The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery - part 6 pdf

174 / As If Beauty attention, is summed up by the glossy folds of sable. It’s that skin I crave, Miss Caswell implies, the one that will give me just the right feeling of invulnerable importance. Wrap yourself up in sable and feel truly loved. The sable is a metonymy for Hollywood, where love floods in from the multitudes. Eve imagines the love of a stage audience (“It’s like, like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up”), but the Hollywood version would be a thousand times more gratifying. Alexan- der Walker describes the difference: “As an emotional response, it was different in kind and fervour from that which greeted stage celebrities. It was close and personal, yet dissociated and mob-like. It radiated love, yet turned the loved-one into an object” (Stardom 47). There is simulta- neously more gain and more loss with Hollywood skin. For more love there are “sacrifices” to be made. Spike Jonze’s 1999 Being John Malkovich gives us an extreme version of the public desire to wear celebrity skin. People pay to enter a portal in order to spend fifteen minutes literally inside the actor. If actors wear their parts, what does it mean that we want to play the part of an actor? What is the nature of the skin they offer? Becoming-celebrity in this instance is the culmination of one’s narcissism. When Malkovich enters his own “portal,” he finds himself reduplicated everywhere, as though to exemplify the actor’s narcissistic trajectory, which is necessarily a col- lapse back into the same—actor. A casual glance at recent advertisements will show what selling power star skin has. Estée Lauder’s “skin tone perfector” (a whole new class of cosmetic that is not foundation and not moisturizer) is called Spotlight. One advertisement shows Elizabeth Hurley outside what is supposed to be the marquis of a theater. Predictably, all eyes are fixed on this shin- ing central figure, who raises one white hand to her pearlescent white face as though to touch the beauty of the image perfected as pure light— the spotlight itself. You are urged to buy this product and “show off your skin.” No longer satisfied with just plain skin, we want to display it— to invite the admiring looks of the multitudes all turned on us as we ra- diate our star qualities. Avon’s “brightening complex” is Luminosity, and As If Beauty / 175 it promises “a face that brightens a room,” yet another ad offering the ordinary woman a miraculous transformation into “star”-light. Lan- côme now has its own version, called Photogênic. I own something from Benefit called High Beam, which claims to be “for the starlet in you,” because it “adds a soft gleam to the complexion.” I have to wonder what I was thinking when I purchased such a product—why would I want my skin to gleam, and what would I do ( moreover, what would people think?) if I did gleam? This is not a natural, dewy glow the cosmetics companies are holding out to us but rather a decidedly artificial actress- in-the-spotlight skin that we can squeeze out of a tube and make our very own, wrap ourselves up in a new alluring celebrity skin. The sales representative at my local Prescriptives counter explained to me what makes their line of “Magic” products so special: some of the formulas are adapted from those of screen makeup. Prescriptives has a line filler product modeled on the wax filler actresses use. She added: “The dif- ference is that the wax strips get hard and fall out. We’ve found a way of keeping the look without the wax hardening.” More recently, the makeup artist associated with “the natural look,” Bobbi Brown, has joined other makeup companies in the renewed interest in looking ce- lebrity. As her product packaging reads: “What Bobbi Brown did for the natural look with her Essentials Collection, she’s now doing for color with her highly anticipated Coloroptions—an innovative color collec- tion inspired by the dramatic looks created backstage in the theater.” Women’s makeup has a long history of deriving from the formulas and practices of theater and film makeup. Because images of film act- ors’ faces were more widely publicized than those of stage actors, their “look” had a powerful cultural effect on the female audience. In her book on the evolution of the American cosmetics industry and beauty practices, Kathy Peiss documents the crossover makeup (from screen to street) that used its screen heritage as an advertising pitch. Max Factor—makeup artist to the stars—particularly exploited the movie tie-in. All advertisements prominently featured screen stars, 176 / As If Beauty their testimonials secured in an arrangement with the major studios that required them to endorse Max Factor Company represen- tatives draped the glamorous image of the movies around their prod- ucts. At movie matinees, they set up stands in theater lobbies, made up women on-stage, raffled cosmetic kits, and distributed complex- ion analysis cards with the names of local drugstores. (126) Factor’s “Pan-Cake” brand foundation was a product borrowed directly from film and stage makeup—as though to cement the fantasied as- sumption of the film star’s camera-ready skin. Jackie Stacey points to the Lux Toilet Soap advertisement to illustrate the way in which identifi- catory relations with film stars influenced habits of consumption, espe- cially among women. In 1955, Lux hired Susan Hayward for its ad cam- paign: “9 out of 10 film stars use pure, white Lux Toilet Soap,” pointing out that “however much Susan may change character, one thing remains familiar: that fabulous complexion” (Stacey 4). Here the advertisement invokes simultaneously the star’s changeability, from role to role, and the star’s “star” substance, her movie-star appearance, literally, her skin. 28 While traditional foundation might seem “fake” to some, it clearly rep- resents movie-star skin for the women who wear it. Ordinary women trying to “even out” skin tone and correct other visible flaws on the skin with foundation and concealers are imitating as nearly as possible the tricks of lighting and film makeup. We thus become objects of the filmic apparatus. Ironically, concurrent with Ripley’s release was an In Style column showing us how to “steal” Gwyneth Paltrow’s “look” from The Talented Mr. Ripley. The makeup artist, we learn, “gave Paltrow matte color for her character’s excursions to Venice and Rome, using MAC Spice lip pencil and Max Factor Lasting Color lipstick in Rosewood” (“Steal This Look” 124). 29 Throughout the century, though, star identities have been attached to consumer products of all sorts, which suggests both the stars’ entanglement in the workings of consumer capitalism and our desire to be /have the stars as an effect of our consumer identities. Within their films, actors were shown beside appliances that would then be used as As If Beauty / 177 oversized cardboard cutouts advertising the product. 30 Of course, there is a big difference between wanting to own a Maytag and wanting to dress like Gwyneth Paltrow, but somehow the star’s image forms a link between the two consuming desires. TR ANSFORM ATIONAL BODIES Not only are we increasingly familiar with the surgical transformations of actors; it is as though the film screen justifies these transformations or renders them at once permissible and inevitable through its func- tioning as a site of transformation. Both the television screen in our homes and the movie screen, which can “become” whatever is projected onto it, are socially sanctioned sites of transformation, metonymically linked to the actors who perform within their frames. Television images hurtle from one to another, cutting between ice cream or battery or automobile commercials and upcoming scenes from a steamy-looking “thriller”— all vying with each other for my attention as I watch the tel- evision unfold yet constrain them behind its implacable screen. The very experience of viewing proves transformative for the viewer. We are transported into another sphere. We rise above our daily worries, our personal stories. In the relationship with the screen, the viewer is caught up in the process of limitless change and transformation. To live in a culture of ubiquitous identification with celebrities means that the shape-shifting images of celebrities can have a profound and transforming effect on noncelebrities. A group of celebrities are well known for their surgical shape shifting— Cher, for example, who is widely criticized for having gone “too far,” whatever that means. Fig- ures 7, 8, and 9 show respectively 1995, 1996, and 2001 versions of Melanie Griffith in Revlon’s “Defy Your Age” campaign. She looks like three different women in these ads. Most obviously, her mouth has been plumped up by the 1996 version, but there are other changes as well, though not as easy to isolate. I have shown these images to several plas- tic surgeons, and they disagree about whether Griffith has undergone Figures 7, 8, and 9. Melanie Griffith for Revlon’s ad campaign, in 1995 (fig. 7), 1996 (fig. 8), and 2001, with Halle Berry (fig. 9). As If Beauty / 179 surgical alteration to her facial contours or whether, instead, the images are airbrushed. Regardless of what the actress has done (or not done) in the service of “defying her age,” what might be the effect of these no- ticeable visual transformations upon female consumers? When we identify with film stars, we identify at the level of the trans- formation itself. “The postsurgical Dolly Parton,” writes M. G. Lord, “looks like the postsurgical Ivana Trump looks like the postsurgical Michael Jackson looks like the postsurgical Joan Rivers looks like . . . Barbie” (244). This shape shifting of the movie stars—from role to role, from body to body—is essential to their lure. They are the preeminent cultural icons, perhaps because they make two-dimensionality stand in for three. The surgical celebrity is simply an extreme version of what movie stars always are for us anyway. As I discuss in the following chap- ter, such identifications with stars and star bodies have destructive con- sequences as well. W. Earle Matory, Jr., believes that the evident use of plastic surgery by black entertainers is the reason for the enormous increase in African Americans requesting cosmetic surgery (195). Of course, Michael Jack- son instantly springs to mind when we think of black entertainers with high-visibility plastic surgery. And although we could read Jackson as an extreme example of a shape shifter who is unlikely to inspire emulation, what I find unsettling about him is the way in which he throws into re- lief “as if ” patterns of the culture in general—both black and white. 31 Racial difference in Jackson’s hands has become just another project for medical ingenuity—like, say, a port wine stain or oversized thighs. Although some characterize Jackson’s multiple surgeries as a caricature of the phenomenon of racial passing through surgical intervention, it seems clear that Jackson is doing no such thing. First, while he may be turning himself whiter, he’s not passing in any conventional sense, be- cause not only do we know he’s black (and he’s certainly black-identified), but also we’ve followed his whole career of physical transformation. Moreover, it is Jackson’s corporeal career that suggests no one is passing any longer and that the surgeries signal surgery as much as they do con- 180 / As If Beauty ventional beauty. Jackson himself is surely the product of a very partic- ular surgical aesthetic. Racial traits, then, are no longer what you hide or reveal; rather, you keep them or go get them “fixed.” While on the one hand it appears that whiteness has successfully colonized the entire physical landscape, on the other, whiteness as an identity is in danger of disappearing altogether—now that it’s just a another surgical outcome. WHAT IF “What if,” pondered a gentle music-framed female voice on my car ra- dio, “what if I had cosmetic surgery? Do you ever wonder ‘what if ’?” If you do, you should make an appointment with this cosmetic surgeon. “He will probably tell you that you don’t need anything done—but just in case . . . don’t you want to know the answer to ‘what if ’?” One way to find out what would happen if you change your face is to have yourself morphed through video-imaging technology, which first became popular in the late 1980s. 32 “Clinical video imaging is best used by creating a standard frontal and lateral patient image. The physi- cian and patient then discuss the reconstructive options during software modification to forecast a desirable surgical plan. The preoperative and modified images are then loaded, side-by-side, for comparison” (Matti- son 387). Alterations are “drawn” on the photographed face with a sty- lus and pad by means of a software paint program. Right then and there you can see the answer to “what if.” Instead of picturing your postoper- ative result through other faces (examples from the surgeon’s previous work), you can see yourself immediately—as if you were another. Nor are hand drawings satisfactory, because it remains “difficult for most pa- tients to imagine what they might look like postoperatively” (Thomas et al., “Analysis of Patient Response” 793). I suspect people growing up in the context of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century technol- ogy don’t find hand drawings adequately representational. Where better to fulfill the destiny of transformational identifications with celebrities than through a video-imaging process that uses a stylus in place of a As If Beauty / 181 scalpel? Is the surgery the cause or the effect of this fantasy whereby one collapses into the very screen image with whom one identified in the first place? Unsurprisingly, video imaging is a sensational marketing tool. As one writer claims, patient confidence in the surgeon is enhanced; even better, many want additional procedures after viewing their projected computerized transformation. 33 The face can begin to seem like an ever- transformable canvas. I attended the “Seminar on Facial Plastic Sur- gery,” run by an otolaryngologist affiliated with my university. Not only did the presentation covertly encourage multiple procedures at once (of- fering discounts), but afterward the audience was invited to go upstairs and see how they would look with computer-generated alterations. 34 A small cluster of people enthusiastically waited in line, excited by the pos- sibilities of what the computer could do for their faces. They expressed no doubts about the ability of the surgeon who had access to such amaz- ing technology. And this is my point—their confidence in the surgeon is increased by their investment in the video-imaging technology. As far as patients are concerned, the projected image is the postoperative re- sult; the face is airbrushed into beauty. When we are coaxed into iden- tifications with airbrushed, digitized, two-dimensional screen images (from print to television to film), we are identifying on the level of the technology itself. The “end result” pictured optimistically on the video screen turns you into the very two-dimensional image that was always at the other end of your cosmetic-surgery dreams. More than the surgeon’s personal expertise, they are trusting his pros- thetic link to technological transformation whereby he can convert flesh into image. No blood, no sliced skin, just software. The performance artist Orlan, who has staged a series of “live” plastic surgery operations in her effort to assume the features of eight famous paintings (“She will fuse into one facial image the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Ge- rôme’s Psyche, a Fontainbleau Diana’s eyes, the lips of Gustave Moreau’s Europa, and the brow of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa” [Wilson et al. 13]), en- titled one of her performances Ceci est mon corps . . . Ceci est mon logiciel . . . 182 / As If Beauty This is my body . . . This is my software. In her computer-generated pro- jection of the composite finished project, we see that she has elided the difference between the digital and the flesh. But such elisions can have awkward consequences. Many patients have felt that they were misled by the “perfect” images on the computer screen when their flesh-and-blood faces don’t exactly match. In fact, Mattison’s excessive enthusiasm for this technology allows him to imag- ine that the actual postoperative result on one young woman was “close to” the preoperative video image. Let’s just say that the patient may have felt (justifiably) let down. Most of the surgeons I interviewed won’t use this technology or do so only rarely because of exactly this problem with patient expectations. As Gorney reports, after several lawsuits, surgeons were advised to have patients sign carefully worded disclaimers. But the disclaimers can only minimally, if at all, diminish the expectations projected onto the fantasy image on the screen—you with the “perfect” nose or your chin realigned or all the bags and folds beneath your chin miraculously waved away. A surgical nurse told me that often pa- tients absolutely cannot grasp the limitations of their individual bodies or surgical technique. Thus, they expect surgery to make them look magazine-perfect— even though, as the nurse observed, such photos are all digitally retouched to the extent that no real body could measure up. Video imaging conspires with patient fantasies of being able to tran- scend both corporeal and technical barriers. The Adobe Photoshop wand breezes across your nose, through the tenacity of cartilage and bone, and presto, there’s Jodie Foster’s nose conjured right in the middle of your face—magic. Repeatedly, surgeons complained to me about the expectations of patients accustomed to these airbrushed images. 35 Yet, I try to point out to them that the widespread demand for cosmetic sur- gery is very much dependent on these transformational identifications. While most surgeons conceded to me that they couldn’t utterly trans- form someone (“you can’t make an ugly woman beautiful,” I heard per- haps too many times), several surgeons did make surgery sound close to miraculous. One surgeon sang the praises of the lower body suspension As If Beauty / 183 surgery developed by Ted Lockwood. As he put it: “Happy is a tummy suction or tummy tuck; ecstatic are these body changes. Ecstatic. Ecsta- tic is when you can get into a size six and you’ve been a twelve all your life. I’m sitting here doing these procedures, and I’m thinking to myself, this didn’t happen. You can’t get these bodies this good.” I complained that the extensiveness of the scars seemed to outweigh the benefits of contour: “They look like they’ve been cut in half and sewn back together.” “I know,” the surgeon replied, “but the body looks fabu- lous!” Which body was he talking about? Moreover, he pointed out that “99.6% of your adult waking life is in clothes; 99.9% of your ego trip and your body image is in clothes.” He insisted that the husbands of his female patients are ecstatic with the results as well and have had no com- plaints about scars that eventually turn white. And besides, what is the big deal when “the trade-off here is basically for a woman to have a fab- ulous body and wear lovely clothes, which make a big difference to that aging body? It’s a zero trade-off. They’re a little bit beyond in-the-back- seat-of-Chevrolet dating and worrying about somebody finding the scar around their tummy.” But, of course, it is a trade-off nevertheless, as the surgeon could not help but reveal, no matter how enthusiastically he extolled the radically transformative qualities of this surgery. What is strikingly illustrated in his description, moreover, is that this particular surgical body is made for clothing, not for parked Chevrolets. It is not about sexual encounter any longer—it’s about making a certain kind of appearance in the world. It is at the level of this “image” that one can appear to be miraculously transformed through lower body suspension surgery. This surgery, whereby you pretty much lift up and tighten everything from the lower thigh to the waist, certainly provides an impressive change in the body’s contours. Although I found the “after” pictures a bit horrifying because of the scars, I also recognized that the women would look markedly dif- ferent in everything from bathing suits to blue jeans. In fact, the scars are especially tailored to be hidden by a bathing suit or bikini under- wear. The scars, then, are simply the residue of the “real, old” body dis- [...]... identification between their flesh-and-blood bodies and their images Tracing the relationship between the body and the soul in photography, Marina Warner writes: The establishment of the photograph as a relic, a material trace of the body in the image, this new twist to the old myth that the camera steals the soul, has inspired various legal moves, on the part of the subjects, to control the terms on which... body and the scanned head of one of the models, played by Susan Dey, in Looker Courtesy of Photofest guised and improved by surgery For surgeons to minimize the scars is to minimize the very body to which they point; oh yes, sure, there are scars, but that’s only a concern when you’re naked The displayed body, the body-in -the- world, the two-dimensional transformational body, is what counts The 1981... among them) that we don’t care if we are taken for younger than we are as long as we look good are not being altogether honest about the relationship between aesthetics and age, or about the impact of evidence on the senses the way in which the lineless face of a forty-five-year-old is “read” as a younger face When she reveals her true age, there is a hesitation on the part of others They missed the evidence... augmentation or tummy tucks, there 1 96 / The Monster and the Movie Star are surgical prices to meet a range of incomes.5 In the world of the health management organization, cosmetic surgery remains the one arena where patients pay out of pocket Many pay by a major credit card or by credit cards offered by the surgical facility for the express purpose of funding these surgeries The story of upward mobility through... with the sexual secrets of stars to the psychoanalytic conviction that the secret origin of the patient’s pathology is always sexual Writes de Cordova: The star system, of course, depends heavily on scenes of confession in which the stars, in interviews or in first-person accounts, bare their souls and confess the secrets of their true feelings and their private lives” (142) The “fanaticism of the fan”... for the evidence of aging when they superficially appear youthful (the hands, for example) I know others who hunt down the evidence of a face-lift Is there a disruption between the neck and the face? Or erratic little tugs of flesh that seem to pull in the wrong direction? The body is a place where surgery s effects are supposed to be visible at the same time that the process itself is hidden BODIES OF. .. the culture There is a history to our investment in the photograph of the surgical makeover Photography, with its claims to reality, became over the course of the nineteenth century the preeminent form of evidence for criminals, the mentally deranged, and ethnic and racial “types.” It was supposed to reveal what one really looked like, without benefit of the imaginative flourishes of the paintbrush The. .. development of photographic portraiture little by little transformed the body into a potential after picture of itself Alan Trachtenberg describes the initial difficulties of training bodies to pose to their aesthetic advantage: The look was all-important, and what to do with the eyes, the key problem To avoid the blankness of expression, or the pained scowl of a direct, frontal look into the camera, the Frenchman... amount of correction needed on the preoperative face: The method of measuring a face begins with the taking of a photograph This photograph is then overlaid with squared transparent paper The lengths of forehead, nose, mouth and chin are measured and noted in the square A photograph of a face with the ideal profile is then taken as the standard on the same ruled and squared paper If the ideal length of. .. place.11 In other words, the existence and circulation of copies compromise the authenticity of the original Although the original work is untouched, the quality of its presence is always depreciated” (221) The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced Since the historical . naked. The displayed body, the body-in -the- world, the two-dimensional transformational body, is what counts. The 1981 film Looker suggests that a culture driven by the perfecti- bility of the. little bit beyond in -the- back- seat -of- Chevrolet dating and worrying about somebody finding the scar around their tummy.” But, of course, it is a trade-off nevertheless, as the surgeon could not. It is not the act of sur- gery that is disturbing or the desperation to continually display some- thing beautiful of their “reality” to the public. It is the large-scale re- versal of calling