A blurry image. Someone is holding the nuclear launch codes, but we can’t quite see them. The CIA operative gives the order: “Zoom! Enhance!” And suddenly the image is in full detail – mission accomplished. This is a movie fallacy that any photographer will tell you is impossible – you can’t just increase a photo’s quality as an afterthought. But the idea is enticing.
Yesterday I was plotting out the route to a friend’s house on google maps, and, having nothing better to do, pinched the map until I had the entire globe in view. I spun the image around, and was struck by how beautiful it was – the blues and greens of the daylight as well as the dark side of the planet speckled with bright city lights. As I zoomed back in to the route I had plotted, state names, then city names, then street names became clear until the screen was nothing but a collection of grey lines criss-crossing the screen. Suddenly the juxtaposition became very clear to me: earth was beautiful from afar, but closer up it was ugly.
I began to see this distinction everywhere: a beautiful lake seen from the car revealed itself to be plagued by storms of gnats, the picturesque New York City skyline a city-sized trash can, the gorgeous fog-bank rolling over Snoqualmie Pass nothing but damp and uncomfortable. Everywhere I looked I saw beautiful things, but the closer I got, the worse they revealed themselves to be.
This is a difficult idea to reconcile. Getting close to something, seeing it in more detail is supposed to reveal the truth of things. Is the truth of everything that it’s ugly once you get to know it? I began to try to think of counter-examples. And then I found it: we do this same thing with people.
Interviewers talk about this when interviewing movie stars. These are people that we’ve seen on the screen time and time again. We form opinions about them, think we know them, all from afar. Talking to someone like that for real can be disillusioning. It becomes clear that they aren’t the perfect paragon we’ve seen on screen time and time again. Daniel Radcliffe is really short. Toby Maguire is hard to talk to. Seeing these people up close gives us an entirely worse image of who they are. That’s pretty cool.
We all put out a front, an image of ourselves that we want the world to see. When all we see are everyone else’s carefully created self images, it’s easy to become insecure about ourselves. When we enhance, we see everyone is a little bit ugly.
Every person in the human race is united by the fact that we’re all a little ugly once you get to know us. To me, that’s a beautiful thing.