Faces, Hands, Emotion

As usual, when I rode the metro this morning, I did a lot of reading over other rider's shoulders. I rarely pick up my own newspaper, and when I'm standing on a crowded train, it's hard to read my own book. So, I look at what other people are reading. Toward the end of my ride, I glanced over at the Washington Post held by the woman next to me and saw a photograph of two members of the Dutch royal family, looking on in horror as a car crashed (intentionally) through the crowd of onlookers celebrating the Queen's birthday, killing six. Similar ones, and related video, are available online this morning.



Synopses of the images, echoing the AP report on the event, consistently used the word "horror" to describe the reactions of the royal family. Al Kamen, of the Post, for example, wrote, "Footage showed the royal family, riding in an open-topped bus, covering their mouths in horror as the car careened through the crowd and crashed into a monument."

The gestures (and facial expressions) that signal horror in these images are familiar: hands fly to mouths as if to hold back a scream or cover eyes to shield them from the image.

Looking over my neighbor's shoulder, I tried the gesture, putting my hand momentarily over my mouth and feeling, unbidden, the rush of anxiety, though I was only mimicking the image.

So I wonder, what is it about placing hands on our own faces that is so closely linked, at least for Euro-Americans, to strong and sudden negative emotions? Is that urge unique to Euro-Americans? I'm suddenly thinking about Darwin's studies of facial expression and human emotion and the pictures by that guy who used electrical stimuli to spark facial expressions and try to spark emotions. Those early studies didn't engage gesture, beyond facial gesture, if I remember correctly. But the urge to cover eyes or mouth, to bury our heads in our hands ... I wonder if that urge does cross cultural moments and spaces.

I know face touching carries a message of horror for the mestizo artists and audiences of Ecuador, but the influence of European cultures could easily explain the gut-wrenching sense of anxiety in, for example, Oswaldo Guayasamin's "Grito."


I'm also drawn to the intimacy of face touching and the connection between horror gestures and a deeply instinctual desire to contain or protect that intimacy. In the Euro-American context, touching the face of another is either a gesture of incredible intimacy (wiping away tears, stroking a cheek, placing a palm against a sick child's forehead) or of deep invasion (imagine the hackneyed, yet emotionally effective image of an attacker covering his victim's mouth or the affective force that accompanies the physical force of a slap). We cover eyes or mouth, hands leaping to our faces before thought consciously recognizes the event before us, to block the invasion of an image we don't want to see or prevent our own horror from escaping. We acknowledge our own helplessness - I don't think of face-covering responses (rather than head-covering responses) occurring in response to events that happening directly to us - we touch our faces when we see but cannot intervene. They are a gesture of helplessness, which is, I guess, part of why Macaluay Culkin's famous face-clutching gesture works so well as spoof: his manic cleverness is accentuated in comparison to his supposed helplessness.