The Mythology of the Face-lift

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Wendy Doniger

A milder version of the face-lift, heavy make-up, is described when, years after the Genghis Khan affair, the aging Dora and her twin sister Nora attend a party and want to look young: "It took an age but we did it; we painted the faces that we always used to have on to the faces we have now. From a distance of thirty feet with the light behind us, we looked, at first glance ..." (Carter, 1991, p. 192). (This technique was immortalized, according to legend, by the aging Doris Day, who persisted in playing the part of young girls--"I knew her before she was a virgin," Groucho Marx once claimed--and insisted on being photographed through gauze smeared with vaseline.) Painted in this way, Nora and Dora meet a man they have known since childhood, and he greets them with the usual cliche:

   "Floradora! You haven't changed one bit!" I was about to say him nay, draw
   his attention to the crow's feet, the grey hairs and turkey wobblers but I
   saw by the look in his eye that he meant what he said, that he really,
   truly loved us and so he saw no difference; he saw the girls we always
   would be under the scrawny, wizened carapace that time had forced on us
   for, although promiscuous, he was also faithful, and, where he loved, he
   never altered, nor saw any alteration. And then I wondered, was I built the
   same way, too? Did I see the soul of the one I loved when I saw Perry, not
   his body? (Carter, 1991, p. 208)

Aye, that is the question. How do we recognize one another, and ourselves, despite the ravages of time?

Kobo Abe's novel The Face of Another investigates the psychological pathology of a face-lift made necessary by an industrial accident. At first, the victim of the accident wears an obvious mask to hide his hideously disfigured face; but then he has a plastic surgeon make him a more realistic face-mask that he can put on and take off at will, and in this face he seduces his own wife. Furious at his own success, he is even more deeply wounded when she leaves him and explains, in a letter, that she had recognized him behind the other face all along. The husband explains, in a letter to his wife, his own self-justification: "The mask was no longer a means by which to get you back, but only a hidden camera through which to watch your betrayal of me. I had made the mask for the purpose of recovering myself. But it had willfully escaped from me ..." (Abe, 1992, p. 209). And: "I prayed for the fairy-tale miracle of awakening one morning to find the mask stuck firmly on my face, to discover it had become my real face.... But the miracle, of course, did not happen" (Abe, 1992, p. 210). And, finally: "I knew very well that exposing the true character of the mask would probably hurt and humiliate you" (Abe, 1992, p. 214).

In the film made from the novel, the plastic surgeon says to his nurse (with whom he is having an affair), "I hope he will use the mask to find himself, not to escape from himself." The latter option is, however, what the face-lift achieves in this film, as it does in the myths: it is a vain attempt to escape from oneself. In a subplot, a girl with a hideously scarred face hides it by letting her hair cover most of her face. Eventually, rejected by other men, she seduces her brother and, later, commits suicide. So this, too, is an intolerable situation; to have a face-lift, or not to have it, is fatal (and leads to incest). The more brutal form of the facelift myth, the Inuit version, is imagined in the film when the surgeon finds a man whose skin tone he wants to copy and says to him, "Just give us the shape of your face; we don't want the details; we wouldn't skin you for 10,000 yen." But this is precisely what the surgeon has done to the man who commissioned the new face: skinned him--removed his own skin and given him another--and charged him 10,000 yen.