months for her upper and lower jaws to “relax,” three years before she will do her eyelids, seven years before the surgeon's work is undone again by time and gravity. The “magic” of plastic surgery (both cinematic and cosmetic) costs always an irrecoverable—and irrepressible—portion of a mortal life.
And a mortal life must live through its operations, not magically, instantaneously, but in time. It is thus apposite and poignant that, offscreen, Isabella Rossellini, who plays and is fixed forever as the eternal high priestess of youth and beauty in both Death Becomes Her and old Lancome cosmetic ads, has joined the ranks of the onscreen “wasp woman,” Janet Starlin. After fourteen years as the “face” of Lancome cosmetics, she was fired at age forty-two for getting “too old.”18 Unlike the wasp woman, however, Rossellini can neither completely reverse the aging process nor murder those who find her middle-aged flesh disgusting. Thus, it is also apposite and poignant that attempts to reproduce the fantasies of the morphological imagination in the real world are doomed to failure: medical cosmetic surgery never quite matches up to the seemingly effortless and perfect plastic surgeries of cinema and computer. This disappointment with the real thing becomes ironically explicit when representational fantasies incorporate the real to take a documentary turn. Discussing the real face-lift and its aftermath of a soap opera actress incorporated into the soap's televised narrative, Woodward cites one critic's observation that “the viewer inspects the results and concludes that they are woefully disappointing.”19
This disappointment with the “real thing” also becomes explicit in my friend's continuing e-mails. Along with specific descriptions of her further healing, she wrote:
Vivian, I'm going through an unsettling part of this surgical journey. When I first got home, the effect was quite dramatic—I literally looked twenty years younger. Now what's happened: the swelling continues to go down, the outlines of the “new face” are still dramatically lifted. BUT, the lines I've acquired through a lifetime of smiling, talking, being a highly expressive individual, are returning. Not all of them—but enough that the effect of the procedure is now quite natural and I no longer look twenty years younger. Maybe ten max…. I'm experiencing a queasy depression. Imagining that the procedure didn't work. That in a few weeks I'll look like I did before the money and the lengthy discomfort. Now I scrutinize, I imagine, I am learning to hate the whole thing. Most of all, the heady sense of exhilaration and confidence is gone. In short, I have no idea any longer how the hell I look.
Which brings me back to myself before the mirror—and again to Barbra, both behind and in front of the camera. There is no way here for any of us to feel superior in sensibility to my friend. Whether we like it or not, as part of our culture, we have all had “our eyes done.” As Jean Baudrillard writes: “We are under the sway of a surgical compulsion that seeks to excise negative characteristics and remodel things synthetically into ideal forms. Cosmetic surgery: a face's chance configuration, its beauty or ugliness, its distinctive traits, its negative traits—all these have to be corrected, so as to produce something more beautiful than beautiful: an ideal face.”20 With or without medical surgery we have been technologically altered, both seeing differently and seeming different than we did in a time before either cinema or cosmetic surgery presented us with their reversible technological promises of immortality and idealized figurations of magical self-transformation—that is, transformation without time, without effort, without cost.
To a great extent, then, the bodily transformations of cinema and surgery inform each other. Cinema is cosmetic surgery—its fantasies, its makeup, and its digital effects able to “fix” (in the doubled sense of repair and stasis) and to fetishize and to reproduce faces and time as both “unreel” before us. And, reversibly, cosmetic surgery is cinema, creating us as an image we not only learn to enact in a repetition compulsion but also must—and never can—live up to. Through their technological “operations”—the work and cost effectively hidden by the surface “magic” of their transitory effects, the cultural values of youth and beauty effectively reproduced and fixed—we have become subjectively “derealized” and out of sequence with ourselves as, paradoxically, these same operations have 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.
