With the Oscars tonight, many people mistakenly believe that the important question is who will win? Annette Benning for The Kids are All Right or Natalie Portman for Black Swan? But the awards at the Oscars are just smoke and mirrors. What we really should care about is not who wins, but what they look like. From the fashion victories and faux pas to the far more important question of whether they look “old” or “too plastic,” we will study the faces and bodies of our Hollywood gods and goddesses, especially the goddesses, the way other tribes study the entrails of ritual sacrifices: as a sign of how we should behave.
More than 75 years ago, anthropologist Marcel Maus wrote that ordinary humans were beginning to imitate film stars. Maus saw this as part of a universal human trend of “prestigious imitation.” In other words, we always imitate the people in our tribe with the most prestige: the village elders, the Queen, our mothers or older siblings, Hollywood stars. The difference is that prior to the cinematic age, we imitated people we actually knew or had at least seen in some royal procession. What happened with the invention of Hollywood is we started to imitate not actual people, but two-dimensional, highly edited images of people. This is what Maus’s contemporary, Walter Benjamin, pointed to as the problem of pretending there is an original in the age of mechanical reproduction.
It’s no accident that when we started to imitate these copies of human beings, rather than their originals, we started to feel mighty disappointed with the way we looked. After all, we didn’t live real life with make-up artists, good lighting, and of course, cosmetic surgery. All that changed about 20 years ago when credit—especially medical credit—became available to us regular folks. All of a sudden a plain Jane like me who did not make a lot of money could go into a surgeon’s office, sign on the dotted line, and take out credit for about 30 percent interest. The result? The democratization of cosmetically enhanced bodies—all of them attempting to look like the cosmetically enhanced bodies we worship on the big screen. Eighty-five percent of cosmetic surgery is paid for with credit and the people getting it are not Hollywood stars, but nurses and teachers and cops. In fact, people who make less than $60,000 a year account for over 70 percent of cosmetic-surgery patients.
That’s why us regular folks, salivating to see our gods and goddesses appear at the Oscars on our TVs, will be searching for signs from them. They must tell us what is beautiful and what is hideous. What procedures are “necessary” and what procedures are going “too far.” One of the most interesting moments will be to see the image of Annette Benning, who appears to have had no cosmetic procedures despite her 52 years, crows feet and a slightly sagging jaw line. Annette Benning’s “natural” look (meaning not surgically enhanced, but obviously we are all engaged in the body project and therefore hardly natural) will be compared to her co-nominees, like Nicole Kidman, whose breast implants were criticized for being “uneven” and whose ever-ballooning lips have been the subject of many a nasty blog thread.
We will study these goddesses and look carefully for their signs. If Benning shows up “refreshed” with a facelift or Botox, the writing will be on the wall: Go into Debt to Go Under the Knife! If Benning shows up without any visible cosmetic enhancements and the press dubs her “tired” or “unattractive,” we will also know what to do. If the other stars show up looking perfectly plastic and yet stunning, we will have to weigh a non-surgical aging against engaging in the battle of staying young forever, a battle whose victory would obviously be Pyrrhic since no matter how young we look, we will all still die of old age (if we’re lucky).
But the truth is, we all already know who will win. The ones who look the youngest and most beautiful in the two-dimensional space of our TV’s will win. And so will plastic and the debt that makes it possible for most Americans. Cosmetic surgery rose 5 percent in 2010, bucking the economic trends. Most of it was still paid for with credit. Most of it was still consumed not by Hollywood stars, but by average Americans. The Oscars are just one of the important ritual sacrifices of the aging body to the gods of technology and greed. We already know how it turns out, but we’ll watch it anyway. Just in case this is the year that the gods reverse their ways and offer up the aging Benning as the most prestigious among us.
