Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Carnal Thoughts - Vivian Sobchack страница 13
35. Gray, Men Are from Mars, 21.
36. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, 63.
37. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing like a Girl,” in Throwinglike a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 141-59. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
38. It might be added that although there would be certain variations in the structure, ratio, and experience of the immanent/transcendent relationship to worldly space, the same might be said of human beings objectified as other on different bases than gender. In our present culture it would be predominantly persons of color, the disabled, the aged, the diseased, and the homeless. Insofar as it was made visible to others through manifest codes of behavior and dress, one could include homosexuals and lesbians—and the poor. For further discussion of this issue see the section “Whose Body? A Brief Meditation on Sexual Difference and Other Bodily Discriminations,” in my The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 143-63.
39. This telling distinction was revealed to me through an intense personal experience. After playing out a typical, very lengthy, and very hostile “lost couple” scenario, when I and my male companion arrived at our restaurant destination extremely late and were asked what happened by our hungry friends, I responded, “We got lost.” My companion, furious and clearly in denial, countered, “I was not lost; I made a wrong turn.” Note, along with the variance in interpretation of and cathexis to the event of our spatial disorientation, my plural attribution (less of guilt than of condition) and my companion's singular assumption of both agency and responsibility.
2
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