Is Any Face Ever An Orphan? Facial (Mis)recognition, From Orphan Black to the Google Arts & Culture App
I am only five years behind the times — knee-deep in the first season of Orphan Black. It’s a heady premise: Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), a former foster child from the UK who’s grown up a grifter, has discovered that she’s one of an unknown number of clones scattered around the globe. Her first thought, naturally, is to take advantage of the situation by impersonating one of her duplicates, the suicidal New York detective Beth Childs (Tatiana Maslany), but this turns out to make life more complicated, not less, and before long, she has to join forces with fellow clones Alison Hendrix (Tatiana Maslany) and Cosima Niehaus (Tatiana Maslany) to stay ahead of her own story — and ahead of a fifth clone, Helena (Tatiana Maslany), who is diligently trying to kill her.
I was marveling, a couple of episodes ago, at the scenario that Maslany was asked to act out — apologies if this is hard to follow:
Alison, a suburban American soccer mom, is asked to “cover” for British Sarah, who is busy pretending to be the American Beth.
— or rather —
A Canadian actress (Tatiana Maslany) pretends to be an American (Tatiana Maslany) pretending to be a Brit (Tatiana Maslany) pretending to be an American (Tatiana Maslany).
It’s an impressive number of false identities to sustain simultaneously.
Anyway, this had me thinking about Slug Solos, a recent Tumblr phenomenon in which unsuspecting musicians photographed wailing on their guitars have giant slugs photoshopped in place of their guitars. This often has the unexpected but highly amusing effect of making it look as if the expressions on the guitarists’ faces are actually responses to their finding themselves cradling enormous, mucus-glistening slugs in their arms. Carlos Santana seems particularly distressed and/or grossed-out:
Now, this is not what Santana’s facial expression communicates to us in the original photo, cradling his guitar:
— but it sure reads that way with the slug, doesn’t it?
On some level, this seems to me like the same phenomenon as looking at the face of a single actress and reading her, successively, as a.) Trouble, b.) Smugness, c.) Ghoul, d.) Robot, e.) Nerd…
Maybe what it’s all about is the Kuleshov Effect. As the folklore of film studies has it: once upon a time, in the early days of the Soviet Union, when both Communism and Cinema were shiny and new, movie director Lev Kuleshov made an experiment. Here’s how Margo Kasdan, Christine Saxton, and Susan Tavernetti tell the story:
Kuleshov purposely selected a close-up shot of an actor with a vague look on his face and made three copies of it. He spliced the first copy to a shot of a plate of soup (and here is where versions of the story vary), the second copy to a shot of a man’s corpse lying face down on the ground, and the third to a shot of a half-nude woman posed lasciviously on a couch. He then spliced all the shots together so that the image of the actor’s face appeared between each of the other shots. According to observers’ reports (and there is no other documentation), everyone who saw the sequence read it as that of a brilliant actor expressing his deepest feelings, first of desperate hunger, then of pity, and then of desire. The sequence was read in this way even though the look on the actor’s face was exactly the same, since exactly the same shot was cut in each time.
The same facial expression on the same actor, placed in different contexts by the film editor’s juxtapositions, was taken to portray entirely different emotions. And the number of possible contexts was as limitless as the strands of film available for splicing. A = B, C, D, E… ∞.
This strange multiplication of meanings, funny and uncanny at the same time, is present in a surprising number of quite ordinary experiences. Do I show the same face when I am at home (a dad and husband), at work (a professor), visiting my parents (sonny boy), at a protest (a malcontent), and so on? How could I not? It is for this reason that the philosopher Nelson Goodman denied that he could simply paint a “faithful” portrait of the man standing right in front of him, “for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool, and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might?”
Maybe this is why we are so fascinated, this week, with the Google Arts & Culture app, or more specifically with the feature that takes your selfie and matches it, according to some mysterious formula, with a face from a portrait in one of the world’s great museums. A little disconcerted by the idea of a machine presuming to tell me whether I am a fiddler, a friend, or a fool, I tried making different faces at it to throw it off. Judge the results for yourself:
Of course, if some of us are invited to see ourselves in classical poses, others— notably, non-white people — are not so favored. Google’s algorithms have the same prejudices as a few centuries’ worth of Western art history. Even more troubling problems with facial recognition software have cropped up recently, as experimenters have purported to train computers to tell our sexuality — or even our potential for criminal behavior — from our faces. Perhaps we are only learning to automate the process by which, for instance, women with ambiguous expressions are said to exhibit “Resting Bitch Face” and ambiguous expressions on African-American faces are scanned as “hostile” by white gazes. In both cases, people are viewed through the distorting lenses of expectations: seen through a male gaze, women are expected to present smiling, “reassuring” faces (so are perceived as “bitches” when they don’t), and seen through a white gaze, African-Americans are expected to present menace (so are perceived as “hostile” even when they aren’t). It is as if we are projecting portraits onto one another all the time.
All of which leads me back to the funny/uncanny strangeness of watching Tatiana Maslany in the act of impersonating somebody (A) impersonating somebody (B) impersonating somebody (A). As if to tell us: clones or not, we are never “just” ourselves.
