasingly, something the girl is trying to sell, such as herself. The point used to be that the girl was engaged, unattainable, already sold. The frontispiece is now a record of lifestyle, while students of the human face would do better to study diamond advertisements.

The drug pushers of this craze, the photographers, are ever more facially intrusive, their lenses so powerful they can penetrate every pore and reveal the tiniest wrinkle or shaving mishap. Layout artists crop faces so as to exaggerate ageing or pass some quasi-political comment. I remember a BBC cameraman once asking his director before an interview: "Are we lighting for or against?"

Those who deride popular analysts of the Middleton face should beware. They do it themselves all the time. We all try to read between the lines. We long to leap the fence of privacy, to know better the person on the other side and "find the mind's construction in the face".

via ScribeFire