(SA/2025) [1]
I.
Whilst totalitarian regimes do not enforce happiness and demand that citizens always smile per se, they do, nevertheless, require outward displays of satisfaction and conformity and often clamp down on any signs of discontent or unhappiness.
Thus it is that one doesn't see many frowns on the faces of those depicted in state controlled propaganda and public emotion at mass events is carefully stage managed.
And this is as true of Disneyland as it is of Nazi Germany; of corporate-media spectacles, such as the Olympics opening ceremony, as it is of a worker's parade in Pyongyang.
Mickey Mouse, Joseph Goebbels, Danny Boyle, and the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, all know how to put on a good a show and make the people smile.
In other words, they all understand the importance of exploiting what Freud calls the pleasure principle [2] and transforming what should be a natural expression of joy [3] into a regulatory facial mechanism that signals the correct response to power.
II.
Having said that, the smile can still, I think, be a counterfascist gesture; for as Baudrillard reminds us, there is the possibility of a sudden reversal even in a single ironic smile, "just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master" [4].
This is not to imply we can laugh all our troubles away, but to suggest that the more hegemonic the system, the greater is its vulnerability to even the smallest of set-backs or acts of defiance. Any challenge, even at a micropolitical level, represents a failure and threatens to quickly go viral; a total system requires complete control and demands absolute complicity.
Thus, smiling - perhaps more with the eyes than the mouth - is still an important ability to possess. If one smiles with a mix of cheerful insouciance and philosophical indifference to the circumstances in which one finds oneself [5], then, who knows, perhaps others might smile back ...
Notes
[1] The title of this image is taken from the lyrics written by Jello Biafra and John Greenway for 'California Über Alles"' (1979), the debut single by American punk band Dead Kennedys. The background artwork is a detail taken from the sleeve for the single, designed by Winston Smith.
The main image (allegedly) shows a woman wearing a smile mask intended to fight depression, taken in Budapest, 1937. The theory behind the mask, designed to force the wearer's mouth into a smile using mechanical devices like wires or medical tape, was that if people looked happier then they would feel happier. Unfortunately, if such masks were ever actually used, they proved to be ineffective and did nothing to reduce the high number of suicides in the city at that time.
[2] For Freud, the Lustprinzip is the instinctive seeking of pleasure (and the avoidance of pain) in order to satisfy biological and psychological needs. In his 1921 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, he considered the possibility of something more primal and operating independently of a pleasure principle conceived in relation to the life instinct; something that he termed the death drive (Todestrieb).
[3] Whilst it's true that in different cultures and societies smiling can convey emotions other other than joy and amusement - such as confusion and embarrassment, for example - there are no non-smiling peoples and evolutionary biologists have traced smiling back millions of years to our earliest ape ancestors.
Interestingly, smiling may also be something that men do more than women and a common female complaint is being told to smile by male strangers, as this is seen as aggressive and controlling rather than born of concern for their happiness.
[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser (University of Michigan, 1994), p. 163.
[5] It's important to note that I'm not asking for sincerity to be expressed in one's smile; nor do I want people to smile enthusiastically. I want them to smile in a manner similar to the Cheshire Cat, so that they become elusive and enigmatic (or imperceptible, as Deleuze and Guattari would say).
Musical bonus: Nat King Cole 'Smile', recorded and released as a single in 1954, it can be found on the album Ballads of the Day (Capitol Records, 1956): click here.
Or for Jimmy Durante's version of 'Smile', originally found on his 1965 album Hello Young Lovers (Warner Bros.) and which famously features in the movie Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019), click here.
