If you ask whether he means it, however, this approximate smile collapses into a puddle of abject uncertainty.
But when they notice how much darker and unattractive the portraits based on their self-descriptions are, the smiles collapse into looks of shocked self-realization.
I stop midsentence, my uneven smile-dimples collapsing.
I see no other explanation for the sag of the jowls and eyelids, the inbuilt frown of the brow, the watered-down blue of the gaze, and, most terrible of all, that sickly smile, no sooner risen than collapsed: such are the marks of a hopelessness so complete that one cannot conceive of any hopes being nourished in the first place.
He is seen snapping at his wife, Liza; his assistant, Sona Movsesian; and the "30 Rock" actor Jack McBrayer, whose smiling Southern countenance collapses when Mr. O'Brien serenades him with a piano tune called "You Stupid Hick".
It was with visible effort that she willed the downturned corners of her mouth into a smile for me; a moment later they collapsed again, as though weighted with lead sinkers.
Her husband broke in with a smile: "We've just come to see it before it collapsed".
I got a phone call and collapsed back onto my bed and lay there and smiled for a bit.
"I wanted it so bad, I didn't sleep for 50 hours and finally collapsed just before the vote," he said, flashing a down-home politician's smile.
All that "triumph of the human spirit" stuff – the smiling, the positivity, the aw-shucks wholesomeness – eventually lost its appeal, and American Idol's ratings collapsed.
