VALENTINE'S DAY

The face of Taylor Swift: If the glass dome placed over her blooming flower is not airtight, then what is its function? To announce, by conspicuously but only temporarily retarding, the spectacle of her eventual and spectacular decay.

The face of Taylor Lautner: the leash’s desire to be free of the dog.

The face of Emma Roberts: I don’t know. But I’d cast a homely Helen of Troy, if only to emphasize how events construct her repute, and not the other way around.

The face of Shirley Maclaine is juxtaposed, here, with its far earlier incarnation, which she now seeks surgically to precede. Reincarnation, thus far, has required the splitting of souls; henceforth it will require their erasure.

The faces of Eric Dane, Bradley Cooper, Patrick Dempsey, and Ashton Kutcher: the jawbone(s) of an ass raised against our better judgment.

The face of Jessica Alba: Life’s exhaustion lies not in desire but in pretending it.

The faces of Queen Latifah, Kathy Bates, George Lopez, and Hector Elizondo: Get out of the way, we’re looking at the other faces.

The face of Jamie Foxx: Intensity as a bombastic joke told alongside an injunction not to react.

The face of Topher Grace: Oh no, what if this is the mirror?

The face of Anne Hathaway: Julia unhinged. Of Jessica Biel: Julia burdened. Of Jennifer Garner: Julia insatiable.

The face of Julia Roberts: One almost wants to say, its world-beckoning charm is not the bright, sudden laugh that breaks across it, but the moment just before in which it registers another’s presence and threatens not to react. Richard Gere was never so lucky as when he flipped closed the necklace box and was allowed to go on existing; she might have as easily withheld that conflagration of delight and so annihilated him on the spot. And he knows it. A power dangerous to wield. Bersani: “In Freudian terms, the hyperbolic ego risks being obliterated by its own narcissistically thrilling inflations.” And yet, this is the formula for love. She must be so careful with us because she knows: if that laugh started and didn’t stop we would watch her shatter. Watch unprotected. And if that is love we might never again be willing to yield.