7 - The New Transactional Face: Rethinking Post-cinematic Aesthetics through The Neon Demon

Summary

Know your faces: it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight. (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus)

As media scholars Zara Dinnen and Sam McBean have asserted, a fascination with the face as ‘a new kind of digital object’ characterises much of recent mainstream narrative cinema. Examining the casting of Scarlett Johansson in a trilogy of science fiction films including He (Spike Jonze, 2013), Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014) and Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), Dinnen and McBean argue that contemporary narrative cinema's attempts to render the face as story offer a useful working through of the increasing technologisation of the face in digital culture. Pointing to the rise of both digital self-mediation and facial recognition surveillance, Dinnen and McBean reference visual artist Zach Blas's concept of a ‘Global Face Culture’. Indeed, digital technologies of facial surveillance achieve a new level of exploitation via the achievement of the digital facial image or DFI. As Dinnen and McBean describe, citing Blas, ‘Facial recognition programs work by making over the face as co-ordinates, data; such systems “substitute the meaning of faces for a mathematics of faces”.’ As they astutely suggest, Scarlett Johansson's science fiction films seem to affectively map the anxieties surrounding this technologisation of the human face, and they are alert to the problematic use of Johansson's white femininity as a repeated and universal signifier for the ‘human’ in these films. In their exclusive attention to the science fiction genre and to questions of the posthuman, however, Dinnen and McBean overlook the digital object of the face (and particularly the white female face as its algorithmic ideal) as a significant capital form in what I deem the post-web 2.0 era.

Coined by author and web designer Darcy DiNucci in 1999, the term web 2.0 addresses changes to the Internet around the new millennium that allowed for greater participation, user-generated content, and interoperability. While all of these characteristics still exist, the continued and uncritical use of the term web 2.0, now two decades old, does not adequately address the significant changes in the experience of online media since 2010. Like post-modernism in relation to modernism, more than the ‘web 3.0’, which problematically suggests continual progress, the post-web 2.0 maintains continuity with the characteristics of web 2.0 but marks a noteworthy shift in user experience.