The Mythology of the Face-lift

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Wendy Doniger

Face-Lifts: The Films

Face-lifts in Hollywood films are often designed to carry off a deception, but here, too, the issues of youth, beauty, and immortality remain powerful; and here, too, the face-lift almost inevitably results in disaster, often in incest. This pattern begins in the films noirs, with films like The Scar (1948), in which a man gives himself a scar in order to match the scar on the face of the man he murders and then impersonates. Too late, he discovers that he has been impersonating someone far worse than himself, indeed that, in a sense, he has been impersonating himself; and so he, too, is murdered. In Dark Passage (1947), we do not see Humphrey Bogart's face for the first half-hour of the film, until he has had the plastic surgery that transforms him into--Humphrey Bogart, masquerading as himself; until then, we see the world through his eyes. A face-lift with a sinister twist occurs in Return from the Ashes, a British film made in 1965 (directed by J. Lee-Thompson, from the novel by Hubert Monteilhet):

   Return from the Ashes

   A Jewish woman doctor in Germany in the 1930s marries a younger man who is
   after her money. She is deported to Dachau during the Nazi regime, and,
   thinking her dead, he has an affair with her daughter by a previous
   marriage. But she survives and returns secretly, though so hideously
   changed by her experience in the camps that she hides from her husband
   until her old friend, a plastic surgeon--who recognizes her even in her
   deformed condition--transforms her face back into what it had been. Before
   she can reveal herself, however, her husband catches sight of her and
   thinks she must be a woman who looks just like his wife, whom he still
   believes to be dead. He asks her to impersonate the dead woman in order to
   help him claim her fortune, and goes so far as to teach her to forge the
   other woman's signature. When he suggests that she should have a
   concentration camp number tatooed on her arm, to complete the disguise, she
   casually remarks that she has already seen to that, and shows him the scar.
   This makes him uneasy, and eventually, when she dyes her hair blond again,
   he realizes that she really is his wife. Indeed, as he always used to say
   to her, "If a woman has beautiful eyes, there is always something the same
   about her, no matter what else happens."

      When the mother claims him back from the daughter, saying, sadly, "He's
   the first man in your life; he's the last man in mine," the daughter plots
   the murder of her mother in order to keep him to herself. He kills the
   daughter and attempts to kill the mother, who is saved by the plastic
   surgeon.

      This woman intentionally undergoes a face-lift in order to impersonate
   herself. This is simply an exaggerated, literalized form of the rationale
   for contemporary surgical face-lifts, too: to make you look like who you
   "really are," i.e., who you were before you aged. The surgery removes one
   set of scars, but her identity is revealed by another scar, and she comes
   into murderous conflict with her own daughter--her younger self, who looks
   like the woman she was before she aged. Here again, the shadow of incest
   falls across the face-lift.