Fake smiles frighten me. More than clowns, or bedbugs, or fear of failure. Fake smiles are behind the economic crisis and the presidential hullabaloo. If we could somehow eradicate fake smiles, I would be confident that my children could live peaceful lives – they would be loved, and never doubt the love surrounding them. They wouldn’t question happiness. My idea of hell is standing in the center of a circle of fake smiles. I think fake smiles are contagious.
Why are fake smiles more frightening than death? Because they trivialize happiness. They reduce the emotional goal of our lives – some kind of happy fulfillment – to no more than a muscle flick. They standardize happiness. I mean, one can express fulfillment and joy in innumerable ways aside from pulling one’s lips apart. Fake smiles promote the idea that all of us should be happy most of the time. We should greet each other with happiness. We should buy toilet paper with smiles on our faces. We are all so happy. Great.
This doesn’t happen in the rest of the world. America is partly unique in terms of phoniness. And you know how situations in America can be dubbed “awkward” (perhaps when someone refuses to don the fake smile, or dons it inappropriately) – well, “awkward” doesn’t exist in such volume outside of our happy homeland. In French, “maladroit” means physically awkward (a man who often trips over himself would be “maladroit”) but never situationally awkward. Same in Spanish. When McDonald’s began opening outlets in Hong Kong in 1975, Chinese store clerks did not understand how to implement McDonald’s mandated “service with a smile.” According to James Watson (author of Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia), “In Hong Kong people are suspicious of anyone who displays what is perceived to be an excess of congeniality, solicitude, or familiarity. The human smile is not, therefore, a universal symbol of openness and honesty. ’If you buy an apple from a hawker and he smiles at you,’ my Cantonese tutor once told me, ‘you know you’re being cheated.’” Friendliness in Hong Kong is a private thing, tantamount to loyalty between close comrades. Public friendliness doesn’t exist for them. They don’t understand the fake smile. Awkwardness is the fake smile’s trendy cousin, and both of them live together in some opulent American McMansion where they have time and money enough to reflect on their social lives and to call things awkward.
I think we might be seeing more fake smiles today than a decade ago. I mean, look at all those emoticons. Fake. They are popular precisely because of their fakeness. Facebook, too. In a book of faces, you do not want to be the only unhappy child. Or perhaps you do. Have you ever wondered about how friendly everyone seems to be on Facebook? Or in e-mails? An unfriendly e-mail is frightening (perhaps because it is so disembodied) so we don the written equivalent to a fake smile, and everything’s alright.
How can we rid our earth of fake smiles? Help me find a way.
Watson, James L. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Ben… Ben Somebody, who often writes pieces for Esquire (is it Alsip?), wrote a piece about six months ago about the art of saying No. Which your blurb reminds me of. His setup for the piece, perfect for these reality show times, was to tell people, simply, “No.” He did not equivocate along the lines of “Well, I wish I could but I can’t” — he just delivered No, flat, like a smack. It was an experiment. And a hell of a lot of fun to read. Partly because he’s a good thinker, and he’s also funny. Anyway, his “No” Piece and your idea about fake smiles both home in on something that drives more than a few of us (and not just Holden Caulfield) batshit crazy. Phoniness. But not exactly phoniness — what is it? Anyone? Bueller?
I agree fake smiles are contagous, and not in the way that real smiles are contagious. Fake smiles have an intimidation effect; we’re strong-armed into offering fake smiles to a world that would mock our genuine smiles. But when you say fake smiles triviliaze happiness, it sounds like you’re implying that a smile itself -a mere “muscle flick” – trivializes happiness. How could a fake smile disconcert you so much then, unless you place some stock in the power of a real smile? Smiling is still a natural reflex for me when I’m amused, surprised, or just too happy. While studying abroad in England, I was wrong-footed by the dearth of smies – whether genuine or fake. Americans’ outgoing friendliness was met with a lot of mistrust. I don’t think American friendliness necessarily equates to phoniness, but the mistrust made me throw out any instinct towards fakeness (the kind that reigns amongst college freshmen during new student week). Even if Americans are influenced/infected by fake smiles because we have the leisure of fake smiles, I do not think we should stint on real smiles, or stifle that impulse.
To answer the question of how to rid the world of fake smiles–an excellent endeavor, in theory–I have to ask what the limits of “fake” are. When you say you think we might be seeing more fake smiles now than a decade ago, what makes you think this? Is it determined in a contextual sense (as in, if I smile when I talk to Republicans, does that constitute fake)? Is it limited to the “:)”s and the “;^D”s or even the “xD”s of the Interwebs? Is it determined by the extent to which the warmth of the smile extends to the eyes?