Editing as plastic surgery: The Swan and the violence of image-creation

Configurations

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 55-76

  Jackson, Kimberly ^a  

^a FLORIDA GULF COAST UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67651229683     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0026     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Gaby Wood, "Meet Marnie ⋯ ," The Observer, July 18, 2004, available online at http://observer.guardian.co.uk (accessed November 4, 2005).
2. Robert Bianco, "There's Nothing Beautiful about 'The Swan,'" USA Today Online, April 11, 2004, www.usatoday.com (accessed November 4, 2005).
3. Myrna Blyth, "Skin Deep: The Trouble with Makeovers," National Review Online May 27, 2004, www.nationalreview.com/blyth (accessed November 4, 2005).
4. Mark Seltzer, "Serial Killers I" Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5:1 (1993): 96.
5. As will become clear, the fact that I call this a "feminine narrative" does not mean that any woman has control over it, but rather that a sort of "feminine logic" prevails in its structure. Also, the feminine nature of this logic does not make it any less violent than its male counterpart(s).
6. The Swan's contestants, too, have statues made of themselves prior to transformation, to remember their "old selves." Aside from the cruelty of such an endeavor, these doubles could not possibly enhance the power of the new beauty queens, as the statues of the goddesses did. Since the contestants are already technological objects through the transformation process itself (i.e., their "new selves" are also statues), this nod toward "old technology" is reminiscent of those tech-noir films, like AI and T2, where the old machines, which used to be "bad guys," are now presented as "good guys," precisely because of their supersession by new technologies. Making the "old self" into a technology merely turns the "new self" into an "upgrade." (Thanks to Bernadette Wegenstein for supplying me with this information.)
7. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 24.
8. To differentiate what I am describing, through Calasso, as feminine imitation from its masculine counterpart, it is helpful to see the mythos in action, so I will place two mythic scenarios side by side, one from Calasso and the other from René Girard. If, for example, we take as a model of masculine desire Girard's formula "desire itself is essentially mimetic, directed toward an object desired by the model," we can easily pose a radically different equation. Girard's equation assumes that desire is subjective and that the object is desired because it is invested with meaning (being) through its being desired by the rival, who is perceived as having more being than the subject. While there are similar narrative elements in both Girard's and Calasso's scenarios-a triad of desire-in Calasso's scenario, desire is attributed to what would be the "object" of Girard's equation (Zeus, being, meaning, investment), and a passion for being desired, which amounts to a tendency toward profusion, on the part of the "subject," Hera. An equation of desire that takes sexual difference into account would thus have to make room for a logic other than the one in which the object of desire is being and the primary impetus is toward coalescence, phallicity, galvanization. It would have to recognize a primary impetus toward, not disintegration (not the death drive), but proliferation (and this is not merely a reversal of the Platonic drive toward the Idea, it is not merely empiricism as opposed to rationalism, but rather a drive of being "itself" toward its own profusion). See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 146.
9. I will continue to refer to the one who undergoes plastic surgery in the feminine because, while plenty of men go under the knife these days, the originary compulsion (and coercion) toward the duplicity of the image is undoubtedly feminine.
10. Laura Grindstaff, "Trashy or Transgressive: 'Reality TV' and the Politics of Social Control," Thresholds: Viewing Culture 9 (1995): 47-55, online at http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/̃nideffer/Tvc/section3/11.Tvc. v9.sect3.Grindstaff.html (accessed May 6, 2007).
11. Ibid.
12. And in The Swan, the editing process begins even sooner, as the creator of the show and the "life-coach" on the show, Nely Galán, chooses and provides the image of the contestant, which will then be edited based on how she has already formed it.
13. Some critics, like Mark Andrejevic in his book Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, refer to the reality TV show Big Brother as an example, at least in its online version, of an "unedited" show that, as such, offers the promise of "access to the real." But since "the appeal of the real, in this context, becomes the promise of access to the reality of manipulation," and "the interesting result was the demonstration of the way in which this promise could be effectively commodified," tuning in (or logging on) to Big Brother produces the same "flattening" effect I discuss below in relation to The Swan and other shows that are heavily edited (Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched [New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004], p. 121).
14. James Friedman, Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 6.
15. Steven S. Vrooman, "Self-Help for Savages: The 'Other' Survivor, Primitivism, and the Construction of American Identity," in Survivor Lessons: Essays on Communication and Reality Television, ed. Matthew J. Smith and Andrew F. Wood ( Jefferson, N.C.: Mc-Farland, 2003), p. 189.
16. Jan Jagodozinski, "The Perversity of (Real)ity TV: A Symptom of Our Times." Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8:2 (2003): 7, online through Gale Group, Florida Gulf Coast University, http://web7.infotrac.galegroup.com (accessed May 16, 2005).
17. I am reminded here of Baudrillard's assertion, in his work on the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and what they represented, that the West was not capable of an appropriate "response" to the attacks because it is no longer capable of "symbolic death" (The Spirit of Terrorism, trans Chris Turner [London: Verso, 2002] p. 15) I think that the Swan contestant narratives' inability to achieve symbolic fullness is part of the same symptom: the lack of potency that the West is experiencing in the symbolic realm due to its overinvestment in "meaning" and an overconsumption of its "products." In the scenario I am attempting to describe, meaning (the subjective-imitative ability to control the way the world is experienced) mixes with technology (the appropriation of experience for the purposes of defining and controlling reality) to such an extent that there is no longer any "world" to be experienced, no "newness" to be generated.
18. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), p. 115.
19. Ibid, p. 119.
20. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 109.
21. Yet there is one moment in which the Swan plays at being a goddess, and in which we can almost believe her: in the return to the site of another's mutilation. Sometimes a Swan from a previous show or season will visit one of the struggling "ugly ducklings" to offer moral support. In this case, it is as if the Swan, like Miss America, sits on a throne in the heavens until called upon to perform some mission of mercy-although perhaps it is more a mission of revenge, because of course, having gone through "the program," she is now a part of it and its cruelty.
22. Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (above, n. 7), p. 227.
23. Ibid., pp. 229-230.
24. Baudrillard, Simulation (above, n. 20), p. 129.
25. I am indebted to a colleague, Glenn Whitehouse, for pointing out that the power of the technological object in this case is most comparable to something like virtual reality: while it "happens" on the TV screen, it "affects" our "real" selves to some extent.
26. Baudrillard, Perfect Crime (above, n. 18), p. 55.
27. Ibid., p. 71.
28. Ibid., p. 74.
29. Ibid., p. 116.
30. In this regard, if their contempt for the female body were not so vicious, one might even feel sorry for the plastic surgeons-artists who, like Sisyphus, must eternally create exactly the same work. They constantly struggle against the stubborn remains of each woman's singularity, obstacles to homogeneity, to total smoothness. They craftily hide the seams and scars, the marks of their paradoxical pursuit of seamlessness through cutting. (In this sense, we know we have passed into postmodernity when the subject no longer says, "Madam, I know not seems," but rather, "Madam, I know not seams"). They are the editors of the Hollywood blockbuster, themselves become superstars and thus victims of their own science. In fact, they do not cut bodies, but edit images: as the show demonstrates, they meet their patients through video tapes and digitized representations of their bodies. The plastic surgeon's relationship to his patient is thus always through her image, not through her "actual" body (it is, after all, his job to get rid of this encumbrance once and for all).
31. This phrase, coined by Caryn James of the New York Times in reference to Survivor, is cited in James Friedman's introduction to his edited collection Reality Squared (above, n. 14), p. 8.
32. Jagodozinski, "Perversity of Reality TV" (above, n. 16), p. 4.
33. Fred Botting, "Future Horror (The Redundancy of Gothic)," Gothic Studies 1:2 (1999): 4, online at EBSCOhost, Academic Search Premier, West Texas A&M University, http://databases.wtamu.edu (accessed June 6, 2004).
34. Michael L. Gillespie, "Drugs and Thugs: The Aesthetic Roots of Media Violence," in The Image of Violence in Literature, the Media, and Society, selected papers from the 1995 Conference, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado (eds. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan [Pueblo, CO: University of Southern Colorado, 1995, pp. 363-370), p. 364.
35. Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), p. 176.
36. Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (above, n. 7), p. 130.
37. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 49.