"I was met unexpectedly by the Montana Face. What I had been expecting I do not clearly know; zest, I suppose, naivete, a ruddy and straightforward kind of vigor - perhaps even an honest brutality. What I found seemed at first glance, reticent, sullen, weary - full of self-sufficient stupidity; a little later it appeared simply inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos that cannot declare itself; A face developed not for sociability of feeling but for facing the weather. It had friendly things to say, to be sure, and it meant them, but it had no adequate physical expression for friendliness, and the muscles around the mouth and eyes were obviously unprepared to cope with the demand of any more complicated emotion."
- Leslie Fiedler, Montana: or the End of Jean Jacques Rousseau.Thus a Jersey Jew in Marlboro Country confronts a social face modeled by the natural elements, as Leslie Fiedler so poetically expressed. Our social organs are affected not only by our genetic heritage, but also directly sculptured by our environment. The girl in the Maybelline eye-makeup ad would go blind in the noonday sun of the prairies, but she can let her scleras hang out over the candle-lit tables at Delmonico's.
- A. B. Guthrie, Jr., poignantly describes the man from the "Big Sky Country":Squinting, he knew why the men he had seen wore the wrinkles of a squint. This country was too bright for the open eye. On all the miles of it the sun glittered. . . A man old but not old. Forty or thereabouts. Weatherworn was better. She imagined he kept a good part of himself unrevealed. . . .
-Guthrie, Arfive
A similar sort of visage is produced at sea, for the sea is similar to the prairies in its ability to weather a man:
Ericson was a big man, broad and tough; a man to depend on, a man to remember; about forty-two or -three, fair hair going grey, blue eyes as level as a foot rule, with wrinkles at the corners - a product of humor and twenty years' staring at a thousand horizons.
- Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea
Few outer organs function in only one way, and a change in one of their functions has repercussions among the others. Nowhere is this more dramatic than in the organs that are also used for social ends. Farmers and other outdoor workers appear to age faster than indoor workers, because the skin changes character in ways that we have come to associate with aging. Blood vessels become more superficial, skin texture more grainy and wrinkled, the follicle pits deeper, and the general tone darker.
If one lives a life exposed to the wind and sun, the "at rest" position of the eyelid becomes a wrinkled squint from continued protection against the elements. But this change carries with it a change in social signal. People accustomed to life continually in the outdoors appear tough to in- door people. Not having spent time required to attain the comfortable squint, we have to wear sunglasses or get headaches from the long exertion of contracted lid muscles.
Lip muscles also tighten against the elements, to keep the mouth closed and to pull the Caucasian's soft pink lip away from the sun. Indoor people take lip balm with them, because they are not tight-lipped from long practice. Our faces are gray-white from the shade, so we must also throw some sunburn lotion into the pack before an extended outing.
Inner and outer weather go together not only in affecting one's spirits of the day, but one's lasting social visage, for there is a large environmental component to social organs. Hair can be bleached blonder by the sun; one's skin and hair texture can be changed by being continually soiled. Size and shoulder breadth are alterable by exercise, as the Charles Atlas advertisements dramatize. Nutrition affects body size and hair luxuriance.
But this particular phenomenon is not limited to human beings. Deer raised on high mineral diets grow larger antlers than do deer raised on minerally deficient diets. Lions in excessively hot areas grow shorter manes than lions in cooler regions. Each population has evolved a potential for social organs depending on the interaction with its surroundings. Deer populations which have lived at low density on highly nutritious browse for millennia maintain their greater potential for developing large antlers even when moved to new habitats. Deer also depend on the wood and soil stain to darken their bony antlers. So, both in the evolution of social paraphernalia and its growth, they are not independent of their surrounding environment.
Our whole evolution as a species has been as an outdoor animal. Our indoor life is a fairly new thing. Our social organs evolved in concert with a plains life and exposure to the weather. The face of the Marlboro Man was the ancestral social face of the dominant. Children's and women's faces were more protected and hence could afford social plasticity. They were the individuals who often remained behind in the shelter when the men were called out to hunt and to war. Coping with noonday elements and scanning distant horizons produced the male's more inflexible social image.
With dominance goes the aloofness that does not reveal weakness or pain. One sees this sort of behavior among dominants of many other species. Whether dominant baboons or dominant dogs, they remain almost statue-like as the young climb over them. It is apparent in carriage and gait as well as in the muscle tone of the face. The posture is relaxed, confident, but still upright, and every gesture is smooth and forthright.
The carriage of the top dog on the block and the top gun in a Western movie are both very lofty. Remember how Shane carried himself - slow but deliberate. His sentences were short but direct, he never hesitated when decisions were to be made. John Wayne and Gary Cooper are our heroes because they are the old-time primate "yup" and "nope" men, and not only in their mannerisms. In their tone of voice, which never rises above nor sinks below fairly narrow limits, and especially in their faces -- they are Fiedler's Montana faces, bigger than life. They are true grit for the locker-room boys.
Marlboro men can only remain that way in the outback, where new people are not encountered at every turn. Indoor people, cooped up in small enclosures, cannot remain aloof, but must dive into the gabbling, chattering and clucking - the social appeasement of a continual cocktail party, grooming to ease tensions and find social identity. Being strangers forever thrown together, we reveal ourselves like passengers who expect never to meet again. Escalation of emphasis makes us pop our eyes and wobble our mouths - exposing our inner emotions, so intense from all their interactions that they must be vented or die as peptic acids.
In our social dilemma, however, we still spread ourselves along the whole spectrum of the demands for openness and the advantages of concealment. A girl wants a husband who is strong and Jolin-Wayne-like, yet at the same time, someone who is sensitive, open, and expressive. Men's cosmetics, like their cigarettes, are designed to make them feel like products of Marlboro country with pine scents and smells of new leather, in spite of the fact that they might abhor the personality described by Fiedler in the opening quote. We admire sincerity expressed by a freely mobile mouth, yet characterize our stage villains with wobbly, weak mouths.
Certain "villain" faces around Hollywood are saleable because they have features opposite to the Montana face. Their features are usually an odd combination of dominant brows, slit eyes with receding chins, and mobile mouths. And, of course, some men excel because they happened to be born with a particular arrangement of physical features resembling those of the old primate dominant (but delicately): movie actors, executives, bank presidents, politicians, and high administrators in all fields. Politically, of course, the Montana face is a shoo-in, especially when combined with an urbane lucidity - there one gets the best of the entire spectrum - a solid, dominant image to lean on and a sensitivity to the needs of the lower social strata. Politicians have been especially careful about their social faces - with the coming of TV and the decline of radio. The golden voices are losing out to the locker-room boys. Though a man's beliefs about economics, foreign policy, the environment, and population regulation are important in campaigns, we still choose our leaders from gut-level impressions of chins, cheeks, or steadiness of eye and carriage as our ancestors have always done.
Few subjects are as delicate as skin deformities. One can't help but feel sorry for someone with a purple birthmark over his face, or a messy scar. These may not cause people direct discomfort. They do, however, alter strikingly the subtle social cues our eyes are so accustomed to evaluating. A missing nose, hypertrichosis or hypotrichosis, harelips and many other pathologies obviously affect our stature. That's why they are so emotionally loaded and are sometimes awkward to deal with, whichever end one is on.
It is fascinating to look at peoples around the world and see how their environment has influenced their social postures toward other people. Konrad Lorenz has commented on the geographic differences in traditions of self-revealment in Central Europe. These same differences exist in America as well, where one can more easily trace their possible origins. For example, there are two main centers of social secretiveness in the United States. One is the thinly settled West, particularly the North plains -- Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, etc. - the type locality for the Montana face. The other area renowned for its self-concealed people is New England for traditionally similar reasons. These are our frontier relics, where the nascent intimacies of forced interdependence have been slow to crack the shell, remnants of early American character, of an inner sensitivity unrevealed.
At the conference table do we misinterpret signals, because physically the social organs are different? In some ways, like a cat trying to communicate with a dog, are the signals similar enough to be grossly recognizable, but the subtle modes of important information exchange so completely different that we have much the same kind of reaction as Fiedler's to the Montana face? The lesson of our body hot spots is that it may be an unwise man who interprets those people to be as different inside as their social organs and mannerisms are on the outside.