Please. Please. I am begging you. Please, for the love of God: MOVE YOUR FACE.
No, not to a different location, Kristen Stewart! You can keep your face right where it is! Which is your head, I am assuming. No, Kristen Stewart: I am referring to the subtle movement of facial muscles, and more precisely to the series of small or large contractions and/or relaxations of said muscles, which we human face-havers refer to as “expressions.” Frequently, those of us who move our faces do so to express emotion! Face-movement lets those around us know what we are thinking, without the effort of lengthy speeches. As such, you would imagine that it would be a fairly important skill for a person whose job is to convey emotions and thoughts in a visual medium. A person such as an actress! A person such as YOU, Kristen Stewart!
And yet, your face? It does not move.
Let me explain: I recently watched a movie in which you appeared. A movie called Adventureland! Now, I would like to share with you, and with those who may be reading this here open – yet Kristen-Stewart-specific – letter what my thoughts on Adventureland have been. For example: imagine, if you will, that a friend of mine approached me, and was like, “Sady, I would like to watch a movie with you. This movie is by the director of Superbad, features Ryan Reynolds in a prominent role, and concerns an upper-middle-class white dude who mopes a lot about his parents not handing him a chunk of money that would have been – and still is, really – inconceivable to you in size, thereby forcing him to take a job that he believes to be beneath his station. He mopes about the job, pretty much throughout. And Kristen Stewart is his love interest, also.” My reaction to this proposal would have been pretty bad! Somebody would have gotten a crotch-punch in that exchange, is all I’m saying! And yet, Adventureland is a fine movie. Kind of a shockingly excellent movie, in point of fact. I just have this one problem: your face is in this movie, Kristen Stewart. And your face? IT POSES A PROBLEM.
Let’s flip through your range, here, Kristen Stewart. Here’s fear:
Okay. Here’s overwhelming lust:
Here is your puckish sense of humor:
And here is, I don’t know, “existential crisis caused by realizing that your parents lied to you about Santa Claus and you believed them and therefore reality may ultimately be subjective and unverifiable and how do you know what you know? Do you trust it? Maybe you shouldn’t! Oh my god, I am so high! What if I have brain damage???? FROM ALL THE MARIJUANA“:
I trust you begin to see the problem. And, trust me, in a film which relies to any substantial degree on your face, said problem is EVEN WORSE! Like, in Twilight and Twilight: New Moon? Whatever. These are Twilight movies. Bella Swan is specifically constructed so as to have nothing resembling a human personality, and “I have nothing resembling a human personality” is something that your face communicates. Quite well! And, honestly, Robert Pattinson can’t do all that many things with his face either. So you are evenly matched! But in Adventureland? This surprisingly almost-good movie, marred only by the presence of and/or lack of movement within your face? Eh. Like, there is this whole scene – it seems to stretch out into infinity, although I would be surprised if it were in fact over fifteen seconds long – where your character has just been in a car with the whiny upper-middle-class white guy who is, for real, SO DISAPPOINTED that he has to have a job. And we are supposed to be witnessing some emotion on your face, as you drive home from this encounter. The issue? We cannot, by any facial indicators, discern what that emotion is supposed to be. Is it, “goodness, I feel the stirrings of an unexpected crush,” for example? Or is it, “I am quite conflicted about this crush I feel stirring within me?” Or is it, by any chance, “if this upper-middle-class white guy does not stop whining about how his parents made him take this job instead of giving him a shockingly huge cash-wad – this job that I ALSO HAVE, and have SUBSTANTIALLY LESS CHANCE OF ESCAPING, because I will not be attending GRAD SCHOOL AT COLUMBIA and having someone else PAY MY MOTHERFUCKING RENT while I’m there, for the sake of the SWEET VIRGIN MOTHER’S SANCTIFIED CUNT-HAIR – I will take each of my socks off and cram them down his throat, one by one, just to shut him up?” That would be an interesting emotion! But since it is on your face, this is what we get, more or less:
Or maybe the point of your character is that we can’t tell what she’s thinking, or whether she’s thinking, or whether she does, in fact, know what a “thought” is. Sure! That’s fun! I wish the question were resolved, at some point, but whatever! If I were in a more analytical, feministical mood, Kristen Stewart, I would talk about this whole freaky wave of non-expression-having, pseudo-hipster love objects – from Margot Tenenbaum to Zooey Deschanel to Scarlett Johansson to, Jesus, Sofia Coppola herself, whose face did not apparently come equipped with expression-making software as far as I know – and how this reflects the desires of a certain variety of (probably) upper-middle-class, (probably) white, (but definitely) male person, which is the desire for a woman precisely as subordinate, empty, hollow, and one-dimensional as the woman Tucker Max or your standard anime geek is probably masturbating over right this second, a fantasy woman which makes them precisely as ill-equipped to deal with a real female person as any or every fantasy woman created by a sexist culture, but with some weird coating of “cool” over the surface, like an ill-fitting slip cover on your grandma’s couch, a “cool” which is not actual cool because actual cool comes from having A PERSONALITY, that personality being something to which none of the above-listed women EVER SEEM TO ASPIRE. But I’m not in that mood, Kristen Stewart! It’s New Year’s Day, and I am drunk, and I just want more prosecco, to be honest! So I will just say this:
You are playing Joan Jett, Kristen Stewart. Yes, my own personal inspiration, imaginary lady-friend, and quite possibly wife: Joan Jett. Do you know one thing that is indisputably, verifiably, historically factually accurate and true about Joan Jett? SHE MOVED HER MOTHERFUCKING FACE. A lot! And it was awesome! I will NOT ALLOW YOU to profane my lady Joan Jett, Kristen Stewart.
So, please. Please, please. Please, for the love of God: take your face. And, somehow – it may be slow, it may be painful – MAKE IT MOVE.
Love,
Sady.
