Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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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