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ON ORDER: BRAD PITT'S NOSE - A Lovelier You, With Off-the-Shelf Parts - By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
IT is a commonplace of anthropology that every culture has its own set of standards defining beauty. But in American culture - at least from the point of view of reality television - the parameters appear to be rapidly narrowing.
Viewers of "The Swan" on Fox and "Extreme Makeover" on ABC - reality programs that take pudgy, snaggle-toothed Americans and put them through a cosmetic-surgery juggernaut - know that at the end of each program the participants emerge, transformed, to the oohs and ahs of family, friends and surgeons.
But as the patients make their appearances, week after week, viewers have also begun to notice an eerie Stepford-spouse similarity. "They all get a chin implant, all get a brow lift, all get their lips done," said Dr. Z. Paul Lorenc, a New York plastic surgeon who has watched the programs.
The cheeks of the patients are all planed upward; lips are uniformly swollen to rubber-doll proportions; breasts stand at military attention. The men have new superhero chins. Mouths, to a person, are packed with teeth as big and white as Chiclets.
Critics of American popular culture have long looked down their noses at the quest for bland conformity. We are a nation, they say, of follow-me consumerism. We all wear the same clothes, eat at the same restaurants and drive the same S.U.V.'s. But these television shows seem to signal that the herd mentality has reached alarming new levels. Are we now all going to have the same face - one that looks like whoever is on the cover of Us magazine?
Dr. Nancy Etcoff, author of "Survival of the Prettiest: the Science of Beauty" (Anchor, 2000) and an instructor in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, said the assembly-line look ultimately damages the notion of personal identity. "We are in danger of doing something unthinkable, which is making beauty boring," Dr. Etcoff said. "When it is all so overtly about appearance, personal identity becomes almost trivial. It's as if people would rather choose a mask, than look like themselves, or their mother, or daughter."
In some social sets, it is a simple fact of life that one will have some major procedure every year. In March, for example, when Lionel Richie's 37-year-old wife filed for divorce in Los Angeles, her list of financial demands included $20,000 a year for plastic surgery. Bruce Wagner, the Los Angeles writer whose novels focus on the dissolution and anomie of contemporary life, regards the current interest in surgical enhancement as a terminally adolescent desire for acceptance.
"I grew up in Beverly Hills, where 25 years ago the summers were the time when girls and boys had their noses done," Mr. Wagner said. "But the fact that we now watch it, uncensored, and what might have been considered lurid, ghoulish or macabre even five seasons back is now part of sweeps week shows just how bent the culture has become. There is an addiction to conformity that is bred in the bone."
Who do all these surgically enhanced people want to look like? "Our religion is celebrity, and our gods are celebrities," Dr. Haworth said. "When we conform to the dictates of taste, that's who we look to."
"Any place on the body where you can have an ideal, cosmetic surgery will cater to that ideal," said Marilyn Yalom, author of "A History of the Breast" (Knopf, 1997). "You had a certain kind of pointed breast that was popular in the 50's. In the 80's, it was softer and bigger. Now, it's a large, almost muscular breast. It is a very interactive relationship between cultural icons and the plastic surgeons themselves."
But there is something chilling in the way that patients today see Pamela Anderson, an obvious consumer of cosmetic surgery, as a paradigm of beauty. Will we become a nation of plastic-surgery pod people? But others believe that the plastic surgery craze plays to the nation's tendency to favor youth over experience, the immediate over the past.
George Orwell said that at 50, every man has the face he deserves, noted Christopher Hitchens, the Vanity Fair columnist. To erase the lines of one's face is a way of destroying one's history.
"And that does mean something about your character," Mr. Hitchens said. "At least in the sense that if you decide to obliterate it and fall in step with a lot of other people who have obliterated it, you may in fact end up looking like nothing else on earth. You may be blank."
full article
IT is a commonplace of anthropology that every culture has its own set of standards defining beauty. But in American culture - at least from the point of view of reality television - the parameters appear to be rapidly narrowing.
Viewers of "The Swan" on Fox and "Extreme Makeover" on ABC - reality programs that take pudgy, snaggle-toothed Americans and put them through a cosmetic-surgery juggernaut - know that at the end of each program the participants emerge, transformed, to the oohs and ahs of family, friends and surgeons.
But as the patients make their appearances, week after week, viewers have also begun to notice an eerie Stepford-spouse similarity. "They all get a chin implant, all get a brow lift, all get their lips done," said Dr. Z. Paul Lorenc, a New York plastic surgeon who has watched the programs.
The cheeks of the patients are all planed upward; lips are uniformly swollen to rubber-doll proportions; breasts stand at military attention. The men have new superhero chins. Mouths, to a person, are packed with teeth as big and white as Chiclets.
Critics of American popular culture have long looked down their noses at the quest for bland conformity. We are a nation, they say, of follow-me consumerism. We all wear the same clothes, eat at the same restaurants and drive the same S.U.V.'s. But these television shows seem to signal that the herd mentality has reached alarming new levels. Are we now all going to have the same face - one that looks like whoever is on the cover of Us magazine?
Dr. Nancy Etcoff, author of "Survival of the Prettiest: the Science of Beauty" (Anchor, 2000) and an instructor in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, said the assembly-line look ultimately damages the notion of personal identity. "We are in danger of doing something unthinkable, which is making beauty boring," Dr. Etcoff said. "When it is all so overtly about appearance, personal identity becomes almost trivial. It's as if people would rather choose a mask, than look like themselves, or their mother, or daughter."
In some social sets, it is a simple fact of life that one will have some major procedure every year. In March, for example, when Lionel Richie's 37-year-old wife filed for divorce in Los Angeles, her list of financial demands included $20,000 a year for plastic surgery. Bruce Wagner, the Los Angeles writer whose novels focus on the dissolution and anomie of contemporary life, regards the current interest in surgical enhancement as a terminally adolescent desire for acceptance.
"I grew up in Beverly Hills, where 25 years ago the summers were the time when girls and boys had their noses done," Mr. Wagner said. "But the fact that we now watch it, uncensored, and what might have been considered lurid, ghoulish or macabre even five seasons back is now part of sweeps week shows just how bent the culture has become. There is an addiction to conformity that is bred in the bone."
Who do all these surgically enhanced people want to look like? "Our religion is celebrity, and our gods are celebrities," Dr. Haworth said. "When we conform to the dictates of taste, that's who we look to."
"Any place on the body where you can have an ideal, cosmetic surgery will cater to that ideal," said Marilyn Yalom, author of "A History of the Breast" (Knopf, 1997). "You had a certain kind of pointed breast that was popular in the 50's. In the 80's, it was softer and bigger. Now, it's a large, almost muscular breast. It is a very interactive relationship between cultural icons and the plastic surgeons themselves."
But there is something chilling in the way that patients today see Pamela Anderson, an obvious consumer of cosmetic surgery, as a paradigm of beauty. Will we become a nation of plastic-surgery pod people? But others believe that the plastic surgery craze plays to the nation's tendency to favor youth over experience, the immediate over the past.
George Orwell said that at 50, every man has the face he deserves, noted Christopher Hitchens, the Vanity Fair columnist. To erase the lines of one's face is a way of destroying one's history.
"And that does mean something about your character," Mr. Hitchens said. "At least in the sense that if you decide to obliterate it and fall in step with a lot of other people who have obliterated it, you may in fact end up looking like nothing else on earth. You may be blank."
full article
