The scariest image on network TV is Charlie Sheen’s smile. It’s the smile of a bland American vampire—an indestructible creature the locals have mistaken for a rakish new neighbor who’s presumed to have a night job because he’s never seen during daylight. Sheen’s smile is chilling because there seems to be almost no real pleasure behind it. It’s just a particular formation of muscle groups, a default position for the face, a counterweight to those dark, narrow, strangely dead eyes—the eyes of an ancient, decadent aristocrat.
—“How Charlie Sheen Remains a TV Super Star,” Salon.com
Greta Garbo belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philter, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of courtly love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.