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 Her presents us with the first digitally produced skin—and the “magic” transformations of special computergraphic and cosmetic effects instantaneously nip and tuck Madeline's buttocks, smooth and lift her face and breasts with nary a twinge of discomfort, a trace of blood, or a trice of effort, and reproduce her as “young.” Indeed, what Rossellini's priestess says of the youth serum might also be said of the cinematic effects: “A touch of magic in this world obsessed by science.” Thus, in the service of instant wish fulfillment this phrase in the narrative disavows not only the extensive calculations of labor and time involved in its own digital effects but also the labor and time entailed by the science and practice of cosmetic surgery.
The film's literalization of anxiety and desire in relation to aging is carried further still. That is, inevitably, the repressed signs of age return and are also reproduced and literalized along with the signs of youth and beauty. When rejuvenated Madeline breaks her neck after being pushed down a flight of stairs by Ernest, she lives on (although medically dead) with visible and hyperbolic variations of my friend's despised “Candace Bergen turkey neck.” (Her celebration of the fact that “the tendons that produce that stringy effect have been severed—forever!” certainly resonates here in the terrible, but funny, computergraphic corkscrewing of Madeline's neck after her fatal fall.) And, after Madeline shoots the returned and vengeful Helen (who has also taken the serum), Helen walks around with a hole in her stomach—a “blasted” and “hollow” woman, however youthful. (“I can see right through you,” Madeline says to her.) Ultimately, the film unites the two women—“Mad” and “Hel”—in their increasingly unsuccessful attempts to maintain their literally dead and peeling skin, to keep from “letting themselves go,” from “falling apart”—which, at the film's end, they quite literally do.
In both The Mask and Death Becomes Her cinematic effects and plastic surgery become reversible representational operations—literalizing desire and promising instant and effortless transformation. Human bodily existence is foregrounded as a material surface amenable to endless manipulation and total visibility. However, there is yet a great silence, a great invisibility, grounding these narratives of surface and extroversion. The labor, effort, and time entailed by the real operations of plastic surgery (both cinematic and cosmetic) are ultimately disavowed. Instead, we are given a screen image (both psychoanalytic and literal) that attributes the laborious, costly, and technologically based reality that underlies bodily transformation to the nontechnological properties of, in the one instance, the mask, a primitive and magical fetish, and in the other, a glowing potion with “a touch of magic.” Of course, like all cases of disavowal, these fantasies turn in and around on themselves like a Mobius strip to ultimately break the silence and reveal the repressed on the same side as the visible screen image.
That is, on the screen side the technological effects of these transformation fantasies are what we came for, what we want “in our face.” But we want these effects without wanting to see the technology, without wanting to acknowledge the cost, labor, time, and effort of its operations—all of which might curb our desire, despoil our wonder, and generate fear of pain and death. As Larissa MacFarquhar notes: “Surely, the eroticizng of cosmetic surgery is a sign that the surgery is no longer a gory means to a culturally dictated end but, rather, an end in itself.”16 Indeed, like my friend who wants the effects of her face-lift to be seen but wants the facts of her costly, laborious, lengthy, and painful operation to remain hidden, our pleasure comes precisely from this “appearance” of seamless, effortless, “magical” transformation. Yet on the other repressed side we are fascinated by the operation—its very cost, difficulty, effortfulness. We cannot help but bring them to visibility. There are now magazines, videos, and Web sites devoted to making visible not only the specific operations of cinematic effects but also surgical effects. (Perhaps the most “in your face” of these can be found on a Web site called—no joke—“Dermatology in the Cinema,” where dermatologist Dr. Vail Reese does a film survey of movie stars' skin conditions, both real and cinematic.)17 These tell-all revelations are made auratic by their previous repression and through a minute accounting of the technology involved, hours spent, effort spent, dollars spent. My friend, too, despite her desire for secrecy, is fascinated by her operation and the visibility of her investment. Her numeracy extends from money
