Look at lovely Ryan Gosling – he is everywhere at the moment. He is the hottest actor in Hollywood. You could go out today and see him in Drive or Crazy, Stupid Love, or wait a couple of weeks and see him star with George Clooney in the presidential election movie Ides of March. If you are in the US all those films probably came out months ago, Ryan Gosling’s career may be over already, but I am on a UK schedule so stick with me.

I like Ryan Gosling. I think he’s cool. I liked him when he was playing a man who embarked upon a loving relationship with a blow-up doll (Lars and the Real Girl), when he went through a painful break-up with Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine) and when he taught a struggling Steve Carell how to seduce beautiful ladies (Crazy, Stupid Love). My all-time favourite is the one where he moves to a quiet Cambridgeshire village and becomes friends with a fair-haired British man and they roam around the countryside having adventures (my imagination). But why do my instincts tell me that I would get on with Ryan Gosling, while at the same time remaining comparatively unmoved by someone like James Franco, who has a PhD at Yale, sawed off his own arm (127 Hours) and likes literature? Franco is just like me (apart from the PhD and the arm), but it isn’t the same.

I believe the answer to this and many other questions lies in Ryan Gosling’s perfectly symmetrical face, with its soft yet masculine features.

It is a handsome, reassuring face, but it has the kind of blankness onto which you can project almost anything. While I might like him because he seems a bit ‘thoughtful’ and reflective, others may look at him and see a real tough guy Gosling, a man’s man (like in Drive), and others will see the total babe romantic Gosling we all know and love. Who could forget his divine performance in The Notebook, officially the girliest film ever made. His face is versatile, it contains multitudes. He makes for a very believable feminist. He can be both the guy that guys want to be mates with and the guy that girls want to go with. In that respect he reminds one of George Clooney, with whom he appears in Ides of March and to whom he bears a rather striking resemblance (above). Theirs is the true Hollywood face. It is a face that could play a president or a thief equally convincingly.

It is also the face of Ronald Reagan, the movie star who became a president. In his open face, people saw themselves. And they were convinced enough to vote for him, time after time. Blankness has power. Many people have remarked that there is a convenient blankness in Stephenie Meyer’s descriptions of Bella, the heroine of Meyer’s Twilight books. She is given very little discernible personality or appearance. This absence of character means that any young, female reader can project herself into the story – learning all kinds of rather unsavoury ‘lessons’ about sex and relationships as she does so (or so I hear). The result? Millions and millions of sales. Yet I am sure Ryan Gosling would never stoop to this kind of thing. He has a perfectly symmetrical face, with soft yet masculine features.

When Herman Melville considers the ‘Whiteness of the Whale’ in Moby Dick the whiteness is so disquieting as it manifests simultaneously the absence of colour and all the colours mixed together. His blank is something that defies comprehension. Our modern blankness, on the other hand, begs to be be whatever the onlooker wants it to be. At its root there is a narcissism – we fill the blankness with self. It is too comfortable. We better watch ourselves (irony intended).

With apologies to James Franco, a good kid doing his best.

Tags: blank, blankness, Featured Post, feminist, film, gosling, james franco, moby dick, reagan, ryan gosling