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
