It is 7:30 on a weeknight. Your boss made you work late and you are rushing home, hoping there will be enough leftovers in the fridge for your supper. You hate to admit it, but you are addicted to reality TV. Tonight your favorite show is on, you don’t have Tivo, and you never did figure out how to program your VCR. The dramatic theme music is just starting, and the television screen flashes pictures of the three or four chosen ones. Each was destined to be unattractive and undesirable but now is about to be made queen (or king) for a day or perhaps even forever.
Welcome to cosmetic surgery reality television. We are living in an age of fantasy presented as reality staged as fantasy. Even though reality television is a global phenomenon, perhaps no country has managed to produce it in such excess as has the United States. This country is the land of self-invention and reinvention, home of gargantuan stores devoted to do- it- yourself home improvement projects and more than 3,000 self-proclaimed cosmetic surgeons in the state of California alone.
Surgery has been a popular topic in visual media for decades, but in the early years of television most stories were serious documentaries about heart surgery, reconstructive cosmetic surgery, and other medical subjects that appealed to the public’s curiosity. Then in 1984 actress Jeanne Cooper had her facelift filmed, and clips of the operation were incorporated into her story line on the soap opera The Young and the Restless. The airing of that surgery opened the media floodgates. The event received tremendous attention it not only put cosmetic surgery squarely within the sights of the average viewer, it succeeded in pandering to the voyeur in us all. (It also became arguably the defining moment of Ms. Cooper’s career. CBS now refers to it as “the first daytime broadcast of an extreme makeover.”) Since then press coverage of cosmetic surgery and related topics has steadily increased, culminating in today’s seemingly limitless public appetite for makeover stories.
One author likened the processcess of undergoing cosmetic surgery to that of joining a religious cult one must undergo a period of intense self- scrutiny that leads to self- mortification. In the processcess the individual must relinquish control to others and endure a certain amount of physical pain. Ultimately, one is reborn to much rejoicing. 1 Whether or not this fairly characterizes all cosmetic interventions, it certainly fits the portrayals of participants on Extreme Make over, one of the most popular cosmetic surgery reality shows. Fans of cinematic and televised fiction know that the sequence of mutilation or surgery, cocooning, and unveiling never fails to delight.
In the 1947 film Dark Passage, Lauren Bacall unwraps Humphrey Bogart’s face after his cosmetic surgery, undertaken to deceive law enforcement officers. Similarly, John Randolph’s character undergoes cosmetic surgery and his new visage “revealed” (now played by Rock Hudson) in the 1966 thriller Seconds. In one of the most popular episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone called “The Eye of the Beholder,” a doctor repeatedly treats a horribly ugly woman in an attempt to salvage her appearance.
As her bandages are unwrapped for the last time the audience holds its breath. The results are shocking: The doctor and the nurses are repulsed by her per sistent ugliness; members of the television audience for the first time see the patient’s beautiful (to them) face and the grotesque, piglike faces of the medical team.
So it is with every unveiling; the audience is titillated with the possibility of the results being either spectacularly good or spectacularly bad. The only way that a show’s producers can lose is if there is only moderate change, in other words, more like typical real-life results. That would not garner big ratings.
Yet none of this is new. History is full of public demonstrations of cosmetic surgery and other dramatic treatments, going back for centuries. Beauty doctors of the early 1900s had no qualms about staging dramatic self-promotional events, and the press was eager to write about them. In fact, many of the stories about cosmetic surgery to which the American public was treated in the 1920s and 1930s smelled suspiciously like publicity stunts.
Outlaws and other celebrities underwent cosmetic surgery that was gleefully reported in the press. One of the most notorious events was the 1923 rhinoplasty of famous vaudeville actress Fanny Brice, performed in a hotel room by a surgeon of ill repute who eventually went to prison for fraud. The next year the New York Daily Mirror sponsored a “Homely Girl Contest,” in which the winner received an offer of free cosmetic surgery. Her outcome was not reported.
Then, in 1931, one might say that the cosmetic surgery reality show was born. In that year Dr. J. Howard Crum was invited to perform a public face-lift before a large crowd at the Beauty Shop Owners Convention in the Grand Ballroom of the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City. The patient, a sixty-year-old actress, had a relatively limited amount of excess skin removed from her face, far less surgery than would be performed during a conventional modern facelift. Nonetheless, the event was deemed a success and duly reported in the newspapers.
Dr. Crum, who rapidly developed a reputation as a huckster and was disavowed by mainstream medicine, went on to orchestrate numerous highly publicized cosmetic surgery performances, sometimes doing multiple operations at the same event accompanied by music. He seemed to be fond of “type-changing” nose operations and probably appreciated the extra press he got when members of his audience fainted during the “show.”
Dr. Crum was hardly the last person of his generation to stage public cosmetic surgery events. The tradition continues today, and not only with reality television. The notorious French performance artist Orlan, whose motto is “My body is my art,” has filmed her on going series of cosmetic surgeries, by which she has requested that her surgeon give her the facial features of ancient female icons. Her procedures, also set to music, take place in an operating room decorated with props, male strippers, and a surgical team dressed in costumes. Orlan insists on local anesthesia so that she can talk, joke, read aloud, and direct the entire performance. Later, she incorporates footage from these films into her lectures and from her studio sells bits of her tissue to the highest bidder.
In recent years more intimate versions of these events occur regularly in hotel rooms, spas, and private homes. People gather with friends, or even strangers, to undergo a variety of not-so-private treatments in a party atmosphere.
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