In Praise Of Men With Real Faces
can I come over and stare at your elevens
WHITE LOTUS & THE PITT SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
Everyone (people in my very specific sphere) is feral for Walton Goggins right now. If you live under a rock, you may not know he’s taken a star turn on this season of White Lotus playing the charmingly broken Rick (or Rick Nine Plus as my BFF has begun referring to him, SATC freaks iykyk). Besides serving a no-skips collection of patterned silk shirts, he has traced a really moving arc from hopelessness to questioning the meaning of life. Thanks to Goggins’ performance, even in this week’s episode wherein he acquires the gun with which he might be murdering his father’s murderer with, we see shreds of doubt in him that are in no way verbalized but only communicated in facial expressions and body language. We’re watching Rick in a movement towards his humanity. A movement, I think, only portrayable by a man with a real face.
Let’s be clear, the proliferation of plastic surgery in actors is much more detectable in women, as they are under greater pressure to freeze their faces at the most fuckable age, whatever that means. But I suspect men are getting subtle work as well. You don’t realize it, but then when you see a real neck on a man with salt and pepper hair you’re like “ah there it is.” But as plastic surgery smooths the faces we see onscreen into a Substance-like swath of perfect skin and veneers, I would argue the real faces are the ones that are becoming more chic. It’s the same reason so many of us fetishize older men for their technology illiteracy — he’s not online, he isn’t cursed with the knowledge of whatever Ben Shapiro is tweeting — in these real faces we can read an unselfconsciousness about beauty standards, and a proclivity to eat pussy like their lives depend on it (I ASSUME).
With Goggins, one doesn’t have to look any further than *checks notes* literally any press appearance he has ever done to get a sumptuously offline vibe from him. Take the GQ interview where he lays out the bottles of dirt he can’t live without. Or the Architectural Digest tour of his Hudson Valley home that gave me absolutely everything I needed. This is what you’re supposed to be doing when you’re rich!! Buying historical homes and filling them with conversation corners and nice art and walking around your private meadow in the nude memorizing lines!! Fuck!! You’re not supposed to disappear into a beige Midjourney nightmare in Calabasas. Live as beautifully as possible for the rest of us who don’t have the means to own a home with Joan Crawford’s name scratched into the wall of the prohibition-era bar. But some people just lack the imagination that Goggins clearly has in spades (see also: eating pussy).
Another man aging like fine wine, albeit a less cool one, is Noah Wyle, who has entered my spiritual realm via The Pitt, a new show on Max (Max, sponsor me) from the creators of E.R. whose entire first season tracks, hour by hour, one day in a very busy emergency room in which Wyle plays attending doctor Dr. Michael Robinavitch (Dr. Robi for short). And while I am transfixed by the gore on display in what is being called one of the most accurate medical shows ever made, I’m also staring (disrespectfully) at Wyle’s real face. The man has crows feet that reach to his hairline and elevens so deep you could bathe in them. For those not living in Los Angeles, elevens are the commonly-botoxed pair of lines that appear between your eyebrows as you age. For those who are not subs, we fetishize them because they symbolize a stern look of disapproval that soaks our panties. And the hotness doesn’t stop there — Dr. Rabi is teaching young interns on their first day on the job with stern but fair attentiveness and encouraging coaching where warranted. I believe a ‘good girl’ was even said aloud, although I may have hallucinated it in my rabid wrinkle fervor.
Again and again he’s given opportunities to be the bad boy for good reasons, like getting a seventeen year old misoprofitol by fudging the fetal age so as to allow her to fall within the cut off for legal abortion in their state, and to provide soulful wisdom to people experiencing the hardest day of their lives. It’s this kind of devil-may-care yet principled attitude that also can be read into, again, a real face. The wrinkles symbolize experience, times he’s deliberated over tough ethical decisions, times he’s furrowed his brow while railing a coworker from behind in a supply closet (I DON’T KNOW MAYBE, OK??)
All this to say, if you have dirty sock fever, you’re not alone. I want more real faces. On men, on women, around town in LA (good fuckin’ luck). I want to see life lived and the evidence on your face. Wear SPF, obviously, but I’m calling now that the trend of the future will be the folks who didn’t endlessly fuck with their faces. Just like human writing (hi) is going to be the new cottage industry in the face of AI, so too will the human face become a badge of analog pride as plastic surgery elevates beauty standards sky high. Thoughts?
See also:
"...a proclivity to eat pussy like their lives depend on it (I ASSUME)." I cackled out loud at this line. Great article!
Goggins is frankly a God, a man breathtakingly brilliant in everything he appears in, who allows one of my greatt pleasures in life when I get to point the uninitiated towards Justified.
Now, this dirty sock club will require dirty socks, where do I apply?