To borrow a phrase from Simone de Beauvoir, the face is not a thing but a situation—one that is, increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive, replete with new information but devoid of human meaning. Today, the young inject their faces and look old; the old inject their faces and look uncanny; a twenty-year-old got famous for hitting himself in the jaw with a hammer to become hotter; teen-agers ask strangers on the internet if a facelift is their only hope. The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing people as commodities and stripping us for parts. But only recently has this process been encoded so specifically onto the face, traditionally thought of as a portal to our humanity. The face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul, and this is happening in front of us, on our phones, in the most banal fashion, every day.

“Daylight,” a documentary by Jon Kasbe about Joe Garcia, the formerly incarcerated man who wrote “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison,” is showing at the IFC Center, presented by