Adventures in Heidi-reality II: Postmodernism and Plastic Surgery

“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” – Andy Warhol

As I wrote in my previous entry, “Adventures in Heidi-reality,” when I saw a tabloid article about Heidi Montag and the continuing saga of her G-cup breast implants, two things came to mind.

Still Life with G Cups (2010)

OK. Four things came to mind.

One of them was Umberto Eco and another was Tom Wesselmann.

Eco was the Italian cultural critic who coined the word “hyperreality,” which seemed to me useful for describing not just Montag’s augmented assets but the whole trend for anatomical enhancement among female celebrities – which can be found in the general population (at least those who can afford it).  The hyperreal is an example of the fake which becomes more desirable than the real.  It is perceived as “more real” than the real.

That this D-cup desire has reached the street is illustrated in the new movie Bad Teacher, in which Cameron Diaz plays a school teacher going to great and improper lengths to purchase a “boob job” so she can land the sugar daddy of her dreams.

Wesselmann, on the other hand, is famous for a series of paintings called Great American Nude.  As I contemplated Montag, I realized that Wesselmann was really on to something way back when in the 1960s.  He foresaw American popular culture’s obsession with an idealized, plasticized female breast.

When Americans think of the early 1960s, they probably think of Happy Days and Mad Men.  They think about Joanie loving Chachi and not fire-engine red nipples on large canvasses.  They think about Don Draper smoking cigarettes – lots and lots of cigarettes – and not a small group of artists in New York City giving birth to Pop Art.

Great American Nude #38

Actually, Madison Avenue and Pop Art go hand in hand, since many of the Pop artists used the visual language of advertising.  Although Wesselmann resisted the Pop Art label for himself, early in his career he was very much associated with it.  Why he was is clear in Great American Nude #38 from 1962.

He combines longstanding artistic conventions with images from American magazines. The basic structure of #38 is that of an odalisque, a painting tradition depicting a reclining nude woman.  Originally these paintings represented attractive young women from a Turkish harem, appealing to a European sense of the exotic and erotic.  But odalisque conventions were transferred to non-harem settings, such as the famous female nude portraits by Modigliani and Gauguin. 

Odalisque and Slave (1839)

Wesselmann’s nude woman reclines in much the same way as the woman in Odalisque and Slave by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, but she also seems to have been literally cut from a magazine ad and then pasted onto the canvas – after he removed her bikini.  Or she is a pin-up girl clipped from a men’s magazine.

This mash-up of high and low culture – the odalisque tradition with a Playboy centerfold – is a hallmark of postmodernism.   

Great American Nude #58

Wesselmann’s borrowing from advertising culture is even more apparent in Great American Nude #58 from 1965.  Here, the entire image could have been taken from a magazine ad -- except Wesselmann has again removed the clothing from the female and again has revealed startling tan lines. (I think I could do a whole blog entry on the meaning of tan lines.)  The revelatory nature of her nudity suggests Wesselmann’s message, if there is one: Beneath the surface of the advertisement’s message, sex is being used to sell the product.

But as his work developed, his nudes became more stylized and the breast became a major focus.  To become stylized, a sign or symbol loses detail.  One or two elements gain in their emphasis and others are de-emphasized or even disappear.  This process is true for what semiotics calls an "icon."  An icon tends to be created when a part of a person or object comes to stand for the whole. 

Great American Nude #85

For example, take Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #85 from 1966.  Note how few lines there are, how few details.  Red lips, red nipples, and a handful of curves have come to the foreground and other details have disappeared.  This is what we would call “an economy of style.”  Saying as much as possible with as few elements as possible.

Great American Nude #38 creates the sign of “visually and sexually appealing nude woman” with many more lines, curves and colors (we see the woman’s entire body, for instance) .  Great American Nude #85 creates the sign for “visually and sexually appealing nude woman” with fewer lines, curves, and colors than does Great American Nude #38.  The breast, or even just the nipple, becomes iconic of "woman," but also sex and pleasure.  Advertising and Hollywood then, in turn, associate that icon with their products.
 

Seascape

By 1967, the breasts become even more pronounced, perhaps swelling in relation to the amount of meaning they contain.  Wesselmann also increased his focus on the individual elements of the female nude until some works depicted just one body part to convey the erotic ideal.  Lips.  A breast.  A foot.

So what does this have to do with Heidi Montag?

I think we can view an obsession with cosmetic surgery as a kind of stylizing of the human body.  In order to achieve some ideal of human physical beauty, certain aspects get emphasized over others – cheekbones, chin, breasts, lips, etc. – sometimes obsessively so.  As with Wesselmann’s increasingly stylized female nude, the pursuit of the ideal human body often eliminates the details that had existed before.  We could say that human “flaws” (or individuality) reside in the details – wrinkles, for instance, or curves that deviate from the ideal.

Those are removed in the pursuit of the ideal.  As the details are lost, the expressions of the ideal begin to resemble each other.  Botoxed faces lose their wrinkles, but also their expressiveness.  As someone who lives in Southern California, I think I can say with some confidence that augmented breasts really do start to look alike.

In Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture, Sara Doris states that post-modern art depicts not encounters with the real but encounters with mediated images, with representations of the real.  (Hyperreality is about preferring representations over the real.)  She cites another critic, Douglas Crimp from 1977:

To an ever greater extent, our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema.  Next to those pictures, firsthand experience seems to retreat.

So women in Hollywood, and to an extent the rest of the country, begin to imitate, through surgery, those images that surround us.

Through its reptition from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, the breast became increasingly iconic for "sex and pleasure."  So a celebrity, such as Montag, could associate herself more closely and immediately with "sex and pleasure" by emphasizing her breasts.

Tony's hangout.

Montag is not alone in this career move.  The Bada Bings of the world are filled with examples, and several web sites are devoted to chronicling which female celebrities have implants.  And it should be noted that Montag has apparently followed through with her desire for breast reduction surgery (recent pics here).

Doris discusses post-modern art’s penchant for imitating advertising imagery and borrowing from other traditions and artists (in a way similar to contemporary musical artists sampling the works of others).  She describes this as a rejection of modernism’s “fetishes of authenticity and originality, as neither form nor subject were unique to the artist.  Thus art making became an act of self-negation rather than self-revelation or self-realization.”

That sounds harsher than I would like.  I do not judge Montag for what she did.  It is her body.  She is free to do with it what she wants.  As is any human.  I am not judging anyone, male or female, who elects to have cosmetic surgery.  I simply am trying to understand the origin of and the influences on the recent mania for mega-breasts.  And I am not saying it started with Wesselmann's art, but I think he somehow saw it coming.

I realize that Montag probably would disagree with applying Doris’s assessment to her.  She might say that her cosmetic surgeries (she has had several) helped her realize her potential rather than negate her individuality.  I also realize she is not indicative of most people who have cosmetic surgery.  A nip or tuck does not make one Cher.

But the extreme lengths to which she went do illustrate, I believe, something in the national consciousness about the beautiful and the erotic.  The ideal being pursued by some people has its origins in our media-saturated lives – or perhaps more accurately, its origins are in our media more than our lives.

Jack Sparrow and Erin Brockovich Fight the Power

Capt. Jack Sparrow, the
world's favorite underdog

Americans love to root for the underdog.  Despite living in the most powerful nation in the world, many people in the United States still identify most with the nation's humble beginnings -- an upstart set of colonies that managed to defeat Great Britain, which at that time was the most powerful nation in the world.

In this sense, the nation may not be much different from people who typically look to their past, especially their childhood, to understand what most shaped their adult personalities.  Sometimes they do this and ignore their more recent influences.

But underdogs need top dogs, and whom people choose as their top dog, as their bully, as their oppressive force, can possibly tell us something about the audience's values.

Lord Cutler Beckett

This came to mind recently when I watched the second and third installments of The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise on DVD in preparation for seeing the latest installment, On Stranger Tides, in the theater.  Although the British Empire is presented as an oppressive force in Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, powerful and global in its reach, the main top dog, the main villain, is the East India Trading Co., depicted as also powerful and global.  It is trying to destroy pirates around the world because they are bad for business.  Through its chairman, Lord Cutler Beckett (played by Tom Hollander), the East India Trading Co. is represented as greedy, oppressive, arrogant, deceitful, and not much fun.

Toward the end of the third film, Cutler Beckett is killed.  As his flagship is destroyed, he falls into the water.  A ghostly shot captures him sinking into the ocean enveloped in the flag of the East India Tea Co.  The image suggests that he has been brought down by his own plans, his own overreaching and conniving.  The image also suggests that the power of the evil corporation has been destroyed, at least temporarily.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

I thought it was interesting that he sinks in a corporate flag and not a national flag.  That makes sense in that Captain Jack Sparrow is not an American, and the film is set in a time before the American Revolution.  It also makes sense in that the film is intended for a global audience, and everyone around the world does not identify with the British as potential antagonists.  Great Britain is the stern father figure in America's rebellious childhood.  The rest of the world, not so much.

However, interpreting this choice of top dog from an American perspective, we can see it fits with a larger pattern.  Frequently the bad guy/top dog in popular films have been signifiers of corporate excess.

In Aliens, for instance, the company is more concerned about the financial possibilities of the chest-splitting monster than it is about the safety of its employees. 

In Avatar, it is a corporation and not a nation that seeks to destroy the Na'vi's Hometree in order to reach the mineral deposits beneath it.

Similarly, to name just a few films, corporations are the bad guys in Norma Rae, Silkwood, Erin Brockovich, The Insider, and Michael Clayton.

I like to look at the stories we tell as similar to dreams.  Like dreams, stories can provide clues to our deepest desires and fears.  But whereas dreams can provide insight into an individual, popular stories can provide insight into the society that enjoys them, into what we could call a collective unconscious.  This is especially true when we find many stories fitting into particular patterns.

Arthur Asa Berger says something similar to this in his book Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics: "Dreams, Freud tells us, are functional: they have a meaning and they do something for the dreamer.  In the same light, our collective dreams (or is it daydreams) have a meaning and provide people with a number of gratifications" (96).

Sally Field in Norma Rae

In the case of films about corporate bad guys, we could say the "gratification" we get from them is an expression of our anxiety about corporate influence in our lives.  But I find it puzzling that this anxiety gets little expression in our real lives.  That is, as a society we seem to enjoy films about corporate bad guys,  yet we have a political system that seems to cater to corporations.

Someone might say this is a case of the American people accepting fantasies over reality.  Instead of acting effectively upon the anxieties depicted in the films, audiences have their anxieties alleviated in the dark and leave the political system unchanged.

However, other Hollywood bad guys represent real-world anxieties, and these other anxieties do find expression in real-world actions.  At election time, not much traction is gained by discussing the need to counter corporate greed or exploitation.  Yet much traction is found in discussing the threat of foreign nations or causes; Nazis, Russians, Japanese, and Islamic terrorists have all taken their turns as Hollywood bad guys.  Electoral points are scored by talking about the threat of crime; many, many Hollywood bad guys are criminals of the more common type, and often times they are represented by ethnic minorities (in that way they are twofer bad guys -- two anxieties in one villain). 

I have no explanation for this particular disconnect between the stories we enjoy and the world we live in.  I will keep looking.

Note: This was originally published with the title "Arg. America Be a Confusing Nation."

At the corner of Hollywood Boulevard & Death Drive

John Cusack was running for his life, and I was laughing.

Buildings very familiar to me were collapsing like giant, fainting robots.  Freeways and boulevards I drive on regularly were crumbling.  Finally, as Cusack and his family escaped in a plane, the entire city of Los Angeles fell into a crack in the Earth or slid into the Pacific Ocean. 

This was the opening of Roland Emmerich's 2012, and I was watching the apocalypse with delight.  For some reason, it was great fun to see things I was familiar with get trashed.  Apocaslapstick.

I love apocalyptic films, movies that show the end of civilization, that destroy man's monuments in a beautiful spectacle.  So, when I saw trailers for Battle: Los Angeles, I knew I had to see the movie.  The City of Angels was going to take in the shorts again!

It's not that I hate Los Angeles.  It's just that I love any movie about the apocalypse.  The apocalypter the better.  But my desire to see LA's latest flogging made me think about how often this happens.  Is there any city that has imagined its own destruction more often?

In 2012, natural disasters destroyed it.  In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), tornados tore the town a new one.  Earthquake (1974) and Volcano (1997) sort of explain themselves.  In films such as Battle: Los Angeles, aliens did it, as they did in the 1953 version of War of the Worlds. 

But this masochistic mayhem was going on in novels before it hit the big screen.  For instance, in The Flutter of an Eyelid from 1933, Myron Brinig has Southern California slide off into the ocean after an earthquake.  In that book, that fate somehow seems like a justified punishment for the vain and dissolute characters he depicted living there.

More famously, Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust (1939) includes someone creating an epic painting called "The Burning of Los Angeles" and the novel ends with an extended description of a riot destroying parts of the town and sweeping away West's characters.

Why would a city that includes Hollywood, also known as The Dream Factory, be so fascinated with these nightmare scenarios?

The city brings the nation cinema and television filled with beauty and sex and dreams of perfection.  Perhaps there is some psychic need to balance that with death and dismemberment.

It might make sense from a Freudian perspective.  Sigmund Freud speculated that humans possessed something called "the death drive."  This was like the flip-side of his thoughts on "Eros," which was related to the biological instinct for procreation and the pleasurable experiences of living.

He was trying to understand why people's behavior often contradicted his notion of "the pleasure principle."  People were often times attracted to things that were scary to them or even had threatened their existence.  For instance, soldiers back from World War I kept reliving their traumatic experiences, rather than repressing them or avoiding them.

For Freud, dreams and the unconscious worked toward wish fulfillment.  So he had a hard time understanding an unconscious or compulsive attraction to fear or pain.  Why would people keep imagining their own deaths?

Kind of like Los Angeles does.  Mike Davis, in The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, counts more than 150 short stories, novels, and films that imagine the city's destruction.

One possible motivation for repeatedly imagining a deadly or traumatic event is the desire to overcome it, to rewrite the story.  Los Angeles has lived through many traumas -- mud slides, earthquakes, wildfires, riots, Charlie Sheen.  It is a city founded upon trauma: the Spanish dispossession of its indigenous inhabitants, and their double dispossession by the arrival of the United States.  In most of the stories and films, the city survives.  We could see the destructive narratives as the city working out its traumatic experiences in symbolic terms.

In some instances, the city's death has been imagined by artists who were angry at Los Angeles.  Brinig was from Montana and didn't like Southern California during his brief stay.  Imagining it sliding into the ocean might have been his way of saying, "This is what you degenerates deserve."  Or he might have been imagining its disappearance so he would never be able to return.

West was probably bitter that he had not found wealth and fame as a writer in Hollywood.  So The Day of the Locust becomes a kind of revenge fantasy.

Sodom and Gomorrah

This "mysterious masochistic trend," to borrow Freud's description of the death drive, could be as simple as a love-hate relationship.  Sure, Los Angeles has sunny skies and warm weather just about every day of the year.  But we also have oppressive smog on some days, ubiquitous, ugly strip malls, oceans of concrete -- and did I mention Charlie Sheen?  We have beautiful men and women, but we also have botox zombies and the insufferably shallow.  We have every culture in the world rubbing shoulders, but we spend so much time trapped in our cars that we never get to meet each other.  So perhaps it is no wonder that we sometimes want the whole frackin' thing to fall into the sea.  I am sure even some of the folks in Sodom and Gomorrah were relieved to see the fire and brimstone headed their way -- "Anything to get out of this traffic!"

Or imagining our own immolation may be driven by guilt.  Look at what we have done to paradise.

So, do you hear that Hollywood?  We've been a bad, bad city and deserve to be punished.  But next time, do it in 3D.


(Please see the comments for a postscript about the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami.)

Snark-Infested Waters

Last night the Golden Globe Awards were handed out in Hollywood, and with them came the usual red carpet spectacle of actors passing the fans and the cameras like floats in a conspicuous consumption parade.

Each award show is followed online by fashionistas grading the appearances of the celebrities who run the gantlet of cameras and fans.  What puzzles me about this process is the apparent randomness of those assessments.

At Yahoo's OMG! site, Angelina Jolie was rated an A- for her glittering gown.  Scarlett Johansson was given a D and was accused of channeling the Bride of Frankenstein with her hair and derided for her embroidered dress.  Anne Hathaway received an A- for her dress that was "embellished with paillettes and Swarovski crystals."  And Vanessa Williams was given a B- with pretty much no commentary at all.

My problem?  I cannot see much quality difference among the dresses.  Of course, they are different.  I see that.  But why is Angelina Jolie's glittery dress worth praising and Scarlett Johansson's not?  Why is Anne Hathaway's dress "embellished" when to me it looks like it could have been made from a thousand Chiclets?  And why is Vanessa "Still Hot at 47" Williams given a begrudging B-?

I know taste is subjective, but it shouldn't be RANDOM.

And then there is Helena Bonham Carter.  The fashion police give her an F for her wild hair, her sunglasses, her mismatched shoes.  Don't they realize she is purposefully refusing to play their game?  Don't they realize she is giving them an F U?

I think I agree with Carter, who may be channeling Laura Mulvey.  In 1975 Mulvey published a famous and influential essay called "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."  In it, she speculated that the camera in classic Hollywood films could be thought of as a heterosexual male.  That is, the camera looked at men and women differently.  It looked at women more as objects of sexual desire -- even though at least half of the people in the audience were women and probably 90 percent of those women were heterosexual.  Why not sexualize the men in the film, too?

Mulvey wrote,  "The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking...."  But the pleasure it provides tends to be one kind: heterosexual male pleasure.  This teaches the women in the audience to look at other women from that perspective, Mulvey wrote.  That is, women begin to rate themselves and other women by how they can be pleasurable to view from a heterosexual male perspective.  When the women begin rating themselves according to the measure of that male gaze, they internalize its criteria and work to make themselves conform to it.  According to Mulvey, "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.... she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire."

Can you say anorexia?  Can you say bulimia?  Can you say breast implants?

Mulvey called this habituated concern about physical appearance "to-be-looked-at-ness."  I realize that is not the most poetic turn of phrase, but I think it describes the process and I think it is true.  Hollywood encourages "to-be-looked-at-ness" in women.

Evidence that this has been interanlized by women in general and not just those in Hollywood is that the televised red carpet event tends to be most watched by women.  Women are watching and rating and admiring or deriding.

Meanwhile, men are not subjected to the same external and internal pressures.  The men in Hollywood cinema are not sexualized in the same way or to the same degree as the women.  And so the men in the audience are not conditioned to internalize a constant state of self-discipline and self-judgment.  They find it possible to think of themselves as attractive regardless of how they may actually appear.  (I think this has begun to change recently, as the male body is getting more sexualized in recent films, but that would be the subject of another essay.)

Evidence of the different criteria for judging men and women also can be found on Yahoo.  All of the photographs of women on the red carpet can be found under the title "Red Carpet Report Card."  The men?  They are found in a slideshow called "Dapper Dudes."  No grades.  No snark.  No distinguishing one man's appearance from another.  They pretty much all look like Brad Pitt.

The women are on display.  The men less so.  The women work to distinguish themselves from each other, the men seem to work toward homogeneity.  How many jokes have been made about the disaster of two women wearing the same dress to a party?  But how many men have run crying to the restroom because some other guy wore the same tuxedo?

These differing criteria help explain the common sight in Hollywood movies of the attractive woman with the average-looking man -- or even the below average looking man.  Think Kevin James married to Winona Rider in The Dilemma.  Or Kevin James married to Maria Bello in Grown Ups.  Think Homer and Marge Simpson.  Think Peter and Lois Griffin. 

Now try to think of an opposite example.  Hot husband, average wife.  You can get back to me when you think of one.