Tis the season to watch Home Alone. It’s a movie I really resonate with because Macaulay Culkin and I are only 2 months apart in age, so that movie is a real snapshot in time for me (minus the fancy house and the snow, as I was a rather poor Texan).
Anyway, most years I just watch the movie for the feels and the nostalgia, and for the musical score that instantly transports me back in time. But this year I was also spending an inordinate amount of time looking at everyone’s teeth. Now this is something I’d already been doing for a while, but not in the same way. Normally I’d come across video of some public figure, wanting to focus on what they have to say but instead being distracted by their blinding chompers.
Stark white. Unnatural. Startling almost, and sometimes veneered to “perfection.”
And many times, these chompers show up on leathered faces that have borne the brunt of many decades of life, yet the teeth shine like a beacon. It’s such a strange (unnerving?) contrast to the rest of the form.
What I noticed when I watched Home Alone, which was released in 1990 (only 35 years ago, not generations ago), was that every actor had different teeth. They were not perfectly straight. They were not perfectly shaped. They were not even similar in form. In fact some of them, like Buzz’s, were quite crooked and gapped. One of the kids even had a mouth full of metal (braces, is what I mean).
They also were not white. They were a natural whitish-yellowish shade that comes from being human and eating a variety of food, drinking coffee, and having a hundred (over time) glasses of wine. The older humans had more deeper shading, and the younger ones had less. And this was all, of course, ok. Normal. Not questioned. Not even a criteria for an actor to secure a leading role on the big screen.
This reminds me of a Friends rerun I watched recently, from the late 90s. In the episode, Ross accidentally bleaches his teeth so white that he refuses to smile and eventually glows under a black light on a date. In the late 90s, the writers apparently (and in my opinion, accurately) believed humanity would be appalled by the unnatural whiteness. That they’d even be scared of it. So they’d had the ensemble actors react that way, and they’d also had his date scream in his face.
Chuckle.
What have we done to our teeth, you guys? And along the same lines, what have we done to the rest of us? When did we decide that not only was whitening a few shades not good enough, but we now have to bleach them out completely and/or replace our perfectly good smiles with veneers?
I feel like the teeth issue is just a super visible symptom of a larger societal issue that has finally gone off the rails. We can’t be ok with what we are. We can’t accept imperfections, or aging, or the slightest tinge of change that may indicate we are not 20 years old anymore. So one way we combat this in the 2020s is to strap our mouths with a fake smile that looks like an LED light, that I guess everyone somehow thinks is normal even though it’s weird and unnatural?
Why, guys. Why.
What is wrong with us?
Every species (plant and animal) on earth ages, yet we are the only one to insist on altering or stopping the process. We use our complex brains to decide not to look at aging as a privilege and a part of life, but to instead tuck and bleach and smooth it away even if we’ve erased our uniqueness.
It’s just so…weird.