who might otherwise ignore the popular music soundtrack or miss its textual significations in other parts of the episode, the visual representation of the process of musical selection here emphasizes the role of popular music in establishing surgical aesthetics by incorporating audio technology in the diegesis. We pay more attention to the music because we see the moment that Garner describes, the particular circumstances in which music is played, and the way that music is activated; thus, we are visually primed to think about what we will hear during the surgical sequence. Activating the stereo sets the plastic surgery in motion and prepares viewers for shots of scalpels and medical technologies penetrating the surface of the body.
FIGURE 6.2. Activation of the Bang Olufsen stereo in the operating room draws attention to the series’ use of popular music to help turn surgical sequences into televisual spectacles.
The sounds that emanate from the Bang Olufsen stereo directly affect our understanding of narrative and embodiment. The deployment of songs creates a critical commentary on what racialized, classed, and gendered bodies matter most in the cityscape of Miami, twists the meanings of pop and rock tunes, and calls attention to the construction of both the on-screen bodies and the televisual spectacle. In the episode “Montana/Sassy/Justice,” Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs” plays during a surgery on a woman’s “cankles.” In the second season premiere, “Erica Naughton,” the Bang Olufsen stereo plays Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” during a facial reconstruction on Libby Zucker to repair some of the physical damage from a gunshot wound. These songs fit part of the “sonic fingerprint” of the series in that they use older songs for ironic/satirical effect; however, these songs may also work to treat surgical procedures as grotesque. The often upbeat songs, guitar riffs, and rock production aesthetic may render these sequences more disturbing and alienating for the viewer, as upbeat popular music achieves a contrapuntal quality when juxtaposed with the images.
Popular music gains some of its representational power from the lyrical allusion to embodiment, but this is not the only way that popular music affects meaning in the series. Popular songs that have been previously featured in high-profile soundtracks carry their previous significations into Nip/Tuck. For instance, during the third season premiere, “Momma Boone,” “Stuck in the Middle with You” plays in the McNamara/Troy operating room as Sean performs a silicone implant replacement surgery. Sean takes over five hours to remove all the leaking silicone from just one breast and then has to put in a new implant before he can even move on to the other breast. Silicone sticks to his surgical gloves, forcing him to stop, put on new gloves, and continue to work. This sequence, with its disturbing visuals, encourages the viewer to link plastic surgery with mutilation. The song’s prior usage in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs further encourages this reading as Tarantino famously used the song to highlight a scene where one protagonist tortures a captured cop and cuts off the cop’s ear. Thus, Murphy and Bloom draw not only on the 1970s classic rock hit, but also on intertextual allusions linking the song to forms of mutilation in the minds of many of Nip/Tuck’s audience members. Yet, even without knowledge of the intertextuality at work here, audience members are likely to be disturbed by the juxtaposition of the singer’s throaty voice, danceable guitar rhythms, and early 1970s folk/rock sound with the visual track of the episode and be prompted to consider whether plastic surgeons are healers or carvers. This sequence can also be seen as setting up one of the central themes of the season, which features a serial killer called the Carver and openly questions what value should be attached to plastic surgeons and their craft.
The song lyrics themselves often remind us that we are watching bodies being opened and reconstructed on-screen. The use of “Poison Arrow” by the British New Wave 1980s band ABC in the episode “Antonia Ramos” further illustrates the role that lyrics in classic songs play in emphasizing the embodied aesthetics of surgery. Featured prominently in the first four minutes of the episode, the nondiegetic song plays as Sean and Christian are called to a hotel room on the seedy side of Miami to take care of a woman (Antonia Ramos) whose breast implants are leaking heroin. Ramos had agreed to smuggle heroin for drug lord Escobar Gallardo in exchange for a contract with what turns out to be a nonexistent Miami modeling agency. The lyrics of ABC’s New Wave pop song are about romantic love and the potential for partners to hurt each other with the “poison arrow” of words. On one level, the placement of this song works to connect emotional and physical pain. For Antonia Ramos, the “poison arrow” is both a physical and a psychological one—surgery to have heroin-filled implants placed in her breast, unexpected complications that lead to her near death and a long recovery, surgery to have the implants removed, and imminent deportation once it is discovered that she has no work visa and the modeling agency doesn’t exist. To sum up the textual role of “Poison Arrow” as ironic/satirical is to ignore the song’s larger role in the narrative, where it further highlights the female, poor, and Latina bodies that “count” less in the Miami cityscape. While such bodies are marginalized within the real Miami, in Nip/Tuck they are also used as “exotic” plot points and “disposable” one-off characters in a series largely about the anxieties of middle-aged white heterosexual professionals.
Murphy and Bloom also make musical choices that take advantage of lyrical allusions and reward insider musical knowledge. Using music that is well known to target demographics deepens narrative comprehension for specific audiences and works to treat embodiment and plastic surgery as politically and socially contested terms within the series. In “Sophia Lopez, Part II,” for example, the title of Tori Amos’s “A Sorta Fairytale” is itself resonant, but Murphy and Bloom’s choice of this song also draws on Amos’s star positioning and her politicized fanbase. The music of Tori Amos, a recording artist with a huge gay, lesbian, and feminist audience who has done active political work for gender and sexual rights, is used to highlight Lopez’s struggle for belonging and comfort in her own body. In the episode, Sophia Lopez, a recurring character, is undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Earlier in the season, Sophia had helped to expose Sean’s mentor, who operated an unsafe and unsanitary practice and who had butchered members of the Miami transgender community. When Sophia expressed her misgivings about helping Sean try to shut down his mentor—namely, that for her and other working-class men and women this surgeon was their only option—Sean agreed to perform the rest of Lopez’s surgeries pro bono.
Before the song begins, an operating room controversy erupts when a nurse tells Sean that Sophia has smuggled in something underneath her gown. Sophia confesses, revealing a picture of her son Raymond, and Sean tells the nurse to wrap the framed picture in a sterile bag and let Sophia hold it in the surgery. As Lopez counts back from ten while Liz administers the anesthesia, “A Sorta Fairytale” begins playing.
This sequence exhibits one common pattern of music licensing in contemporary television drama, where an extended song clip accompanies a montage to close the episode. Thus, while Amos’s “A Sorta Fairytale” may be perceived as diegetic music, occurring within the fictional world of the program (although we don’t always see the stereo being turned on in every surgery scene), the song becomes part of the nondiegetic soundtrack once we leave the operating room and we see Sean and Christian in their homes. In the operating room, Amos’s song calls attention to the politically contested nature of embodiment. The content of the song, about an emotional breakup, is far from the romantic fairytale implied by the song title and refrain. Amos’s performance on the Bosendorfer piano and backup musicians’ performances on acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and drums work to create a kind of dreamy soundscape. While the refrain invokes Lopez’s fantasy of social acceptance, the repetition of the lyrical refrain, “a sorta fairytale,” along with the plaintive to wistful to morose quality of Amos’s vocals call attention to the fact that even after this surgery, Sophia Lopez will have to fight for social acceptance and for bodies like hers to be valued in the public sphere.
The song, together with the visuals—the framed picture of the patient’s son, our previous knowledge of Lopez as a recurring character in the series—highlight the economic, psychological, and physical struggles faced by transgender
