I recently watched Fly Me to the Moon, a moderately charming rom-com about fictional hijinks leading up to the Apollo 11 moon landing. It stars Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum as romantic leads, a combination I was already inclined to think of as fairly stiff, but which was lent an extra dimension of woodenness by either ScarJo’s unwillingness or her inability to move her face very much. (This was a choice/limitation highlighted by the presence of Anna Garcia, who did a great job as the snarky sidekick and whose eyebrows moved with deft skill throughout the film.)

I don’t want to speculate about which substances or procedures may or may not have restricted Johansson’s facial mobility, nor do I have much to add to the existing discourse around the rampant spread of plastic surgery and the mark it leaves in the form of frozen faces across Hollywood. Instead, I want to talk about Ancient Greece.

2500 years ago, give or take, theatre was a young art form in Athens. Productions featured a few key actors who often played multiple roles and a chorus of about a dozen people who spoke the same lines in unison, and everybody on stage wore a mask. If you ever read Sophocles in high school English class, you probably already have an image of these masks in your head: large, intricate, with exaggerated features and expressions that convey a strong sense of character or emotion.

Our expectations of the performing arts today are incompatible with this convention. We want to watch actors emote, to glimpse into the heart of someone unknown to us and see how it is changed from the beginning of the story to the end. Back in the day, though, Ancient Greek theatre didn’t contain characters as we conceive of them today as much as archetypes: This is the Queen. That is the Prophet. These are the Furies. Those are the Satyrs.

These roles were not always static (this is Oedipus, and that is Oedipus after he has blinded himself), but they were limited by the fact that their stories were fixed, one-dimensional points in the collective imagination of the audience. Give or take a couple eyes, Oedipus at the beginning of the play is functionally no different than Oedipus at the end; he is a symbol for the inevitability of fate, the tragedy of hubris. He may change externally, but he does not develop internally. Why should he, when he ends up in the same place no matter how Sophocles gets him there? The moment he steps on stage, the audience knows him as the Tragic Hero. His story is familiar, his fate is sealed. The character is the mask.

Obviously, we still find great pleasure in being told different versions of the same stories today. You can start any rom-com and know that the top billed actors will smooch by the end. You can go watch the latest Marvel installment and expect the handsome young hero to prevail. But while those conventions are fixed ideas, the single dimension is always worth stretching into a line because of the novelty to be discovered between its end points: How will our protagonists deal with obstacles, betrayal, heartbreak? What emotions will they stir up in us? How will they change in the next two hours?

Characters in modern film, TV, and theatre are not symbolic, but specific. We don’t go to the movies to watch how skillfully a screenwriter can show us the onward, undeniable march of fate; we go for the thrill of meeting someone new and discovering who they are. And that thrill—that novelty, that good old Aristotelian catharsis—happens in the face. Gwyneth Paltrow’s mournful yearning in Shakespeare In Love. Diane Keaton’s cynical self-awareness at war with her feelings in Something’s Gotta Give. Everything Rachel McAdams does in The Notebook.

I do not pretend that the film industry provides us with a rich array of faces to look at: it took effort to come up with an example above that did not feature an actress in her 20s, and even then, all three women I mentioned are white and blonde and thin and pretty. But in those movies, their faces tell stories that are specific. They grimace and frown and laugh and cry. Their characters come to life in motion and detail.

Today, though, motion and detail are increasingly rare. Actresses are freezing their faces, cutting them and poking them and injecting them with chemicals in pursuit of perfect beauty and eternal youth. This does more than simply make movies worse: it tells us something about what our culture expects of women and what space it wants them to occupy.

Rather than telling stories with their malleable, wrinkly, specific faces, women in film and TV seem to be wearing Ancient Greek masks again—except now there’s just one kind: “The Woman.” She is young, her skin is smooth, her lips are full and her cheeks are pillowy and her eyelids fold in just the right way. The Woman may have specific quirks and desires and challenges, but these are secondary to her real purpose in every story, which is simply to look pretty and be admired. Audiences needn’t worry about being exposed to an aging face on screen because The Woman is always young; science and money have seen to that. Her story isn’t a story anymore so much as an archetype, an ideal. A fixed point with smooth edges.

If you’re not wearing this mask yourself, are you even a Woman? Probably not. You’re some kind of aberration, like an Old Hag. You are difficult, ugly, undesirable, annoying, probably poor. Yuck. A Woman is easy, breezy, beautiful, flushed with the glow of youth and abundance. Don’t you want to be more like her? Don’t you want to smooth the edges, erase the wrinkles, compress yourself into a single, simple point? Ew, why are you frowning? The Woman doesn’t do that. She is so much easier to—hey, stop fighting us! Just put the mask on, geez!

good links:

• I linked it above, but Jia Tolentino on the plastic surgery epidemic for the New Yorker is, of course, worth your time. (For me it was even worth re-subscribing to the New Yorker.)

• “It was rarely far from my hand, this time-eating box I used to communicate with my loved ones, read the news, laugh at the brainrot comedic stylings of a few thousand people, navigate cities, check into flights and subway turnstiles, listen to songs, and about twenty-seven other things. I asked it for answers. I followed its direction. It extended my capacities; it eroded me.”

• I am enjoying the hell out of the Waterlily Weigh-Off competition, in which botanic gardens across the world are making delightful videos to show how much weight their giant waterlily leaves can hold before they start to go under. Social media can be good sometimes!