self-concept and recognition

[mrissa]

A friend wrote recently in a locked post about the difficulties of staying out of a sad mood when one has a physiological reaction of crying. When tears spring to one's eyes, this person finds, even when it's because it's cold out, it can be difficult to keep one's brain from following along.

And I'm doing that today, because what I have of a voice is a thin and wistful little thing, as though I was tentatively contemplating a great regret or sorrow. It is not my normal quiet voice. It is a quiet voice with a much more limited range, and the center of that range is higher than my norm. Usually when I have a bad cold and my voice goes, the "not quite gone" stage sounds like Princess Leia rescuing Han Solo from carbonite, and I do often go around saying, "You have hibernation sickness. Your eyesight will return in time," for entertainment value in such circumstances.

That is frustrating. This--this is maddening. On the other hand, it is almost certainly more effective in what the body needs, which is for me to avoid making noises, because I don't want to talk at all if I have to sound that wispy and wimpy.

Last night we watched Star Trek: Nemesis (look, just because the segue is invisible doesn't mean it's not there, all right?), and the thing that just baffled me was that the guy they had playing the younger clone of Jean-Luc Picard sounded nothing like Patrick Stewart. I don't mean that accent, I mean the voice, the resonances. Not only did he not sound like Patrick Stewart, he didn't sound like he could ever mature to sound like Patrick Stewart. And he didn't sound like trauma or deliberate change of behavior had given him a different voice. He just sounded like...someone completely unlike Patrick Stewart.

This was boggling to me. To me, Patrick Stewart's voice is the central fact of recognizing him. They could put him in a false nose and a wig and give him the most exaggerated Richard III hunch ever, and he would still be obviously Patrick Stewart, blatantly obviously, because he would still have that voice.

I had not realized how much I felt the same way about myself. I do not have a famous or fame-worthy voice. But it is my voice; it is part of how I am me. When I have something to say, I do not waver and quaver around it like this. If I trail off and end a sentence with a question mark, I mean for the question to be answered, ideally promptly.

When I was in college, we discovered a couple of things: how I could recognize most of my friends from the knees down if they walked past a basement window; how we all knew each other's coats (ah, college in Minnesota); how one friend who had no social trouble with not recognizing us really didn't have a clear idea of what our faces looked like. A few years later, an acquaintance linked me to a picture of a woman he was sure I looked just like. We had no facial features in common. None. Not nose or chin or cheeks or eyes or eyebrows or jaw, not shape of face or shape of head or type of hair (she had the hair I always wanted when I was little, straight and jet-black, but it was not even a similar length to mine, not parted in the middle like mine, just not). From what I could tell in the picture, she had delicate shoulders. Mine are indelicate--wait, that's not it. Mine are strong and broad for the rest of my body size. I suggested that perhaps he meant that she reminded him of me or vice versa? No. We looked alike. He was sure of it. And now someone else in my life has recently turned out to have a fairly low priority on facial features in the processes of how their brain processes recognition, and I'm sort of poking around wondering where I resemble somebody else but I'm not aware of it because the person who sees it is using such different axes of measurement.

Comments

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

Interesting reflection there. I've been having a parallel reflection myself since watching _Tropic Thunder_ last week. (I know. I know. Bad stupid movie. It is.) Everyone was telling me there ws this "famous actor in disguise!" in the movie and that it was so hard to recognized him!. All were telling me that it took them the credits to find out. Well, I recognized him in exactly one second. Tom Cruise with facial hair and male pattern baldness. I exclaimed :"What, it's supposed to be a surprise?" I turn to my husband: "You see who that is right?" He said. no. I say: "for the love, it's Tom Cruise! it's obvious." Evidently, no. Obviously, I process facial recognition differently, because I did not think him well disguised at all! Add the voice, the body movements, the pout! No disguise at all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've never seen Tropic Thunder, but sometimes I have difficulty and other times not, leading me to think that my defaults overlap partially but not completely with the ones they pay attention to in the average Hollywood production.

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

I rarely have issues with Hollywood make up hiding a actor's identity. However, I have been know to find resemblences in people that know one else seems to see. I guess I need to think what my defaults are. I do know they are strongly based on voice and movement, but not exclusively.

[aedifica]

I used to work with two guys who I mixed up with each other all the time. When I really stopped and looked at them, they didn't look much alike, but they both had dark hair and their foreheads were similar! So apparently I recognize people by their foreheads (and hair), or at least I used to a few years ago.

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've probably told people they look like someone they don't actually look like. I am *awful* with faces. I recognize people by their hair or shapes or -- unfortunately -- what they're wearing. Visually, anyway. I am *awesome* with voices. The Star Trek movie would probably drive me batty with Fake!Picard.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, if not with that, some other way.

It was really not a good movie.

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

That's unfortunate. :(

I'm wondering how the yet-to-be-released one will turn out.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My best bet is that it will be terrible, but I feel the urge to find out anyway.

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

I agree. Not good.

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

I'm really good with voices, and with kinetic factors: I recognize people's walk, gestures, face movements, body language, but have been known to mix up completely dissimilar people - based on the fact they have similar walks or mouth-patterns. I'm not much good at recognizing different people in photography at all, but show me a video and I'll pick out a minor actor from a show I saw 20 years ago, who's playing a monster under 40 pounds of latex in this one, because of the way his mouth moves when he shapes a word. It's weird.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I've had people I don't know recognize my voice. I'm a lousy actor, in the sense that I'm not good at assuming roles, but I'm a terrific reader and have a distinctive voice and speaking style. Ah, it's nice to have fans.

FWIW, I can pick your voice out of a crowded room party. It's a fine voice, a Mrissa voice. Nothing like Patrick Stewart.

And yeah, I think your bearing has more to do with visual recognition than your face. At least for some, apparently.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

One reason I don't pay attention to actors is that I rarely can recognize them from one film to another. Heck, I often have trouble recognizing them in the *same* film; I ask things like "Is that supposed to be the same guy who planted the explosives earlier?". Whatever Hollywood thinks people use to recognize people, it's not what I use. Maybe this is partly because there's such little diversity of appearance in the Hollywood talent.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So it seems like that would include faces and voices, then? Since most actors talk while playing their roles? Hmm. Yet I suspect that if I was in the next room at a party and raised my voice and said, "David!", you would call back, "Yes, Mris?" and not, "Yes, Sherry?" or "Yes, Stella?", to pick two other adult women whose voices you hear sometimes but not daily and who speak in a similar register to mine. So I don't think it's that you don't recognize voices.

This stuff is hard to figure out.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Good actors use their voices differently in different roles, though. Pacing, rhythms, emphasis, and all that. (I'm just reading Hellspark, remember). Also I'm hearing the TV through not the world's most wonderful sound system generally.

[aszanoni.livejournal.com]

I had this exact same reaction, watching the 2005 Batman movie. I couldn't tell Batman/Bruce Wayne apart from someone else most of the movie.

I complained quite a lot that if I can't tell who the hero is, then maybe they shouldn't have another major character who looks just like him.

Steve thought it was a grand flick and watched it again immediately.

I'm not sure how I recognize people, but I do know that I can't tell a lot of Hollywood actors apart -- as you say, DDB, little diversity.

M'ris -- may your voice, and you, get better soon! =hugs=

*---

[rosefox]

I am so bad at recognizing people by any means that I've discovered I'm more likely to fall in love with people who have very striking features--interesting hair, unusual height, a particularly melodious laugh--simply because I'm more likely to remember them. Sometimes I get sad about all the wonderful people I'm probably missing out on because they just don't stick in my head.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

I think self concept forms at the age we start to recognize who we are and our place in the world. Anything that knocks that off kilter is disturbing. For you right now it's your voice. For me, right now, there are days I look at my hands and think they don't belong to me, they belong to my mother. Internally I will always and forever be 19.

I will remember people's faces from having seen them once or twice, at a con for instance, and not remember their names. I think because I'm a very visual person that facial features stick with me. So do voices. I will recognize a voice in a movie from another room. The Patrick Stewart thing in the movie would drive me nuts.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I don't know; I think I was pretty clear on who I was and my place in the world pretty darned early, as these things go--probably before my voice had matured into being my voice (which was around age 12) and certainly before I had this hair (age 18). And yet the hair is so much me that I had a moment of extreme weirdness when I was walking the dog around my folks' old neighborhood a few years ago, because it suddenly hit me that if anyone I used to know saw me from a distance, the hair wouldn't be the automatic recognition that it is for so many of the people who know me now as an adult--because I didn't grow my hair out until the first college summer I spent away from home. So all the years that it's gotten to be me, my hair, were years I didn't spend in that neighborhood for more than a few days at a time.

And there are clearly things about self-concept that encompass shifting with time. When I got my first two grey hairs this summer, I was delighted and didn't feel unlike myself at all, so apparently whatever it is about my hair in my mind includes the probability that it will go grey at some point, probably gradually, and that starting that now is reasonable.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've gotten pretty good at recognizing actors, so it can't be true that my facial-recognition skills suck, but what I suck at is going past saying "oh, yes, I've seen that face before, and maybe this is where." What I can't do is describe faces, or even imagine specific ones if they aren't right in front of me.

Which is not what you are talking about here, but this post has made me feel like I am not alone in facial difficulties, at least.

I do, however, recognize voices pretty well. I'd seen Jude Law in a small number of movies when I saw A.I., and as I recall, partway through the screen goes black and you hear a voice and I said, "hey, that's Jude Law!" and then the image came up and yes, that's who the new character was. I never would have guessed I knew his voice that well, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Describing faces is hard. Most people have two eyes, one nose, two lips...you can see the difficulties in some of the worse fantasy novels, where everybody has a "button nose" or a "hooked nose" or some exaggerated description, where most of the people you meet just have...noses. How are your nose and mine different? They are, but without photos of the two of us--or even with--I wonder if most people who had seen us both could describe the difference. (I wonder if this is why there is a prevalence of "ski-jump" or "tip-tilted" noses among a certain type of fantasy heroine: it's the distinctive way the author knew to talk about a nose and could actually imagine. What, exactly, is a button nose? Other than the one Frosty the Snowman has?)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I can't even seem to describe them well in less literal terms, the way some authors can. Which is why you generally know the hair color and maybe body type of my characters, but that's about where it ends. My editor has bemoaned more than once the fact that she has little idea what most of my characters look like.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

This is similar to my husband's comments about recognizing people wearing bunny suits in a fab, Everything's covered but the eyes (and even those if they wear glasses) and the suits are loose. So you have the walk and the height and maybe some rough contours. It seems to be plenty.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Ericka insists that her brother looks like Eddie Murphy. I point out, each time this comes up, that Eddie Murphy is black. This does dissuade her from thinking they look the same.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Does skin colour seem so overwhelmingly important to you that it completely eliminates all other points of resemblance?

[jbru.livejournal.com]

In addition, her brother does not seem to resemble Eddie Murphy. The skin color is merely the most obvious aspect of this.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

carandol once noted that screwing up your face against rain (and goodness knows there's a lot of rain in Lancaster) makes a frowny face and makes you feel worse than if you don't do it, because rain getting in your eyes doesn't scrunch you up into a bad mood. This turns out to be actually true for me as well, and information I am glad to have.

I recognise people mostly by body language, not faces. This means that a good actor who uses different body language in different films, I have no idea who the heck they are. It also means that John Travolta and Alex Baldwin playing very similar characters in two different movies, convinced me (from the trailers) that they were the same actor, and indeed the same character. Also I can't tell Brad Pitt from... that other guy who has the same body language and plays the same kind of parts. Real people, however, I can tell apart pretty much every time.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I'm having wonderful images of you doing Princess Leia lines and your shoulders behaving indelicately. It's very vampy which is the perfect word to cross campy and trampy.

My mental Mris is hysterical today.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hey, good deal! Mine is too!