face on the screen, I am quick to remember that on my side of the image I am not so much ever aging as always becoming.
1. James Atlas, “The Sandwich Generation,” New Yorker, Oct. 13, 1997, 59.
2. Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging,” reprinted in No Longer Young: The Older Woman in America (Ann Arbor: Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan/Wayne State University Press, 1975), 31. (Sontag's original article was published in Saturday Review, Sep. 1972, 29-38.) Sontag's insights are echoed in the epigraphs that begin this chapter; see Ann Gerike, “On Gray Hair and Oppressed Brains,” in Women, Aging, and Ageism, ed. Evelyn R. Rosenthal (New York: Haworth, 1990), 38; and Elissa Melamed, Mirror, Mirror; The Terror of Not Being Young (New York: Linden Press/Simon and Schuster, 1983), 30.
3. I‘ve invoked these images before in an earlier companion piece on aging. See Vivian Sobchack, “Revenge of The Leech Woman: On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Film, ” in Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture, ed. Rodney Sappington and Tyler Stallings (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994), 79-91. The specific film characters mentioned here-now icons for certain generations of women—occur, respectively, in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and Whatever Happened to BabyJane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962).
4. New Yorker, Feb. 19 and 26, 2001, 166.
5. Jeffrey Wells, “Mirror, Mirror,” Entertainment Weekly, Apr. 12, 1996, 8. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
6. J. Max Robins, “A New Wrinkle in Video Technology,” TV Guide (Los Angeles metropolitan edition), Sep. 28-Oct. 4, 1996, 57. The news anchors who have benefited from the camera and their ages at the time of the TV Guide piece were Dan Rather, 64; Peter Jennings, 58; Tom Brokaw, 56; and Barbara Walters, 65.
7. See Sobchack, “Revenge of The Leech Woman.”
8. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 21.
9. Melamed, Mirror, Mirror, 30.
10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Bantam, 1968), 542.
11. Sigmund Freud, “The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis,” in Collected Papers, vol. 1, ed. Ernest Jones, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1950) 130.
12. An illuminating comparison might be made between my friend's detailing of her cosmetic surgery and its aftermath with J. G. Ballard's “Princess Margaret's Face Lift,” in The Atrocity Exhibition, new rev. ed. (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1990), 111-12. It's opening paragraph reads (and note the focus again on jowls and neck): “As Princess Margaret reached middle age, the skin of both her cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. Her naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along her jaw fell forward. Her jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of her neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex” (111). For similar graphic description see also Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Face Age,” New Yorker, July 21, 1997, 68: “Consider the brutal beauty of the face-lift…. If you're getting a blepharoplasty (an eye job), the doctor will slice open the top of each of your eyelids, peel the skin back, and trim the fat underneath with a scalpel, or a laser. If you're also in for a brow-lift, the doctor might carve you to the bone from the top of your forehead down along your hairline; slowly tear the skin away from the bloody muck it's attached to underneath; and then stretch it back and staple it near the hairline. You may suffer blindness, paralysis, or death as a consequence, but most likely you'll be fine.”
13. Kathleen Woodward, “Youthfulness as Masquerade,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (fall-winter 1988-89, 133-34.
14. CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide, review of The Mask, dir. Chuck Russell, Cinemania 96, CD-ROM (Microsoft, 1992-95).
15. Ballard, “Princess Margaret's Face Lift,” 111.
16. MacFarquhar, “The Face Age,” 68.
17. See http://www.skinema.com (accessed Oct. 24, 2003).
18. For more on the Lancôme episode and Rossellini's bitterness about it see Isabella Rossellini, Some of Me (New York: Random House, 1997).
19. Woodward, “Youthfulness as Masquerade,” 135. (Woodward is citing film and cultural critic Patricia Mellencamp.)
20. Jean Baudrillard, “Operational Whitewash,” in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1993), 45. Of special interest in surgically constructing the ideal face is the French performance artist Orlan, who has publicly undergone any number of surgeries in an ironic attempt to achieve the forehead of Mona Lisa, the eyes of Psyche (from Gérôme), the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the mouth of Boucher's Europa, and the nose from an anonymous sixteenth-century painting of Diana. On Orlan and the connection between special effects and cosmetic surgery see Victoria Duckett, “Beyond the Body: Orlan and the Material Morph,” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 209-23.
21. MacFarquhar, “The Face Age,” 68. In regard to the meaning of these statistics (and I don't fully agree with her), MacFarquhar writes: “It doesn't make sense to think about cosmetic surgery as a feminist issue these days, since more and more men—a fifth of all patients in 1996—are electing to undergo it” (68).
22. For a particularly devastating but accurate (and funny) send-up of The Mirror Has Two Faces see the pseudonymous Libby Gelman-Waxner's “Pretty Is as Pretty Does,” Premiere 10, no. 6 (Feb. 1997). Reading the film's central thematic as asking and responding to Streisand's increasingly desperate question “Is Barbra pretty?,” Gelman-Waxner also recognizes the displaced age issue—and, dealing with the confrontation scene between daughter and mother in which the latter reveals her jealousy and finally admits her daughter's beauty, she writes: “Watching a 54-year-old movie star haranguing her mother onscreen is a very special moment; it's like seeing the perfect therapy payoff, where your mom writes a formal note of apology for your childhood and has it printed as a full-page ad in the Times” (38).
23. Susan Bordo, “In an Empire of Images, the End of a Fairy Tale,” Chronicle of HigherEducation, Sep. 19, 1997, B8.
3
What My Fingers Knew
The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh
[M]y body is not only an object among all objects,…but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them. —MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, Phenomenology of Perception
What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced. —ROLAND BARTHES, The Pleasure of the Text
Nearly every time I read a movie review in a newspaper or popular magazine, I am struck by the gap that exists between our actual experience of the cinema and the theory that we academic film scholars construct to explain it—or perhaps, more aptly, to explain it away. Take, for example, several descriptions in the popular press of Jane Campion's The Piano
