According to Bloom, two major strategies for Nip/Tuck were to use “classic” rock tunes for ironic and/or satirical effect and to use “cool” newer tunes (mainly electronic music) to depict the superficial, slick world of South Beach and certain surgeries. Murphy and Bloom also repurposed songs that older audiences would remember from their original contexts and that could be viewed during the burgeoning 1970s and 1980s nostalgia trend by audiences too young to remember their original radio and MTV airplay. The series’ Miami location and the use of classic rock and pop songs may have reminded older viewers of the strategic deployment in Miami Vice of popular songs such as Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” but Nip/Tuck depicted a much grittier Miami than the earlier “big three” network series, which was produced during the decline of the classic network system, whereas Nip/Tuck was produced during what Amanda Lotz calls the transition to a “post-network era.”7
Bloom and Murphy decided to use the Bang Olufsen stereo in the operating room as a character of sorts in the series, and the music that the stereo plays is an important part of most surgical sequences.8 These sequences often begin with either anesthesiologist Liz Cruz or one of the nurses waving a gloved hand in front of the device in order to activate it and then zoom in on a spinning CD that is also the sync point for the start of the master recording. In effect, the program’s surgical sequences are set in motion by powering up audio technologies.
In addressing the textual and stylistic importance of highlighting the selection of music and the handling of listening technologies on the screen, Ken Garner argues that Quentin Tarantino’s films, especially Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, devote screen-time to the act of musical selection in ways that heighten the meaning of the music played, linking the process of playing music more directly to on-screen actions, character identifications, and narrative incidents.9 Extending Garner’s point to television style in Nip/Tuck, we can see Murphy and Bloom employing the Bang Olufsen stereo to call attention to the visual and sound styles of each particular surgery. For viewers 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