The Globalisation of the Pan-American Smile

WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Chennai, more than 10 years ago, I observed a lady roll off a bus and nearly break her neck while scrambling fast through the jasmine flowers and coconut stalls lining MG Road. She managed not to break an elbow plummeting onto the asphalt, and instead scampered away with a big smile. I remember being stunned by that smirk. Had I witnessed the same scene in Zurich or in Milan, I believe a Swiss or an Italian lady would be cursing away, or at least grimacing in fear for having almost killed herself. This is when I began to understand a major difference between the Western and the Indian smile, the latter not necessarily used just to express joy, and not falling in the category of the widely spreading Pan-American smile I had learned to adopt while spending 11 years of my youth in the US.

While adjusting to Indian culture, it took me a while to decode the difference between the reaction of a young Tamil cook in the house I was living in, who always returned the broad, toothy grin I sported, believing it represented a universal sign of approach­ability, compared to the grumpier reaction of the older cleaner, trudging up and down the stairs with stout hips and narrow shoul­ders, dragging behind brooms and buckets, impermeable to my daily attempts at extracting from her an expression of cordiality. The younger worker, I later understood, had clearly been exposed to the influences of the contemporary Westernisation of global culture, while the older lady had been sufficiently shielded from it. Also, she’d probably lived through enough trouble to have fewer reasons to chuckle about nothing.

All this got me to analyse the possible intercultural misunderstanding I was tucking beneath my own smile. And about the con­troversial side of the Pan-American smile and its internationalisation. Briefly, the Pan-American smile is that forced-polite wince of certain flight attendants—deadpan eyes, cheekbones pulled up to arch the corners of the mouth. You may call it the used-car salesman smile or the Berlusconi, or alligator smile. It is used indiscriminately for friends and for people you’ve never met. And, as the name suggests, it comes from America.

For many Norwegians, a stranger who smiles at you can only mean three things: you are facing a madman, a drunkard or an American. For an average Pole, you’re in the presence of a fool. Some Europeans and Asians sometimes accuse Americans of act­ing childishly, mostly because of their excessive propensity for baring their teeth in loud, tonsil-throbbing laughter. Studies and books on the subject explain that a smile can indeed indicate pleasure, joy, fun, satisfaction, contentment, affection, seduction, and relief, but it can also communicate stress, nervousness, annoyance, anger, shame, fear, and contempt. There is the smile of enjoyment; the affiliative one which signals positive social intentions; and the smile of dominance, that of pride, mockery, and deceit.

While the bright, teeth-baring and luminous Pan-American smile exposes the West’s spasmodic individualistic pursuit of happiness and emotions, some collectivist cultures of the Global South reveal, in a more seraphic smile which goes from Buddha to Mao Zedong all the way to Xi Jinping, the need to communicate calmness, serenity, and wisdom, even if it may actually hide ulterior motives.

It is in the difference between the pursuit of individual happiness and the need to achieve collective serenity that the meaning of this facial expression changes. In this divergence, a smile becomes philosophy.

THE EVOLUTION OF SMILES

The smile is a ubiquitous and versatile weapon born before humanity. Our primate ancestors already smiled, both to show pleasure and to defend themselves. The sated grin of babies who have just filled their belly with their mother’s milk is innate, but the culture in which those children grow up will affect the interpretation of that facial expression.

 

The arc of evolution of this weapon of seduction, political resource, and contagious gesture begins with a primate and evolves all the way into an emoticon, across a rich history that documents the globalisation of the smile in some countries where courses are being taught to teach people how to smile, especially in those cultures where laughter was traditionally considered a sign of stupidity.

For decades, the world has been smiling more and more, despite the many growing troubles. The spread of the Pan-American smile, hand-in-hand with globalisation, is viewed by some as a positive development, reflecting a growing sense of global interconnectedness and the universal appeal of displays of positivity and happiness. But it has its critics.

It is a phenomenon that has penetrated humanity for almost a century. The message of superiority of the hermetic Mona Lisa of the Renaissance is reflected today in Elon Musk’s jaw-clenched self-assuredness. The toothy seduction of US President John F Kennedy made it mandatory for all the presidents who followed to bare their enamel in campaigns’ photo-ops. Wasn’t it Ronald Reagan’s movie star smile that won the Cold War, putting an end to the history of the long faces of Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev? It is a powerful weapon that can be expensive, considering that a Hollywood producer insured Julia Roberts’ smile for $30 million. A powerful resource that can assume different meanings.

A study by the Polish Academy of Sciences indicates that people rarely smile in countries with instability in their legal, healthcare, and social systems; in other words, in a context where the future is perceived as more unpredictable. Where the majority of people believe that the only certainty is un­certainty, the grinning optimist is seen as a fool. This is why, according to the study, and for different reasons, in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, China, and Malaysia, those who smile are seen as more intelligent, while in parts of India, in Japan, Iran, South Korea, and Russia, they are seen as less bright.

A study by the University of Wisconsin found that in countries with few immigrants there are rules on how many emotions can be expressed in public, pressuring people to contain the manifestation of their feelings in order to avoid destabilising the social order. In countries with more immigration, a smile is seen as a friendly gesture, for lack, often, of a common language. In Canada and in the US, lands of immigrants, facial expressions have made up for linguistic barriers. That’s why this sort of non-spontaneous, somewhat forced smile is appropriately called the “Pan-American smile”.

Its intention is to spread non-verbal positivity, but if used constantly, in contexts like politics or at the workplace, it can be interpreted as insincere and untrustworthy. Plus, the pressure to project an incessant positive attitude can be exhausting and even damaging to mental health, which could explain many of the neuroses of Western cultures. This demand applies even more to women, who are often expected to smile more than men, and who may face more negative consequences if they fail to do so.

In Japan’s strong monoculture, smiles can instead be used to hide emotions (similar to the Tamil lady falling off a bus in Chennai). Japan is the country of Naki-warai, or “crying while laughing”, a context where a smile can be used to show anger, sadness, and shame. Not uncommon in other parts of Asia.

The smile of real, true enjoyment and pleasure, on the other hand, has been documented by the French physiologist Guillaume Duchenne who gave his name to the “Duchenne smile”. No teeth are showing, cheekbones pulled, eyes squint­ing in joy, difficult to fake, it has to be heartfelt.

Another study by Victoria University in New Zealand analysed the fact that in some cultures, happiness is not the supreme value. Displaying signs of happiness can take different meanings. In America, the “pursuit of happiness” is engraved in the constitution. Thus the need to propagate the illusion of happiness through the culture of smiles. In some Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, the expression of happiness can trigger envy from friends or from divine or diabolical entities that might steal your happiness. Also, those expressing excessive enjoyment can be seen as selfish, boring, and superficial. But all of this is changing rapidly, as the connotation of the smile has always been in transformation.

HISTORY AND ETIQUETTE OF THE ART OF THE SMILE

The significance of the Apollonian and Dionysian smiles in ancient Roman sculptures cannot be explained with certainty. Most likely they were meant to communicate a sense of health or contentment. The Greek smile is considered Dionysian, more vulgar and direct. In the Middle Ages, the lower classes had to hide their satire under parody, the smile had to be hidden. In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville tries to convince the revered Jorge de Burgos that laughing is not a sin. But he fails to do so.

In art, the smile remained absent until the beaming angel of the Reims Cathedral in France (1246), a symbol of new values in the West, a smile towards the future, as professor Colin Jones recounts in The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris. Thus we have the luminosity of the angelic smile of Petrarch’s Laura. But also the wily smile of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, according to whom “one can smile and smile and still be a villain.”

Throughout Renaissance painting the mouth remained mostly shut in an ambiguous or balanced smile. For centuries it was practically impossible to be able to glimpse at a tooth. Why? Poor teeth, certainly. But the blame also lies with Erasmus’ On Civility in Children and Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, both Western canons of the so-called “path to civilization”, a cultural revolution focused on the control of orifices to manifest a good upbringing. In public, one does not spit, must chew with a closed mouth, no fingers up the nose or into the ears, no loud flatulence allowed and, also, no bearing of the teeth if you laugh. Those who violated these rules were labelled stupid, crazy, or prey to low desires. Lowly and vulgar hoi polloi. If the soul is calm and peaceful, the face is at rest. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle in his Rules of Decorum (1703) stated that “God would not have given human lips if He wanted the teeth to be on open display.”

This facial regime ruled over art and literature until an iconographic revolution, two years before the French one. In 1787, it is the courage of a woman who makes the world smile. Painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun exhibits her smil­ing self-portrait, teeth on display, causing a shock. The modern toothy smile is born. Even literature, in the novels of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins to describe char­acters who overcome their weeping and sobbing tragedies with a smile on their lips, triggering an imitative process in readers’ lives that will be amplified later via Hollywood movies. In the West, it finally becomes desirable to manifest emotions.

Then the smile goes again into hibernation, chased away by the gloomy guillotines of the Reign of Terror in 1793. The situation gets serious for a whole century of wars and political and industrial revolutions that lead to the growing power of America, a culture that realises that the smile is a resource.

A weapon, really, as the famous American author Mark Twain indelibly affirmed: “The human race has a really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” Jazz legend Louis Armstrong sang: “When you smile, the world smiles back at you.” And the American comedian Phyllis Diller applied geo­metrical terms: “A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”

The smile’s weaponisation in the West reaffirms itself in 2015 when, in the aftermath of the murder of 12 people in the newsroom of Charlie Hebdo, the former editor-in-chief Philippe Val said: “We must continue to laugh—it is difficult today but it is the absolute weapon.”

The supremacy of the disruptive American smile invades the world at first through cinema and TV, through dozens of Hollywood stars’ charismatic, hypnotic smiles ingrained in the world’s collective unconscious. The Pan-American smile has become almost necessary if you want to do busi­ness internationally. If the language of commerce and trade is English, the proactive attitude it travels with is American, and it comes packing a super-toothy, blinding white grin which has been making thousands of dentists into millionaires with custom-made “larger than life” Tom Cruise-like smiles. Cam­era technology has now imposed the regime of the “Smile!” transforming the Duchenne spontaneity into a performative gesture devoid of emotion, so much so that even funeral self­ies have become popular.

It has become so indispensable as a tool of globalisation that for the last twenty years, many Japanese executives have been taught how to smile by holding chopsticks in their mouths, in order to exercise the zygomaticus minor and orbicularis oculi muscles that are engaged in the Pan-American smile. More recently, assistants at Chinese Olympic stadiums have had to take the same course to greet a global audience. Border agents in Russia and France, where smiles traditionally have only been found in the mouths of fools, have enrolled in courses to ask for documents with a smile. A mayor in the Philippines has even imposed a fine on public employees who do not smile.

The phenomenon has been amplified by digitalisation on social media, where we are all forced to show our incisors and molars to communicate positivity at all costs. Technology has accelerated the contagion of smiles in anti-smile cultures, breaking down barriers and imposing the Pan-American smile via the hieroglyph of the emoji. One out of five of the half-million tweets posted every day contains an emoji. The most used emoji of the 3,000 that are available is “laughing with tears of joy”.

The smile that began on a primate’s jaw, which then moved to a statue of Apollo, and blossomed on the toothy mouth of a French painter before the Revolution, bared on the face of the US president who won the Cold War, and arrived all the way to the yuppies who built the West’s financial empire, starting in the 1980s, has now become an international icon used by almost everyone on the billions of screens across the globe. It’s a smile that has been covered by face masks dur­ing the lockdowns of the pandemic, a watershed event from which we are emerging somewhat changed.

The question now is whether the crisis of Westernisation will result in a crisis of the Pan-American smile. Will the world get those chopsticks out of its jaws and begin to affect a more content, calmer smile? For the moment, it seems that the Pan-American smile is still laughing all the way to the bank.

communicationglobalisationMao ZedongPan-American SmilepoliticsWesternisationXi Jinping