Smile (2022)
it looks like people but it's not a person
On the eve of Halloween (October 30th) I went with family to see Smile (in theatres now), Parker Finn’s directorial debut. It’s a real therapist’s film: the protagonist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), is a psychiatrist, and the film opens with her assuring a patient that the things he’s scared of may feel real, but they are actually all in his head.1 She repeats this familiar refrain with her next patient, who, unfortunately, really is haunted by an evil spirit, thus undermining her whole vocation. This evil entity or force immediately latches onto (infects?) Rose, and the rest of the film is her attempt both to evade the force and to convince other people that she is perceiving reality. You may recognise this plot from It Follows (2014) and several other films, as has been noted in many tepid critical responses. It was fine overall and is both beautifully shot and slightly tongue-in-cheek with the overdone jump scares and the supernatural horror visuals at the end. There’s a bit where Rose is holding a mug with a smiley face on it. It’s a smart if unoriginal movie and I would recommend it to people who really do like horror. But content warning for discussion of suicide in this post, and also some fairly gory moments in the film itself.
The central motif (the gimmick; the principle of formal unity) of Smile is that the haunted individual sees or imagines various people around them wearing an extremely creepy and fixed smile while staring at them. It’s simple, but it really works. A smile that is not appropriate to a social situation is immediately noticeable, especially in the smooth and highly choreographed world of cinematic facial expression. A smile that is fixed, a rictus, is even worse. A real smile is naturally a form in motion: the face has to move through an organic and variable series of positions in order to actually express the complex life of the spirit (the non-evil, Hegelian variety). Arresting this series at any point other than the one to which we are accustomed (and, to be sure, being permanently stuck in a completely relaxed facial position would ring alarm bells too, would constitute a kind of insensate catalepsy) immediately produces the uncanny, and the horrifying follows upon it directly. We are, as many people in different scientific and humanistic disciplines have studied, irresistibly attuned to the becoming of the face.2 An uncanny expression, an unmoving smile, is easily detected even under poor visual conditions, such as, for example, in an out of focus shot, or a moving shot, which happens a few times to Rose when she walks past rooms or is in dark spaces. You can’t but notice.
I said it was a therapist’s film: what are the forms that we associate with cinematic therapy? It’s the interview scene, the private dialogue, tension mediated by a table, asymmetric chairs, and, most essentially, the two-person shot/reverse shot. This type of shot set-up subjects the faces of the two actors to immense scrutiny. They carry most of the content of the scene. In the very opening, Rose (in a display of her technical expertise and thoughtfulness) adjusts her chair so she is sitting beside her first patient, presumably to reduce the sometimes adversarial nature of the shot/reverse. Such a shot is also a rich intersubjective reality palely imitated by the mirror shot of a lone character. The mirror shot can be shot/reverse, and it is a workhorse feature of most filmmakers’ vocabularies. To look in the mirror and see something else is a horror that has carried many films. And Smile has a few of those moments: I really enjoy Sosie Bacon’s neurotic rubbing-face-with-hands thing, in which, in moments of private self-assembly, she is as if moulding her face, and you notice that her hands (a force from without) are moving her lips and cheeks around.
The two-person shot/reverse, though, takes two characters as dynamic mirrors of each other, engaged in intensely choreographed speech and physical response. The cut between them is as natural as anything. It is a magnificent technology for silently imitating something that we do every day without thinking: look at the person who is speaking. But watching a shot/reverse, you can’t take the whole room in continuously. There is always a slight risk that, when you cut back to the other person, something will have changed. This is scary to consider, and Smile makes you consider it. In the first confrontation between Rose and the patient, Laura, who commits suicide in front of her, thus passing on the evil spirit, there is a moment where something shifts, and Laura becomes suddenly terrified of Rose, begins to shriek and rush back from her. Rose actually looks over her shoulder; she can’t see anything, and we can’t either. We are suddenly not privy to Laura’s viewpoint, but from then on we, the audience, are ourselves literally haunted by the possibility of a reverse shot suddenly changing the facial expression of the person to whom we believed we were speaking. It is sort of a laborious invention of a new type of jump scare, one which infiltrates the formal conditions of possibility for a therapist scene. Not the jump scare itself, even, but the threat of one. Indeed, later in the film, the spirit comes to haunt Rose in the form of her own very experienced therapist, and she doesn’t notice until the smile arrives.
The cut really is a cut, a little break in reality. Every film editor has to work hard to heal over this little rupture in the psychic world of their aesthetic object, and psychoanalytic film theory has of course made hay for decades with this basic barred or cut subjective structure. Smile’s contribution to this long history is to lean on the smile as a kind of cut – in two senses, both scary.
Usually, the camera, in obeyance of the 180-degree rule,3 shows you both characters from the same side of the room, so the two paired shots are at slight but complementary angles. In this first dialogue, the camera at one point switches to perfectly symmetrical mirror shots, which is as far as you can go without breaking the 180-degree rule. It’s subtle but introduces a more intense and explicitly mirrored quality to this dialogue, an intense straining at continuity that most exactly aligns the two faces and their forms. I take this early scene to be the locus of the film’s big formal invention, structuring the viewer’s experience of all the cinematography to come.
Laura at one point explains “it looks like people but it’s not a person.” It’s the smile that wears the people. I felt that this was a neat opportunity to point out that the smile is therefore obviously capital, which also often looks like people but is not a person. The concrete versus the abstract smile. I had in mind various discussions of the way the smile inserts itself into customer service, emotional labour, is detached from its living spirit and to a certain extent literally commodified.4 The movie unfortunately does not lean much on this element, and instead quite explicitly theorises the evil spirit as ‘feeding on trauma.’ This is a consequence of it being a therapist film; the therapists are constantly providing you with intelligent readings of their circumstances, which is well and good, but it means we get the labelled lit-crit ribbons handed to us before we’ve finished wrapping our interpretation. That it (the entity; the meaning of the film) is trauma alone is almost too easy, in a world where widespread trauma often is brushed away by institutions that have little more to offer than a smile.
Rose goes to see the widowed wife of the art history professor who killed himself in front of Laura, and she discovers his study full of attempts to draw the evil thing, the results of which are mostly creepy reproductions of odd smiles from the history of painting plus intense faux-Bacon abstract portraits. There is one canvas covered in black with a single faceless smile in white in the middle; it is a Cheshire cat grin, of course, but this time completely malevolent. This is one of many of the movie’s smart attempts to analyse the smile’s form as the essential element, to dissever it from the people it wears so that it can become a figure for some real problem in our social form. The film pivots away from this in presenting the spirit as a figure for trauma, especially childhood trauma. The metaphoric leap is monster = trauma, which has its own timeless effectiveness to be sure. This particular move doesn’t really immanently account for why it is specifically a smile, though, beyond the creepy inappropriateness of the smile to trauma in general or suicide in particular. To describe the smile as a figure not for trauma but rather, say, for alienated customer service labour, or superegoic capital (the desire that travels under the sign of the death drive) would I think by contrast be a metonym, because the evil smile is plucked directly from the smiles that actually torment us in the realm of circulation. I think I would find the metonymic both creepier and more original, although this is a criticism of the form “I wish they had made a different movie,” so really I am just thinking out loud here and the film does great work with its materials until the final act. Let me know what you think. I give it probably three frowning emojis out of five.
“In the biz we call that ‘gaslighting,’” I say aloud.
“That’s not what that means,” replies my mother.
Premier example of such humanistic study: https://face.hypotheses.org/
This is the rule or convention that governs the shot/reverse shot in order to keep the viewer oriented. In order to retain a sense of the location of the two characters in space, the camera’s position during any given shot/reverse sequence should remain within a single 180-degree arc on one side of the two characters. Switching to the other side by going more than 180 degrees suddenly swaps the positions of the characters on the screen, which messes with continuity.
In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace speaks of the Professional Smile:
the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee … Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile? (289)
See also the permanent malformed facial expression of the mother in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” in Oblivion, and one million other examples in the history of literature that I just can’t remember right now.