Stranger faces

If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the most crucial locus of human relation. Stranger Faces contests this mythology by treating the face as a mediated sign or thing that we delight in playing with. I examine an eclectic set of “stranger” faces across media from the nineteenth century to now: the “disfigured” face in “The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick,” the so-called Elephant Man; the “biracial” face in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative; the “object-face” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; the “animal face” in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man; and the “digital face” in emoji. In each case, we yearn to read a face—for intention, for affect—but we fail; we compensate for that failure by taking a fetishistic pleasure in it.

You can read an excerpt of Stranger Faces here, on Post-45.