The Mythology of the Face-lift

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Wendy Doniger

The teenage daughter of the FBI agent keeps changing her face too--but she does it with green paint and weird earrings, the usual teenage self-mutilation, and her father asks her, "Who are you supposed to be now?" Hers is another sort of splitting, a bifurcation of identity between child and woman that is the key to another familiar sub-theme of the face-lift, incest: she shoots Sean, mistaking him for Castor, naturally enough, but when Castor (whom she mistakes for Sean, her father) makes sexual advances to her, she stabs him. In the end, Sean and Eve adopt Castor's son, Adam, the surrogate for the son Castor had killed. Maslin remarks that, in terms of films, this is "... a gimmick that hasn't been seen before" (Maslin, 1997, C14) but as a myth, it certainly has been seen before. In Shattered (1991) and Face/Off (1997), A Face to Die For (1996), and Face of Another (1966), the plastic surgeon at first functions as a kind of deus ex machina, restoring youth, giving life; but in the end, he dispenses loss and death, also divine gifts.

Conclusion: Lift Off

The mythology of the face-lift expresses, and challenges, the belief that in order to remain yourself you must stay the same, and in order to stay the same you must change your face into the face that belonged to who you were. But with the face-lift you actually change into someone else, different from who you really are now: a person with a soul and a face that are formed and scarred by experience. Charles Sibert describes watching a face-lift operation: "With each snip, I imagined the ghosts of the myriad worries that furled this woman's forehead flying free: there, the times she troubled over school exams; there, the long waits for loved ones who were late; and there, the years of confusion and doubt" (Sibert, 1996, 24). And he records the hesitations of a woman who ultimately did not have the surgery: "`But then,' she said, a nicely furrowed frown indicating a still-intact corrugator muscle, `I looked at my nose in the mirror and thought, That's my father there, and that's my mother right there in the upper eyes'" (Sibert, 1996, p. 45). Family resemblance here serves to anchor personal identity in the surface of the face that changes with age, not with surgery.

A Clairol advertisement for a dye to make grey hair black or blond or red again proclaims: "Grey Hair Lies." That is, time lies, age lies, death lies. The outer surface of the old woman lies, by concealing the young soul beneath, and the dye restores the truth of youth. Marjorie Garber questions the special acceptability of face-lifts in contrast with operations that change not one's age but one's sex: "Why does a `nose job' or `breast job' or `eye job' pass as mere self-improvement, ... while a sex change (could we imagine it called a `penis job?') represents the dislocation of everything we conventionally `know' or believe about gender identities and gender roles, `male' and `female' subjectivities?" (Garber, 1992, p. 117) The face-lift offers a quick fix to stave off the inevitable flood of a deeper change. Saul Bellow's Armenian cynic spoke of that other change: "On any certain day, when you're happy, you know it can't last, but the weather will change, the health will be sickness, the year will end, and also life will end. In another place another day there'll be a different lover. The face you're kissing will change to some other face, and so will your face be replaced.... You make your peace with change" (Bellow, 1949, p. 540). "Your face will be replaced" has so many meanings here: Your own present face will be replaced by your aging face or by the face of another person with whom your lover will replace you or, as a result of the first and in order to prevent the second, with a face-lift. Most of us cannot claim, with Bellow's protagonist, that we have made our peace with change.