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Scary Women
Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects
I once heard a man say to his gray-haired wife, without rancor: “I only feel old when I look at you ”—ANN GERIKE, “On Gray Hair and Oppressed Brains ”
“I'm prepared to die, but not to look lousy for the next forty years.” —ANONYMOUS WOMAN TO ELISSA MELAMED, Mirror, Mirror: The Terror of Not Being Young
What is it to be embodied quite literally “in the flesh,” to live not only the remarkable elasticity of our skin, its colors and textures, but also its fragility, its responsive and visible marking of our accumulated experiences and our years in scars and sags and wrinkles? How does it feel and what does it look like to age and grow old in our youth-oriented and image-conscious culture—particularly if one is a woman? In an article on the cultural implications of changing age demographics as a consequence of what has been called “the graying of America,” James Atlas writes: “Americans regard old age as a raw deal, not as a universal fate. It's a narcissistic injury. That's why we don't want the elderly around: they embarrass us, like cripples or the terminally ill. Banished to the margins, they perpetuate the illusion that our urgent daily lives are permanent, and not just transient things.”1 This cultural—and personal—sense of aging as “embarrassing” and as a “narcissistic injury” cannot be separated from our objectification of our bodies as what they look like rather than as the existential basis for our capacities, as images and representations rather than as the means of our being. Thus, insofar as we subjectively live both our bodies and our images, each not only informs the other, but they also often become significantly confused.
What follows, in this context, is less an argument than a meditation on these confusions as they are phenomenologically experienced, imagined, and represented in contemporary American culture, where the dread of aging—particularly by women—is dramatized and allayed both through the wish-fulfilling fantasies of rejuvenation in certain American movies and the more general, if correlated, faith in the “magic” and “quick fixes” of “special effects,” both cinematic and surgical. This conjunction of aging women, cinema, and surgery is also the conjunction of aesthetics and ethics, foregrounding not merely cultural criteria of beauty and desirability but also their very real as well as representational consequences. As Susan Sontag writes: “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathology—intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men. It is particularly women who experience growing older with distaste and even shame.”2
Thus, it is not surprising that, at sixty-three and as a woman with the privilege of self-reflection, I am always struggling with such distaste and shame in response to the various processes and cultural determinations of my own aging. Indeed, for a long time, despite my attempts at intellectual rationalization, cultural critique, or humor, I found myself unable to dismiss a recurrent image—one that still horrifies me as I reinvoke it. The image? It's me and her, an other—and as her subjective object of a face has aged, the blusher I've worn every morning since I was a teenager has migrated and condensed itself into two distinct and ridiculously intense red circles in the middle of her cheeks. This image—which correspondingly brings a subjective flush of shame and humiliation to my cheeks for the pity and unwilling disgust and contempt with which I objectively regard hers—is that of an aging woman who not only deceives herself into thinking she is still young enough to wear makeup, and poorly applies it, but who also inscribes on her face the caricature both of her own desire and of all that was once (at least to some) desirable. This is not only my face but also the face of clutchy and desperate Norma Desmond. It is whatever happened to Baby Jane, the child star who never grew up but did grow old: ludicrous, grotesque, overpowdered and rouged, mascara and lipstick bleeding into and around her wrinkled eyes and mouth, maniacally proclaiming an energy that defies containment, that refuses invisibility and contempt.3
Although I no longer imagine the extremity of my blusher converging into shameful red circles on my cheeks or fear producing the chilling whiteface of the self-deluded Baby Jane, I still despair of ever being able to reconcile my overall sense of well-being, self-confidence, achievement, and pleasure in the richness of my present with the problematic and often distressing image I see in my mirror. Over the past several years, most of my exaggerated fantasies gone, I nonetheless have become aware not only of my mother's face frequently staring back at me from my own but also of an increasing inability to see myself with any real objectivity at all (as if I ever could). In less than a single minute I can go from utter dislocation and despair as I gaze at a face that seems too old for me, a face that I “have,” to a certain satisfying recognition and pleasure at a face that looks “pretty good for my age,” a face that I “am.” Most often, however, in the middle register between despair and self-satisfaction I stand before the mirror much like “The Vain but Realistic Queen” who intones, in a wonderful New Yorker cartoon, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall: Who—if she lost ten pounds and had her eyes and neck done, and had the right haircut, could, in her age group—be the fairest one of all?”4
Whatever my stance, I live now in heightened awareness of the instability of my image of myself, and I think about cosmetic surgery a lot: getting my eyes done, removing the furrows in my forehead, smoothing out the lines around my mouth, and lifting the skin around my jaw. But I am sure I would be disappointed. I know the effects wouldn't last—and I feel, perhaps irrationally but perhaps not, that there would be awful consequences. Indeed, after reading an earlier version of this essay, a friend told me the following joke: “One night, in a vision, God visits a seventy-five-year-old woman. ‘How much time do I have left to live?' she asks him; and he replies, ‘Thirty-five years.' Figuring that as long as she is going to live another thirty-five years, she might as well look young again, she spends the following year having a ton of cosmetic surgery: a face lift, a tummy tuck, her nose reshaped, liposuction, a whole makeover. After all this is finally done, she is hit by a car and killed instantly. Inside the pearly gates she angrily asks God, ‘What happened? I thought you said I had another thirty-five years.' And God replies: ‘Sorry, but I didn't recognize you.'” Indeed, I not only dread others not recognizing me, but I also dread not recognizing myself. I have this sense that surgery would put me physically and temporally out of sync with myself, would create of me an uncanny and disturbing double who would look the way I “was” and forcibly usurp the moment in which I presently “am.” There is a certain irony operative here, of course, since even without surgery I presently don't ever quite recognize myself or feel synchronous with my image when I look at it in mirrors or pictures. And so, although I don't avoid mirrors, I also don't seek them out, and I'm not particularly keen on being photographed. Rather, I try very hard to locate myself less in my image than in (how else to say it?) my “comportment.”
It is for this reason that I was particularly moved when I first read in Entertainment Weekly that Barbra Streisand (only a year younger than I am, a Brooklyn-born Jew, a persistent and passionate woman with a big mouth like me) was remaking and updating The Mirror Has Two Faces, a 1959 French film about a housewife who begins a new life after plastic surgery. Barbra's update was to tell the story of “an ugly duckling professor and her quest for inner and outer beauty”5 Obviously, given that I'm an aging academic woman who has never been secure about her looks, this struck a major chord. Discussing the film's progress and performing its own surgery (a hatchet job) on the middle-aged producer, director, and star, Entertainment Weekly reported that the “biggest challenge faced by the 54-year-old” and “hyper-picky” Barbra
was how to present her character. In the original, the mousy housefrau undergoes her transformation via plastic surgery. But Streisand rejected that idea—perhaps because of the negative message—and went with attitude adjustment instead. Which might work for the character, but does it work for the star? “Certain wrinkles and gravitational forces seem to be causing Streisand concern,” says one ex-crew member. “She doesn't want to look her age. She's fighting it” (9)
The Mirror—indeed—Has Two Faces. Except for the income and, of course, the ability to sing “People,” Barbra and I have a lot in common.
Before actually seeing the film (eventually released in 1996), I wondered just what, as a substitute for surgery, Barbra's “attitude adjustment” might mean. And how would it translate to the superficiality of an image—in the mirror, in the movies? Might it mean really good makeup for the middle-aged star? Soft focus? Other forms of special effects that reproduce the work of cosmetic surgery? It is of particular relevance here that recent developments in television technology have produced what is called a “skin contouring” camera that makes wrinkles disappear. In a TV Guide article rife with puns about “vanity video” and “video collagen” we are told of this “indispensable tool for TV personalities of a certain age” that “can give a soap opera ingenue a few extra years of playing an ingenue” but was first used “as a news division innovation” to make aging news anchors look younger. According to one news director, the camera “can remove almost all of someone's wrinkles, without affecting their hair or eyes.” However, for the “top talents” who “get a little lift from the latest in special effects,…the magic only lasts as long as the stars remain in front of the camera.”6 This marvelous television camera aside, however, just how far can these special effects that substitute for cosmetic surgery take you—how long before really good makeup transforms you into a grotesque, before soft focus blurs you into invisibility, before special effects transform you into a witch, a ghoul, or a monster? Perhaps this is the cinematic equivalent of attitude adjustment. The alternative to cosmetic surgery in what passes for the verisimilitude of cinematic realism is a change in genre, a transformation of sensibility that takes us from the “real” world that demonizes middle-aged women to the world of “irreal” female demons: horror, science fiction, and fantasy.
Indeed, a number of years ago I published an essay on several low-budget science fiction / horror films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s that focused on middle-aged female characters.7 I was interested in these critically neglected films because, working through genres deemed fantastic, they were able to displace and disguise cultural anxieties about women and aging while simultaneously figuring them in your face, so to speak. For example, in Attack of the 50-Ft. Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958), through a brief (and laughable) transformative encounter with a giant space alien, wealthy, childless, middle-aged, and brunette Nancy achieves a literal size, power, and youthful blondeness her philandering husband, Harry, can no longer ignore as she roams the countryside, wearing a bra and sarong made out of her bed linens, looking for him. In The Wasp Woman (Roger Corman, 1959) Janet Starlin, the fortyish and fading owner of a similarly fading cosmetics empire, can no longer serve as the model for advertising her products (“Return to Youth with Janice Starlin!”) and overdoses in secret experiments with royal “wasp jelly,” which not only reduces but also reverses the aging process. There are, however, side effects, which regularly turn the again youthful cosmetics queen into a murderous insect queen (with high heels, a sheath dress, and a wasp's head). And, in The Leech Woman (Edward Dein, 1960), blowzy, alcoholic, despised June becomes her feckless endocrinologist husband's guinea pig as they intrude on an obscure African village to find a secret “rejuvenation serum.” Made from orchid pollen mixed with male pituitary fluid (the extraction of which kills its donors), the serum allows June to experience, if only for a while, the simultaneous pleasures of youth, beauty, and revenge—in the tribal ritual of her transformation, she chooses her husband as pituitary donor. The Leech Woman is the most blatant of these movies about ageism, not only in plot but also in dialogue. The wizened African woman who offers June her youth speaks before the ritual:
For a man, old age has rewards. If he is wise, the gray hairs bring dignity and he is treated with honor and respect. But for the aged woman, there is nothing. At best, she's pitied. More often, her lot is of contempt and neglect. What woman lives who has passed the prime of her life who would not give her remaining years to reclaim even for a few moments of joy and happiness and know the worship of men. For the end of life should be its moment of triumph. So it is with the aged women of Nandos, a last flowering of love, beauty—before death.
In each of these low-budget SF-horror films scared middle-aged women are transformed into rejuvenated but scary women—this not through cosmetic surgery but through fantastical means, makeup, and special effects. Introduced as fading (and childless) females still informed by—but an affront to—sexual desire and the process of biological reproduction, hovering on the brink of grotesquerie and alcoholism, their flesh explicitly disgusting to the men in their lives, these women are figured as more horrible in—and more horrified by—their own middle-aged bodies than in or by the bodies of the “unnatural” monsters they become. In this regard Linda Williams's important essay, “When the Woman Looks,” is illuminating. Williams argues that there is an affinity declared and a look of recognition and sympathy exchanged between the heroine and the monster in the horror film. The SF-horror films mentioned here, however, collapse the distance of this exchange into a single look of self-recognition. Touching on this conflation of woman and monster in its link with aging, Williams writes:
There is not that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned. (In one brand of horror film this difference may simply lie in the age of its female stars. The Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords considered too old to continue as spectacle-objects nevertheless persevere as horror objects in films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962] and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte [1965]).8
Indeed, such horror and SF films dramatize what one psychotherapist describes as the culture's “almost visceral disgust for the older woman as a physical being,” and they certainly underscore “ageism” as “the last bastion of sexism.”9 These films also recall, particularly in the male—and self—disgust they generate, Simone de Beauvoir's genuine (if, by today's standards, problematic) lament:
[W]oman is haunted by the horror of growing old…. [T]o hold her husband and to assure herself of his protection,…it is necessary for her to be attractive, to please…. What is to become of her when she no longer has any hold on him? This is what she anxiously asks herself while she helplessly looks on at the degeneration of this fleshly object which she identifies with herself. She puts up a battle. But hair-dye, skin treatments, plastic surgery, will never do more than prolong her dying youth…. But when the first hints come of that fated and irreversible process which is to destroy the whole edifice built up during puberty, she feels the fatal touch of death itself.10
How, in the face of this cultural context, as a face in this cultural context, could a woman not yearn for a rejuvenation serum, not want to realize quite literally the youth and power she once seemed to have? In the cinematic—and moral—imagination of the low-budget SF-horror films I've described above, aging and abject women are thus “unnaturally” transformed. Become suddenly young, beautiful, desirable, powerful, horrendous, monstrous, and deadly, each plays out grand, if wacky, dramas of poetic justice. No plastic surgery here. Instead, through the technological magic of cinema, the irrational magic of fantasy, and a few cheesy low-budget effects, what we get is major “attitude adjustment”—and of a scope that might even satisfy Barbra. The leech woman, wasp woman, and fifty-foot woman each literalize, magnify, and enact hyperbolic displays of anger and desire, their youth and beauty represented now as lethal and fatal, their unnatural ascendance to power allowing them to avenge on a grand scale the wrongs done them for merely getting older. Yet, not surprisingly, these films also maintain the cultural status quo—even as they critique it. For what they figure as most grotesque and disgusting is not the monstrousness of the transformation or the monster but rather the “unnatural” conjunction of middle-aged female flesh and still-youthful female desire. And—take heed, Barbra—the actresses who play these pathetic and horrific middle-aged women are always young and beautiful under their latex jowls and aging makeup. Thus, what these fantasies of female rejuvenation give with one hand, they take back with the other. They represent less a grand masquerade of feminist resistance than a retrograde striptease that undermines the double-edged and very temporary narrative power these transformed and empowered middle-aged protagonists supposedly enjoy—that is, “getting their own back” before they eventually “get theirs.” And, as is the “natural” order of things in both patriarchal culture and SF-horror films of this sort, they do get theirs—each narrative ending with the restoration and reproduction of social (and ageist) order through the death of its eponymous heroine-monster. Attitude adjustment, indeed!
These low-budget films observe that middle-aged women—as much before as after their transformations and attitude adjustments—are pretty scary. In Attack of the 50-Ft. Woman, for example, as Nancy lies in her bedroom after her close encounter of the third kind but before she looms large on the horizon, her doctor explains to her husband the “real cause” of both her “wild” story of an alien encounter and her strange behavior: “When women reach the age of maturity, Mother Nature sometimes overworks their frustration to a point of irrationalism.” The screenwriter must have read Freud, who, writing on obsessional neurosis in 1913, tells us: “It is well known, and has been a matter for much complaint, that women often alter strangely in character after they have abandoned their genital functions. They become quarrelsome, peevish, and argumentative, petty and miserly; in fact, they display sadistic and anal-erotic traits which were not theirs in the era of womanliness.”11
Which brings us back again to Barbra, whom it turns out we never really left at all. In language akin to Freud's, the article on the production woes of Barbra's film in Entertainment Weekly performs its own form of ageist (psychoanalysis. The “steep attrition rate” among cast and crew and the protracted shooting schedule are attributed to both her “hyper-picky” “perfectionism” and to her being a “meddler” (8). We are also told: “Among the things she fretted over: the density of her panty hose, the bras she wore, and whether the trees would have falling leaves” (9). A leech woman, wasp woman, fifty-foot woman—in Freud's terms, an obsessional neurotic: peevish, argumentative, petty, sadistic, and anal-erotic. Poor Barbra. She can't win for losing. Larger than life, marauding the Hollywood countryside in designer clothes and an “adjusted” attitude doesn't get her far from the fear or contempt that attaches to middle-aged women in our culture.
Perhaps Barbara—perhaps I—should reconsider cosmetic surgery. Around ten years younger than Barbra and me and anxious about losing the looks she perceived as the real source of her power, my best friend recently did—although I didn't see the results until long after her operation. Admittedly, I was afraid to: afraid she'd look bad (that is, not like herself or like she had surgery), afraid she'd look good (that is, good enough to make me want to do it). Separated by physical distance, however, I didn't have to confront—and judge—her image, so all I initially knew about her extensive facelift was from e-mail correspondence. (I have permission to use her words but not her name.) Here, in my face, so to speak, as well as hers were extraordinary convergences of despised flesh, monstrous acts, and malleable image (first “alienated” and later proudly “possessed”). Here, in the very prose of her postings, was the conjunction of actuality and wish, of surgery and cinema, of transformative technologies and the “magic” of “special effects”—all rendered intimately intelligible to us (whether we approve or not) in terms of mortal time and female gender. She wrote, “IT WORKED!” And then she continued:
My eyes look larger than Audrey Hepburn's in her prime.…I am the proud owner of a fifteen-year old's neckline. Amazing—exactly the effect I'd hoped for. Still swollen…but that was all predicted. What this tendon-tightening lift did (not by any means purely “skin deep”—he actually…redraped the major neck and jaw infrastructure) was reverse the effects of gravity. Under the eyes—utterly smooth, many crow's feet eradicated. The jawline—every suspicion of jowl has been erased. Smooth and tight. Boy, do I look good. The neck—the Candice Bergen turkey neck is gone. The tendons that produce that stringy effect have been severed—forever! OK—what price (besides the $7000) did I pay? Four hours on the operating table. One night of hell due to…a compression bandage that made me feel as if I were being choked. Mercifully (and thanks to Valium) I got through it…. Extremely tight from ear to ear—jaw with little range of motion—“ate” liquids, jello, soup, scrambled eggs for the first week. My sutures extend around 80% of my head: Bride of Frankenstein city. All (except for the exquisitely fine line under my eyes) are hidden in my hair. But baby I know they're there. Strange reverse-phantom limb sensation. I still have my ears, but I can't exactly feel them.…I took Valium each evening the first week to counteract the tendency toward panic as I tried to fall asleep and realized that I could only move Vi inch in any direction. Very minimal bruising—I'm told that's not the rule.…I still have a very faint chartreuse glow under one eye. With makeup, voila! I can't jut my chin out—can barely make my upper and lower teeth meet at the front. In a few more months, that will relax. And I can live with it. My hair, which was cut, shaved and even removed (along with sections of my scalp), has lost all semblance of structured style. But that too is transitory. The work that was done by the surgeon will last a good seven years. I plan to have my upper eyes done in about three years. This message is for your eyes only. I intend, if pressed, to reveal that I have had my eyes done. Period. Nothing more.12
But there's plenty more. And it foregrounds the confusions and conflations of surgery and cinema, technology and “magic,” of effort and ease, that so pervade our current image culture. Indeed, there is a bitter irony at work here. Having willfully achieved a “seamless” face, my best friend has willingly lost her voice. She refuses to speak further of the time and labor and pain it took to transform her. The whole point is that, for the magic to work, the seams—both the lines traced by age and the scars traced by surgery—must not show. Thus, as Kathleen Woodward notes in her wonderful essay “Youthfulness as Masquerade”: “Unlike the hysterical body, whose surface is inscribed with symptoms, the objective of the surgically youthful body is to speak nothing.”13 But this is not the only irony at work here. At a more structural level this very lack of disclosure, this silence and secrecy, is an essential (if paradoxical) element of a culture increasingly driven—by both desire and technology—to extreme extroversion, to utter disclosure. It is here that cosmetic surgery and the special effects of the cinema converge and are perceived as phenomenologically reversible in what has become our current morphological imagination. Based on the belief that desire—through technology—can be materialized, made visible, and thus “realized,” such morphological imagination does a perverse, and precisely superficial, turn on Woodward's distinction between the hysterical body that displays symptoms and the surgically youthful body that silences such display. That is, symptoms and silence are conflated as the image of one's transformation and one's transformation of the image become reversible phenomena. These confusions and conflations are dramatized most literally, of course, in the genre of fantasy, where “plastic surgery” is now practiced through the seemingly effortless, seamless transformations of digital morphing.
Indeed, the morphological figurations of fantasy cinema not only allegorize impossible human wish and desire but also extrude and thus fulfill them. In this regard two such live-action films come to mind, each not only making visible (and seemingly effortless) incredible alterations of an unprecedented plastic and elastic human body but also rendering human affective states with unprecedented superficiality and literalism. The films are Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992) and The Mask (Chuck Russell, 1994)—both technologically dependent on digital morphing, both figuring the whole of human existence as extrusional, superficial, and plastic. The Mask, about the transformation and rejuvenation of the male psyche and spirit, significantly plays its drama out on—and as—the surface of the body. When wimpy Stanley Ipkiss is magically transformed by the ancient mask he finds, there is no masquerade, no silence, since every desire, every psychic metaphor, is extroverted, materialized, and made visible. His tongue “hangs out” and unrolls across the table toward the object of his desire. He literally “wears his heart on his sleeve” (or thereabouts). His destructive desires are extruded from his hands as smoking guns. Thus, despite the fact that one might describe Jim Carrey's performance as “hysterical,” how can one possibly talk about the Mask's body in terms of hysterical “symptoms” when everything “hangs out” as extroverted id and nothing is repressed “inside” or “deep down”? Which makes it both amusing and apposite, then, that one reviewer says of The Mask: “The effects are show-stopping, but the film's hollowness makes the overall result curiously depressing.”14 Here, indeed, there is no inside, there are no symptoms, there is no silence; there is only display.
Death Becomes Her functions in a similar manner, although, here, with women as the central figures, the narrative explicitly foregrounds age and literal rejuvenation as its central thematic—youth and beauty are the correlated objects of female desire. Indeed, what's most interesting (although not necessarily funny) about Death Becomes Her is that plastic surgery operates in the film twice over. At the narrative level its wimpy hero, Ernest Menville, is a famous plastic surgeon—seduced away from his fiancee, Helen, by middle aging actress Madeline Ashton, whom we first see starring in a musical flop based on Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth. Thanks to Ernest's surgical skill (which we never actually see on the screen), Madeline finds a whole new career as a movie star. Here, J. G. Ballard, in a chapter of his The Atrocity Exhibition called “Princess Margaret's Face Lift,” might well be glossing Madeline's motivations in relation to Ernest in Death Becomes Her. Ballard writes: “In a TV interview…the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions…as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.'”15 Death Becomes Her plays out this initial fantasy but goes on to exhaust the merely human powers of Madeline's surgeon husband to avail itself of “magic”—both through narrative and “special” morphological effects. Seven quick years of screen time into the marriage, henpecked, alcoholic Ernest is no longer much use to Madeline. Told by her beautician that he—and cosmetic surgery—can no longer help her, the desperate woman seeks out a mysterious and incredibly beautiful “Beverly Hills cult priestess” (significantly played by onetime Lancome pitchwoman, Isabella Rossellini), who gives her a youth serum that grants eternal life, whatever the condition of the user's body.
At this point the operation of plastic surgery extends from the narrative to the representational level. Indeed, Death Becomes Her presents us with the first digitally produced skin—and the “magic” transformations of special computergraphic and cosmetic effects instantaneously nip and tuck Madeline's buttocks, smooth and lift her face and breasts with nary a twinge of discomfort, a trace of blood, or a trice of effort, and reproduce her as “young.” Indeed, what Rossellini's priestess says of the youth serum might also be said of the cinematic effects: “A touch of magic in this world obsessed by science.” Thus, in the service of instant wish fulfillment this phrase in the narrative disavows not only the extensive calculations of labor and time involved in its own digital effects but also the labor and time entailed by the science and practice of cosmetic surgery.
The film's literalization of anxiety and desire in relation to aging is carried further still. That is, inevitably, the repressed signs of age return and are also reproduced and literalized along with the signs of youth and beauty. When rejuvenated Madeline breaks her neck after being pushed down a flight of stairs by Ernest, she lives on (although medically dead) with visible and hyperbolic variations of my friend's despised “Candace Bergen turkey neck.” (Her celebration of the fact that “the tendons that produce that stringy effect have been severed—forever!” certainly resonates here in the terrible, but funny, computergraphic corkscrewing of Madeline's neck after her fatal fall.) And, after Madeline shoots the returned and vengeful Helen (who has also taken the serum), Helen walks around with a hole in her stomach—a “blasted” and “hollow” woman, however youthful. (“I can see right through you,” Madeline says to her.) Ultimately, the film unites the two women—“Mad” and “Hel”—in their increasingly unsuccessful attempts to maintain their literally dead and peeling skin, to keep from “letting themselves go,” from “falling apart”—which, at the film's end, they quite literally do.
In both The Mask and Death Becomes Her cinematic effects and plastic surgery become reversible representational operations—literalizing desire and promising instant and effortless transformation. Human bodily existence is foregrounded as a material surface amenable to endless manipulation and total visibility. However, there is yet a great silence, a great invisibility, grounding these narratives of surface and extroversion. The labor, effort, and time entailed by the real operations of plastic surgery (both cinematic and cosmetic) are ultimately disavowed. Instead, we are given a screen image (both psychoanalytic and literal) that attributes the laborious, costly, and technologically based reality that underlies bodily transformation to the nontechnological properties of, in the one instance, the mask, a primitive and magical fetish, and in the other, a glowing potion with “a touch of magic.” Of course, like all cases of disavowal, these fantasies turn in and around on themselves like a Mobius strip to ultimately break the silence and reveal the repressed on the same side as the visible screen image.
That is, on the screen side the technological effects of these transformation fantasies are what we came for, what we want “in our face.” But we want these effects without wanting to see the technology, without wanting to acknowledge the cost, labor, time, and effort of its operations—all of which might curb our desire, despoil our wonder, and generate fear of pain and death. As Larissa MacFarquhar notes: “Surely, the eroticizng of cosmetic surgery is a sign that the surgery is no longer a gory means to a culturally dictated end but, rather, an end in itself.”16 Indeed, like my friend who wants the effects of her face-lift to be seen but wants the facts of her costly, laborious, lengthy, and painful operation to remain hidden, our pleasure comes precisely from this “appearance” of seamless, effortless, “magical” transformation. Yet on the other repressed side we are fascinated by the operation—its very cost, difficulty, effortfulness. We cannot help but bring them to visibility. There are now magazines, videos, and Web sites devoted to making visible not only the specific operations of cinematic effects but also surgical effects. (Perhaps the most “in your face” of these can be found on a Web site called—no joke—“Dermatology in the Cinema,” where dermatologist Dr. Vail Reese does a film survey of movie stars' skin conditions, both real and cinematic.)17 These tell-all revelations are made auratic by their previous repression and through a minute accounting of the technology involved, hours spent, effort spent, dollars spent. My friend, too, despite her desire for secrecy, is fascinated by her operation and the visibility of her investment. Her numeracy extends from money to stitches but is most poignant in its temporal lived dimensions: four hours on the operating table, one night of hell, a week of limited jaw motion, time for her hair to grow back, a few months for her upper and lower jaws to “relax,” three years before she will do her eyelids, seven years before the surgeon's work is undone again by time and gravity. The “magic” of plastic surgery (both cinematic and cosmetic) costs always an irrecoverable—and irrepressible—portion of a mortal life.
And a mortal life must live through its operations, not magically, instantaneously, but in time. It is thus apposite and poignant that, offscreen, Isabella Rossellini, who plays and is fixed forever as the eternal high priestess of youth and beauty in both Death Becomes Her and old Lancome cosmetic ads, has joined the ranks of the onscreen “wasp woman,” Janet Starlin. After fourteen years as the “face” of Lancome cosmetics, she was fired at age forty-two for getting “too old.”18 Unlike the wasp woman, however, Rossellini can neither completely reverse the aging process nor murder those who find her middle-aged flesh disgusting. Thus, it is also apposite and poignant that attempts to reproduce the fantasies of the morphological imagination in the real world are doomed to failure: medical cosmetic surgery never quite matches up to the seemingly effortless and perfect plastic surgeries of cinema and computer. This disappointment with the real thing becomes ironically explicit when representational fantasies incorporate the real to take a documentary turn. Discussing the real face-lift and its aftermath of a soap opera actress incorporated into the soap's televised narrative, Woodward cites one critic's observation that “the viewer inspects the results and concludes that they are woefully disappointing.”19
This disappointment with the “real thing” also becomes explicit in my friend's continuing e-mails. Along with specific descriptions of her further healing, she wrote:
Vivian, I'm going through an unsettling part of this surgical journey. When I first got home, the effect was quite dramatic—I literally looked twenty years younger. Now what's happened: the swelling continues to go down, the outlines of the “new face” are still dramatically lifted. BUT, the lines I've acquired through a lifetime of smiling, talking, being a highly expressive individual, are returning. Not all of them—but enough that the effect of the procedure is now quite natural and I no longer look twenty years younger. Maybe ten max…. I'm experiencing a queasy depression. Imagining that the procedure didn't work. That in a few weeks I'll look like I did before the money and the lengthy discomfort. Now I scrutinize, I imagine, I am learning to hate the whole thing. Most of all, the heady sense of exhilaration and confidence is gone. In short, I have no idea any longer how the hell I look.
Which brings me back to myself before the mirror—and again to Barbra, both behind and in front of the camera. There is no way here for any of us to feel superior in sensibility to my friend. Whether we like it or not, as part of our culture, we have all had “our eyes done.” As Jean Baudrillard writes: “We are under the sway of a surgical compulsion that seeks to excise negative characteristics and remodel things synthetically into ideal forms. Cosmetic surgery: a face's chance configuration, its beauty or ugliness, its distinctive traits, its negative traits—all these have to be corrected, so as to produce something more beautiful than beautiful: an ideal face.”20 With or without medical surgery we have been technologically altered, both seeing differently and seeming different than we did in a time before either cinema or cosmetic surgery presented us with their reversible technological promises of immortality and idealized figurations of magical self-transformation—that is, transformation without time, without effort, without cost.
To a great extent, then, the bodily transformations of cinema and surgery inform each other. Cinema is cosmetic surgery—its fantasies, its makeup, and its digital effects able to “fix” (in the doubled sense of repair and stasis) and to fetishize and to reproduce faces and time as both “unreel” before us. And, reversibly, cosmetic surgery is cinema, creating us as an image we not only learn to enact in a repetition compulsion but also must—and never can—live up to. Through their technological “operations”—the work and cost effectively hidden by the surface “magic” of their transitory effects, the cultural values of youth and beauty effectively reproduced and fixed—we have become subjectively “derealized” and out of sequence with ourselves as, paradoxically, these same operations have allowed us to objectively reproduce and “realize” our flesh “in our own image.” These days, as MacFarquhar puts it, “sometimes pain, mutilation, and even death are acceptable risks in the pursuit of perfection”—and this because the plasticity of the image (and our imagination) has overwhelmed the reality of the flesh and its limits. Indeed, as of 1996, “three million three hundred and fifty thousand cosmetic surgical procedures were performed, and more than one and a half million pounds of fat were liposuctioned out of nearly three hundred thousand men and women.”21
Over e-mail, increments of my friend's ambiguous “recovery” from realizing her fantasies of transformation and rejuvenation seemed to be in direct proportion to the diminishing number of years young she felt she looked: “Vivian, I've calmed down, assessed the pluses and minuses and decided to just fucking go on with it. Life, that is. They call it a ‘lift' for a reason…. The face doesn't look younger (oh, I guess I've shaved five to eight years off), but it looks better. OK. Fine. Now it's time to move on.” But later the fantasy of realization reemerges—for the time being, at least, with real and sanguine consequences: “Vivian, the response has been terrific—everybody is dazzled, but they can't quite tell why. It must be the color I'm wearing, they say, or my hair, or that I am rested. At any rate, I feel empowered again.”
In sum, I don't know how to end this—nor could I imagine at the time of my friend's rejuvenation how, without cosmetic surgery, Barbra would end her version of The Mirror Has Two Faces. Thus, not only for herself, but also for the wasp woman, for my friend, for Isabella Rossellini, and for me, I hoped that Barbra—both onscreen and off—would survive her own cinematic reproduction. Unfortunately, she did not. “Attitude adjustment” was overwhelmed by image adjustment in her finished film: to wit, a diet, furious exercise, good makeup, a new hairdo, and a Donna Karan little black dress. Despite all her dialogue, Barbra had nothing to say; instead, like my friend, she silenced and repressed her own middle-aging—first, reducing it to a generalized discourse on inner and outer beauty and then displacing and replacing it on the face and in the voice of her bitter, jealous, “once beautiful,” and “much older” mother (played by the still spectacular Lauren Bacall). Barbra's attitude, then, hadn't adjusted at all.22
Susan Bordo ponders “the glossy world” of media imagery that “feeds our eyes and focuses our desires on creamy skin, perfect hair, bodies that refuse awkwardness and age. It delights us like visual candy, but it also makes us sick with who we are and offers remedies that promise to close the gap—at a price.”23 I finally did get to see my rejuvenated friend in the flesh. She looked pretty much the same to me. And, at the 1996 Academy Awards (for which the song in The Mirror Has Two Faces received the film's only nomination), Barbra was still being characterized by the press as “peevish” and “petty.” And that wasn't all, poor woman (money and voice aside). Two years after linking Barbra with her SF-horror film counterparts and ironically figuring her as marauding the countryside as a middle-aged monster in designer clothes, I found my imagination elaborately realized in a 1998 episode of the animated television series, South Park. Here was featured a huge “MechaStreisand” trashing the town like Godzilla. Tellingly, one of the South Park kids asks: “Who is Barbra Streisand?” and is answered thus: “She's a really old lady who wants everybody to think she's forty-five.” This coincidence may seem uncanny but, indeed, suggests just how pervasively middle-aged women, particularly those with power like Streisand, are demonized and made monstrous in our present culture.
I, in the meantime, have become more comfortable in my ever-aging skin. I'm old enough now to feel distant from the omnipresent appeals around me to “look younger” and to “do” something about it. Indeed, after my friend's surgery I vowed to be kinder to my mirror image. In the glass (or on the screen), that image is, after all, thin and chimerical, whereas I, on my side of it, am grounded in the fleshy thickness and productivity of a life, in the substance—not the reproduced surface—of endless transformation. Thus, now each time I start to fixate on a new line or wrinkle or graying hair in the mirror, now each time I envy a youthful face on the screen, I am quick to remember that on my side of the image I am not so much ever aging as always becoming.
1. James Atlas, “The Sandwich Generation,” New Yorker, Oct. 13, 1997, 59.
2. Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging,” reprinted in No Longer Young: The Older Woman in America (Ann Arbor: Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan/Wayne State University Press, 1975), 31. (Sontag's original article was published in Saturday Review, Sep. 1972, 29-38.) Sontag's insights are echoed in the epigraphs that begin this chapter; see Ann Gerike, “On Gray Hair and Oppressed Brains,” in Women, Aging, and Ageism, ed. Evelyn R. Rosenthal (New York: Haworth, 1990), 38; and Elissa Melamed, Mirror, Mirror; The Terror of Not Being Young (New York: Linden Press/Simon and Schuster, 1983), 30.
3. I‘ve invoked these images before in an earlier companion piece on aging. See Vivian Sobchack, “Revenge of The Leech Woman: On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Film, ” in Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture, ed. Rodney Sappington and Tyler Stallings (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994), 79-91. The specific film characters mentioned here-now icons for certain generations of women—occur, respectively, in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and Whatever Happened to BabyJane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962).
4. New Yorker, Feb. 19 and 26, 2001, 166.
5. Jeffrey Wells, “Mirror, Mirror,” Entertainment Weekly, Apr. 12, 1996, 8. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
6. J. Max Robins, “A New Wrinkle in Video Technology,” TV Guide (Los Angeles metropolitan edition), Sep. 28-Oct. 4, 1996, 57. The news anchors who have benefited from the camera and their ages at the time of the TV Guide piece were Dan Rather, 64; Peter Jennings, 58; Tom Brokaw, 56; and Barbara Walters, 65.
7. See Sobchack, “Revenge of The Leech Woman.”
8. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 21.
9. Melamed, Mirror, Mirror, 30.
10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Bantam, 1968), 542.
11. Sigmund Freud, “The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis,” in Collected Papers, vol. 1, ed. Ernest Jones, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1950) 130.
12. An illuminating comparison might be made between my friend's detailing of her cosmetic surgery and its aftermath with J. G. Ballard's “Princess Margaret's Face Lift,” in The Atrocity Exhibition, new rev. ed. (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1990), 111-12. It's opening paragraph reads (and note the focus again on jowls and neck): “As Princess Margaret reached middle age, the skin of both her cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. Her naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along her jaw fell forward. Her jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of her neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex” (111). For similar graphic description see also Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Face Age,” New Yorker, July 21, 1997, 68: “Consider the brutal beauty of the face-lift…. If you're getting a blepharoplasty (an eye job), the doctor will slice open the top of each of your eyelids, peel the skin back, and trim the fat underneath with a scalpel, or a laser. If you're also in for a brow-lift, the doctor might carve you to the bone from the top of your forehead down along your hairline; slowly tear the skin away from the bloody muck it's attached to underneath; and then stretch it back and staple it near the hairline. You may suffer blindness, paralysis, or death as a consequence, but most likely you'll be fine.”
13. Kathleen Woodward, “Youthfulness as Masquerade,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (fall-winter 1988-89, 133-34.
14. CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide, review of The Mask, dir. Chuck Russell, Cinemania 96, CD-ROM (Microsoft, 1992-95).
15. Ballard, “Princess Margaret's Face Lift,” 111.
16. MacFarquhar, “The Face Age,” 68.
17. See http://www.skinema.com (accessed Oct. 24, 2003).
18. For more on the Lancôme episode and Rossellini's bitterness about it see Isabella Rossellini, Some of Me (New York: Random House, 1997).
19. Woodward, “Youthfulness as Masquerade,” 135. (Woodward is citing film and cultural critic Patricia Mellencamp.)
20. Jean Baudrillard, “Operational Whitewash,” in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1993), 45. Of special interest in surgically constructing the ideal face is the French performance artist Orlan, who has publicly undergone any number of surgeries in an ironic attempt to achieve the forehead of Mona Lisa, the eyes of Psyche (from Gérôme), the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the mouth of Boucher's Europa, and the nose from an anonymous sixteenth-century painting of Diana. On Orlan and the connection between special effects and cosmetic surgery see Victoria Duckett, “Beyond the Body: Orlan and the Material Morph,” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 209-23.
21. MacFarquhar, “The Face Age,” 68. In regard to the meaning of these statistics (and I don't fully agree with her), MacFarquhar writes: “It doesn't make sense to think about cosmetic surgery as a feminist issue these days, since more and more men—a fifth of all patients in 1996—are electing to undergo it” (68).
22. For a particularly devastating but accurate (and funny) send-up of The Mirror Has Two Faces see the pseudonymous Libby Gelman-Waxner's “Pretty Is as Pretty Does,” Premiere 10, no. 6 (Feb. 1997). Reading the film's central thematic as asking and responding to Streisand's increasingly desperate question “Is Barbra pretty?,” Gelman-Waxner also recognizes the displaced age issue—and, dealing with the confrontation scene between daughter and mother in which the latter reveals her jealousy and finally admits her daughter's beauty, she writes: “Watching a 54-year-old movie star haranguing her mother onscreen is a very special moment; it's like seeing the perfect therapy payoff, where your mom writes a formal note of apology for your childhood and has it printed as a full-page ad in the Times” (38).
23. Susan Bordo, “In an Empire of Images, the End of a Fairy Tale,” Chronicle of HigherEducation, Sep. 19, 1997, B8.
