What follows, in this context, is less an argument than a meditation on these confusions as they are phenomenologically experienced, imagined, and represented in contemporary American culture, where the dread of aging—particularly by women—is dramatized and allayed both through the wish-fulfilling fantasies of rejuvenation in certain American movies and the more general, if correlated, faith in the “magic” and “quick fixes” of “special effects,” both cinematic and surgical. This conjunction of aging women, cinema, and surgery is also the conjunction of aesthetics and ethics, foregrounding not merely cultural criteria of beauty and desirability but also their very real as well as representational consequences. As Susan Sontag writes: “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathology—intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men. It is particularly women who experience growing older with distaste and even shame.”2
Thus, it is not surprising that, at sixty-three and as a woman with the privilege of self-reflection, I am always struggling with such distaste and shame in response to the various processes and cultural determinations of my own aging. Indeed, for a long time, despite my attempts at intellectual rationalization, cultural critique, or humor, I found myself unable to dismiss a recurrent image—one that still horrifies me as I reinvoke it. The image? It's me and her, an other—and as her subjective object of a face has aged, the blusher I've worn every morning since I was a teenager has migrated and condensed itself into two distinct and ridiculously intense red circles in the middle of her cheeks. This image—which correspondingly brings a subjective flush of shame and humiliation to my cheeks for the pity and unwilling disgust and contempt with which I objectively regard hers—is that of an aging woman who not only deceives herself into thinking she is still young enough to wear makeup, and poorly applies it, but who also inscribes on her face the caricature both of her own desire and of all that was once (at least to some) desirable. This is not only my face but also the face of clutchy and desperate Norma Desmond. It is whatever happened to Baby Jane, the child star who never grew up but did grow old: ludicrous, grotesque, overpowdered and rouged, mascara and lipstick bleeding into and around her wrinkled eyes and mouth, maniacally proclaiming an energy that defies containment, that refuses invisibility and contempt.3
Although I no longer imagine the extremity of my blusher converging into shameful red circles on my cheeks or fear producing the chilling whiteface of the self-deluded Baby Jane, I still despair of ever being able to reconcile my overall sense of well-being, self-confidence, achievement, and pleasure in the richness of my present with the problematic and often distressing image I see in my mirror. Over the past several years, most of my exaggerated fantasies gone, I nonetheless have become aware not only of my mother's face frequently staring back at me from my own but also of an increasing inability to see myself with any real objectivity at all (as if I ever could). In less than a single minute I can go from utter dislocation and despair as I gaze at a face that seems too old for me, a face that I “have,” to a certain satisfying recognition and pleasure at a face that looks “pretty good for my age,” a face that I “am.” Most often, however, in the middle register between despair and self-satisfaction I stand before the mirror much like “The Vain but Realistic Queen” who intones, in a wonderful New Yorker cartoon, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall: Who—if she lost ten pounds and had her eyes and neck done, and had the right haircut, could, in her age group—be the fairest one of all?”4
Whatever my stance, I live now in heightened awareness of the instability of my image of myself, and I think about cosmetic surgery a lot: getting my eyes done, removing the furrows in my forehead, smoothing out the lines around my mouth, and lifting the skin around my jaw. But I am sure I would be disappointed. I know the effects wouldn't last—and I feel, perhaps irrationally but perhaps not, that there would be awful consequences. Indeed, after reading an earlier version of this essay, a friend told me the following joke: “One night, in a vision, God visits a seventy-five-year-old woman. ‘How much time do I have left to live?' she asks him; and he replies, ‘Thirty-five years.' Figuring that as long as she is going to live another thirty-five years, she might as well look young again, she spends the following year having a ton of cosmetic surgery: a face lift, a tummy tuck, her nose reshaped, liposuction, a whole makeover. After all this is finally done, she is hit by a car and killed instantly. Inside the pearly gates she angrily asks God, ‘What happened? I thought you said I had another thirty-five years.' And God replies: ‘Sorry, but I didn't recognize you.'” Indeed, I not only dread others not recognizing me, but I also dread not recognizing myself. I have this sense that surgery would put me physically and temporally out of sync with myself, would create of me an uncanny and disturbing double who would look the way I “was” and forcibly usurp the moment in which I presently “am.” There is a certain irony operative here, of course, since even without surgery I presently don't ever quite recognize myself or feel synchronous with my image when I look at it in mirrors or pictures. And so, although I don't avoid mirrors, I also don't seek them out, and I'm not particularly keen on being photographed. Rather, I try very hard to locate myself less in my image than in (how else to say it?) my “comportment.”
It is for this reason that I was particularly moved when I first read in Entertainment Weekly that Barbra Streisand (only a year younger than I am, a Brooklyn-born Jew, a persistent and passionate woman with a big mouth like me) was remaking and updating The Mirror Has Two Faces, a 1959 French film about a housewife who begins a new life after plastic surgery. Barbra's update was to tell the story of “an ugly duckling professor and her quest for inner and outer beauty”5 Obviously, given that I'm an aging academic woman who has never been secure about her looks, this struck a major chord. Discussing the film's progress and performing its own surgery (a hatchet job) on the middle-aged producer, director, and star, Entertainment Weekly reported that the “biggest challenge faced by the 54-year-old” and “hyper-picky” Barbra
was how to present her character. In the original, the mousy housefrau undergoes her transformation via plastic surgery. But Streisand rejected that idea—perhaps because of the negative message—and went with attitude adjustment instead. Which might work for the character, but does it work for the star? “Certain wrinkles and gravitational forces seem to be causing Streisand concern,” says one ex-crew member. “She doesn't want to look her age. She's fighting it” (9)
The Mirror—indeed—Has Two Faces. Except for the income and, of course, the ability to sing “People,” Barbra and I have a lot in common.
Before actually seeing the film (eventually released in 1996), I wondered just what, as a substitute for surgery, Barbra's “attitude adjustment” might mean. And how would it translate to the superficiality of an image—in the mirror, in the movies? Might it mean really good makeup for the middle-aged star? Soft focus? Other forms of special effects that reproduce the work of cosmetic surgery? It is of particular relevance here that recent developments in television technology have produced what is called a “skin contouring” camera that makes wrinkles disappear. In a TV Guide article rife with puns about “vanity video” and “video collagen” we are told of this “indispensable tool for TV personalities of a certain age” that “can give a soap opera ingenue a few extra years of playing an ingenue” but was first used “as a news division innovation” to make aging news anchors look younger. According to one news director, the camera “can remove almost all of someone's wrinkles, without affecting their hair or eyes.” However, for the “top talents” who “get a little lift from the latest in special effects,…the magic only lasts as long as the stars remain in front of the camera.”6 This marvelous television camera aside, however, just how far can these special effects that substitute for cosmetic surgery take you—how long before really good makeup transforms you into a grotesque, before soft focus blurs you into invisibility, before special effects transform you into a witch, a ghoul, or a monster? Perhaps this is the cinematic equivalent of attitude adjustment. The alternative to cosmetic surgery in what passes for the verisimilitude of cinematic realism is a change in genre, a transformation of sensibility that takes us from the “real” world that demonizes