The film's literalization of anxiety and desire in relation to aging is carried further still. That is, inevitably, the repressed signs of age return and are also reproduced and literalized along with the signs of youth and beauty. When rejuvenated Madeline breaks her neck after being pushed down a flight of stairs by Ernest, she lives on (although medically dead) with visible and hyperbolic variations of my friend's despised “Candace Bergen turkey neck.” (Her celebration of the fact that “the tendons that produce that stringy effect have been severed—forever!” certainly resonates here in the terrible, but funny, computergraphic corkscrewing of Madeline's neck after her fatal fall.) And, after Madeline shoots the returned and vengeful Helen (who has also taken the serum), Helen walks around with a hole in her stomach—a “blasted” and “hollow” woman, however youthful. (“I can see right through you,” Madeline says to her.) Ultimately, the film unites the two women—“Mad” and “Hel”—in their increasingly unsuccessful attempts to maintain their literally dead and peeling skin, to keep from “letting themselves go,” from “falling apart”—which, at the film's end, they quite literally do.
In both The Mask and Death Becomes Her cinematic effects and plastic surgery become reversible representational operations—literalizing desire and promising instant and effortless transformation. Human bodily existence is foregrounded as a material surface amenable to endless manipulation and total visibility. However, there is yet a great silence, a great invisibility, grounding these narratives of surface and extroversion. The labor, effort, and time entailed by the real operations of plastic surgery (both cinematic and cosmetic) are ultimately disavowed. Instead, we are given a screen image (both psychoanalytic and literal) that attributes the laborious, costly, and technologically based reality that underlies bodily transformation to the nontechnological properties of, in the one instance, the mask, a primitive and magical fetish, and in the other, a glowing potion with “a touch of magic.” Of course, like all cases of disavowal, these fantasies turn in and around on themselves like a Mobius strip to ultimately break the silence and reveal the repressed on the same side as the visible screen image.
That is, on the screen side the technological effects of these transformation fantasies are what we came for, what we want “in our face.” But we want these effects without wanting to see the technology, without wanting to acknowledge the cost, labor, time, and effort of its operations—all of which might curb our desire, despoil our wonder, and generate fear of pain and death. As Larissa MacFarquhar notes: “Surely, the eroticizng of cosmetic surgery is a sign that the surgery is no longer a gory means to a culturally dictated end but, rather, an end in itself.”16 Indeed, like my friend who wants the effects of her face-lift to be seen but wants the facts of her costly, laborious, lengthy, and painful operation to remain hidden, our pleasure comes precisely from this “appearance” of seamless, effortless, “magical” transformation. Yet on the other repressed side we are fascinated by the operation—its very cost, difficulty, effortfulness. We cannot help but bring them to visibility. There are now magazines, videos, and Web sites devoted to making visible not only the specific operations of cinematic effects but also surgical effects. (Perhaps the most “in your face” of these can be found on a Web site called—no joke—“Dermatology in the Cinema,” where dermatologist Dr. Vail Reese does a film survey of movie stars' skin conditions, both real and cinematic.)17 These tell-all revelations are made auratic by their previous repression and through a minute accounting of the technology involved, hours spent, effort spent, dollars spent. My friend, too, despite her desire for secrecy, is fascinated by her operation and the visibility of her investment. Her numeracy extends from money to stitches but is most poignant in its temporal lived dimensions: four hours on the operating table, one night of hell, a week of limited jaw motion, time for her hair to grow back, a few months for her upper and lower jaws to “relax,” three years before she will do her eyelids, seven years before the surgeon's work is undone again by time and gravity. The “magic” of plastic surgery (both cinematic and cosmetic) costs always an irrecoverable—and irrepressible—portion of a mortal life.
And a mortal life must live through its operations, not magically, instantaneously, but in time. It is thus apposite and poignant that, offscreen, Isabella Rossellini, who plays and is fixed forever as the eternal high priestess of youth and beauty in both Death Becomes Her and old Lancome cosmetic ads, has joined the ranks of the onscreen “wasp woman,” Janet Starlin. After fourteen years as the “face” of Lancome cosmetics, she was fired at age forty-two for getting “too old.”18 Unlike the wasp woman, however, Rossellini can neither completely reverse the aging process nor murder those who find her middle-aged flesh disgusting. Thus, it is also apposite and poignant that attempts to reproduce the fantasies of the morphological imagination in the real world are doomed to failure: medical cosmetic surgery never quite matches up to the seemingly effortless and perfect plastic surgeries of cinema and computer. This disappointment with the real thing becomes ironically explicit when representational fantasies incorporate the real to take a documentary turn. Discussing the real face-lift and its aftermath of a soap opera actress incorporated into the soap's televised narrative, Woodward cites one critic's observation that “the viewer inspects the results and concludes that they are woefully disappointing.”19
This disappointment with the “real thing” also becomes explicit in my friend's continuing e-mails. Along with specific descriptions of her further healing, she wrote:
Vivian, I'm going through an unsettling part of this surgical journey. When I first got home, the effect was quite dramatic—I literally looked twenty years younger. Now what's happened: the swelling continues to go down, the outlines of the “new face” are still dramatically lifted. BUT, the lines I've acquired through a lifetime of smiling, talking, being a highly expressive individual, are returning. Not all of them—but enough that the effect of the procedure is now quite natural and I no longer look twenty years younger. Maybe ten max…. I'm experiencing a queasy depression. Imagining that the procedure didn't work. That in a few weeks I'll look like I did before the money and the lengthy discomfort. Now I scrutinize, I imagine, I am learning to hate the whole thing. Most of all, the heady sense of exhilaration and confidence is gone. In short, I have no idea any longer how the hell I look.
Which brings me back to myself before the mirror—and again to Barbra, both behind and in front of the camera. There is no way here for any of us to feel superior in sensibility to my friend. Whether we like it or not, as part of our culture, we have all had “our eyes done.” As Jean Baudrillard writes: “We are under the sway of a surgical compulsion that seeks to excise negative characteristics and remodel things synthetically into ideal forms. Cosmetic surgery: a face's chance configuration, its beauty or ugliness, its distinctive traits, its negative traits—all these have to be corrected, so as to produce something more beautiful than beautiful: an ideal face.”20 With or without medical surgery we have been technologically altered, both seeing differently and seeming different than we did in a time before either cinema or cosmetic surgery presented us with their reversible technological promises of immortality and idealized figurations of magical self-transformation—that is, transformation without time, without effort, without cost.
To a great extent, then, the bodily transformations of cinema and surgery inform each other. Cinema is cosmetic surgery—its fantasies, its makeup, and its digital effects able to “fix” (in the doubled sense of repair and stasis) and to fetishize and to reproduce faces and time as both “unreel” before us. And, reversibly, cosmetic surgery is cinema, creating us as an image we not only learn to enact in a repetition compulsion but also must—and never can—live up to. Through their technological “operations”—the work and cost effectively hidden by the surface “magic” of their transitory effects, the cultural values of youth