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
