Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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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