Art and Physiognomy

Artwork with mass market appeal inadvertently, inevitably conforms to correct facial physiognomic principles.

For example, the jutting chin is an aggression signal. The gentle, altruistic Neanderthal’s chin recedes. Cartoon villains’ chins jut.

Pictured above: Thanos from Avengers, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, Jaffar (Arabic snake melonhead) from Aladdin.

Despite the Jimmy Savile closer, a large, jutting chin doesn’t necessarily signify predation. Instead, it signifies Thumos.

Let’s break it down further. Chin size determines strength of resistance. If someone shoves you in the chest, chin size determines how difficult you are to move. (A physical metaphor for a psychological trait, my dear Aspies…)

By contrast, chin projection or recession determines whether your resistance is passive or active. Contrast Jerry Seinfeld’s passive, undercutting, indirect humor with Jay Leno’s bluff comfortable assertiveness. Both men are no pushovers, but they exhibit quite different styles of expression.

Next we come to the nose. A large, hooked, downward angled nose signifies highly deliberate and inauthentic untrustworthy predation, as we already saw on Jaffar.

The long, thin Nixon nose signifies an extreme of deliberateness and thus, inadvertently, manipulativeness. Nixon was untrusted even when he told the truth, while Kennedy winsomely charmed.

A straight large nose signifies noble self-mastery.

The Roman nose above signifies the harder, uncompromising and aggressive virtue of the eagle.

The Greek nose signifies the gentler, selfless side of nobility. In my usage, a true Greek nose features a depressed nasion. (Traditionally, the Greek nose is straight and the Roman nose beaked, with the nasion irrelevant.)

Meanwhile, an upturned, pert little button nose signifies spontaneous emotional authenticity, but also feminine sensitivity and lack of impulse control and maturity.

The Greek nose goes with the zygomatic and periorbital retreat characterizing the Neanderthal, creating an aerodynamic facial shape with large, open eye sockets that fall away at the edges of the face. The reverse of this, the Cro Magnon face, signifies a far less altruistic and more combative nature. Incidentally, it is well designed to protect the eyeballs from the fisticuffs that are sure to result. Whereas the wider peripheral vision of the Neanderthal sacrifices this protection for group-beneficial early warning.

Deeply set eye sockets signify heavy prefrontal cortex growth overhanging the eyes. A strong psychological overlayer of Logic, Reason and Will dominate the emotional and lizard brains. Pain itself is dampened and ignored; raw empathy is reduced because it must filter through this layer first. Deep set eyes are warrior eyes. The din of battle does not reach their cool, calculating logical core.

(I exaggerate. Deep set eyes in a wimpy face just makes a nerd. But it’s a start towards warrior-dom, anyway. The extra honesty and honor helps, too.)

A prominent supraorbital brow ridge emphasizes this deepset impression, and signifies heavy testosteronization and additional assertiveness. The heavy brow of the Thunderer warns of weighty looming wrath. Dick Fuld rages as Lehman goes under. In feminine women, this feature fairly vanishes.

All that was merely prelude. Having established a sufficient groundwork, let us examine certain faces near and dear to my heart: The Red Skull, the Predator, and the Alien.

Let’s start with the Alien. Sicker than the rest, he is the best.

Note the hugely projecting chin. When viewed frontally, this chin is without much depth. Yet in profile, it extends to exaggerated length. Why? We already know the Alien is intended to be hyper aggressive, hyper assertive – an relentlessly active hunter. Hence the chin projection. But it has no depth when viewed frontally, because large facial area signifies humanity. The Alien has no soul, and thus no face. No eyes, no nose. Just chin and teeth.

Physiognomy is not limited to the face, however. We also gain valid inference from the back of the head. The human innate capacity to read back of skull shape is far less finely evolved than the capacity to read faces. However, it nevertheless exists, and in mega-franchises refined by a thousand artists and ten million fans, we can find valid trends.

Note the shape of the back of the alien’s head. It is entirely exaggerated along a single dimension. It extends back and slightly up. The angle is just enough to miss the occipital. The brainmass is thus concentrated in the fauxcippital region.

Abstraction altitude increases along Koanic’s Mohawk, starting from the base and rising along the skull’s crest in profile until reaching the forehead (just like a mohawk does). When the head is at true neutral orientation, a line drawn through the eyes or brow describes the boundary between occipital and fauxcippital. Above this line, abstraction altitude is sufficient to divide self from other and comprehend raw ego. Below it, the sort of ego-less attachments that autists and aspies exhibit predominate.

Let’s call this line the Ingenopathic Horizon. Above this horizon, ego dawns, gradually transforming from its rawest state into higher abstraction levels of religious fire, hierarchy, and at last the ethical universalism of the high vertical forehead.

Thus the angle of the Alien’s backswept skull signifies raw egoic ambition and drive, unrestricted by the higher abstraction layers, which look beyond the pure self to encompass a more sublime perspective.

The Alien is unadulterated soulless naked predatory bloodlust. Yet the vast size of its backswept brain indicates incredible spiritual force driving this perfected killing machine. Without eyes, the demon sees.

Let us turn from this sick thing to examine something vastly more human – that fearless, indomitable, honorable savage, the Predator.

Human, you say? Yes. Just as the gorilla is a near cousin, the product of a different boar-chimp hybridization event, so also the Predator shows clear signs of porcine persuasion – from tusks to bristles to subcutaneous fatty armor to bipedality (a consequence of the pig pelvis and spine) to seasonal war-rut to mad piggy eyes.

Let’s examine those burning yellow eyeballs: small, deepset, and surrounded by bone. This creature is tough, rational, hostile and calculating. Its social interactions are minimal and founded on violent dominance, like the boar. Yet it is also linear, straightforward, honest and honorable. Boars do not fight sows – they fight other boars. Predators only kill the armed.

Whereas the Alien is wholly without prefrontal cortex, the deepset eyes of the Predator indicate large orbital frontal lobes, albeit ones dominated by the rut’s surging testosterone. Yet his backswept forehead also signifies a lack of ethical universalist restraint. “Do unto others” is not in the Predator lexicon.

What of the Predator’s spirit? The back of the head tells the tale. It is man-shaped, if arch-Melonheads be men. It is backswept, but not at so extreme an angle as the Alien’s. Its angle emphasizes the backswept parietal. While the fauxcippital’s egoic drive is powerfully present, this drive is mediated by the backswept parietal’s more sophisticated concepts of warrior pack honor. The Predator seeks not to feed, but to win honor. This is a more highly abstracted ambition. Note further down the identical skull structure of the honor-bound Klingons.

Coupled with the honesty of the deep eye sockets, this causes Predators to frequently exhibit objectively bad combat decisions, handicapping themselves to conform to the rules of honor against opponents human and Alien. This is pro-social – only the greatest warriors survive and breed, strengthening their race. Yes, the Predator is altruistic.

Thus Predators are the most primitive of Paladins. Across the galaxy they count coup, offering blood sacrifices to a dark god.

And what of true Paladins? Why, those exist too. You may find real ones, such as Pericles, pictured always with his helmet to hide his coneheaded “defect”. Or you may find them in fiction, stalking the forests for the servants of Chaos. The noble, selfless fire of the conehead spirit is accurately represented here:

Now at last we come to the Red Skull. In the Avengers, he finds his most perfect expression to date. His features are significantly Cro Magnon – square, blocky, projecting. But they have an element of fineness to them that signifies a tinge of selfless principled cognition. This is no simple lusting brute, but also a thinker, a man with ideals greater than himself. Hail Hydra.

What the actual fuck do I mean? In part it’s a simple consequence of the makeup art. To preserve the emotional signaling of the thin skin surrounding the eyes, they had to lay off the makeup there. But they built it up elsewhere to create the skull look. This actually creates a semblance of the open, aerodynamic Neanderthal periorbital and zygomatic retreat at the outer edges of the eyes. No previous iteration of the Red Skull that I’ve seen has such open, ingenopathic eye sockets… mostly because they’re cartoons not subject to physical constraints.

As for the rest, his nasal bone is straight and Roman. His bone structure and testosteronization are pronounced and robust, obviously, including brow ridge, cheekbones, and chin size. However, his chin projection appears to be neutral, giving him a calmer look. In short, he looks like a formidable agent of higher purpose.

The actual acting leaves much to be desired, as does the plot, lines and combat choreography. But in half of the above stills, he looks convincing enough. The other half are ruined by hammy expressions. So let’s give the win to the makeup artists and call it a day. They’re most likely a bunch of Neanderthals who understand how a villain should look.