Objects of love: I want a famous face and the illusions of star culture

Configurations

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 33-53

  Blum, Virginia L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY   (United States)

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EID: 67651238892     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. The series was canceled in 2004 after only two seasons.
2. Virginia L. Blum, Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 208-213.
3. http://www.surgery.org/press/procedurefacts-asqf.php (accessed 10/28/07). Surgeons I have interviewed since the advent of this programming indicate a general upturn in their practices. See Stephanie Jucar, "Facing Facts: Teens Are Turning to Plastic Surgery, but at What Cost?" Sacramento Bee, Scene, June 10, 2005, p.E1 See also Janet Simons, "Teens Turning to Plastic: 'Reality' Shows Fire Desire for Fantasy Faces, Bodies," Rocky Mountain News, June 21, 2004, pp. 1-2.
4. See Virginia L. Blum, "Love Your Neighbor, Hate Yourself: The Vicissitudes of Affect in Cosmetic Surgery," in Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations, ed. Nancy Chen and Helene Moglen (Santa Cruz, Calif.: New Pacific Press, 2006), pp. 47-53.
5. As we can see from the following "quick fact" from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, we were already well on our way toward making cosmetic surgery a regular part of consumer culture: "Since 1997, there has been a 465 percent increase in the total number of cosmetic procedures. Surgical procedures increased by 118 percent, and nonsurgical procedures increased by 764 percent" (http://www.surgery.org/download/ 2006QFacts.pdf).
6. Mark Andrejuvic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 9-10.
7. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1998), p. 49.
8. My use of the phrase "cosmetic surgery romance" alludes to Freud's famous theory of the "family romance" in which the child imagines that she or he is the lost or kidnapped heir of royalty. See, in this collection, Pam Orosan-Weine's convincing discussion of the ways in which the family romance has been both conscripted and mangled in the service of relocating one's "true" self to the body's appearance: "The family romance fantasy in this show is the implied message that we all, contestants and viewers, are just a few short steps away from being swans and beauty queens. The psychic fantasy and the television show both suggest that the real disappointments and limitations in the course of their lives and in these contestants' appearance are an unfortunate mistake" (Pamela Orosan-Weine, "The Swan: The Fantasy of Transformation Versus the Reality of Growth," in this issue).
9. See Blum, Flesh Wounds (above, n. 2) pp. 107-109, for an account of the pathologization of cosmetic surgery.
10. Only one surgeon, with a practice in Beverly Hills, encouraged the practice. He felt that it gave him a better sense of what the patient was after.
11. Andrejevic, Reality TV (above, n. 6), p. 175. Andrejevic writes that the participants in the reality program Temptation Island often expressed interest in some sort of fashion or screen career. The IWAFF participants similarly discuss their hope for screen or modeling careers.
12. Such sadomasochistic identifications on the part of the viewer are central to the reception of reality programming.
13. Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafer cited as SE), trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1914-16), 14: 67-102. This essay was published in 1914, during the time when movie-star fan culture was developing. This is not to argue for a direct correlation, but rather to suggest that the subject Freud is attempting to account for in his essay is one already available to the lure of celebrity identifications. For an early history of the rapid ascension of film actors from players to "stars," see Richard De Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urban: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
14. Freud, "On Narcissism" (above, n. 13), p. 90.
15. See Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); idem, "Sociality and Sexuality," Critical Inquiry 26:4 (2000): 641-656;
16. Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2003);
17. and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), for important readings of this impossible essay that all go far toward charting Freud's struggle with identity formation.
18. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id [1923],SE 19:364.
19. Freud, "On Narcissism" (above, n. 13), p. 75. That Freud's very first example of narcissism is someone experiencing "organic pain" becomes even more significant when we think of the way in which the surgery itself figures in the plastic-surgery story. The actual surgery is typically (and ironically) decorporealized when linked to the body's beautification.
20. Ibid., p. 76.
21. Mary Duenwald, "How Young Is Too Young to Have a Nose Job and Breast Implants?" New York Times, September 28, 2004, p. 5.
22. Freud, "On Narcissism" (above, n. 13), p. 77.
23. Thus the split between ego libido and object libido may for Gia be enacted between the penis (the man) and what for Gia are the desirable parts of her (all the rest, the woman).
24. See, e.g., Mireya Navarro,"The Most Private of Makeovers," New York Times, November 28, 2004, p. 1. It is precisely this visibility, this turning of the private parts into something more public, that makes the private parts surgical fodder. Whatever "I" see, in other words, needs to please "me," boost my self-esteem, swell my self-love. The moment I identify a part of my body as "on view," that is the moment when it becomes subject to surgical enhancement. So, the question arises, can we say that this hypernarcissistic relationship between the ego and the body is sexual in Freud's sense of the term? More, how might these body surgeries participate in shifting not only the experienced geography of the modern body but also what constitutes the sexual as such?
25. Sigmund Freud, "Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality" [1922], SE 18:221-232.
26. Sigmund Freud, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" [1921], SE 18: 105.
27. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (Madison (T.:International Universities Press, 1971), pp. 126-128.
28. Freud, "On Narcissism," (above, n. 13), pp. 82-83.
29. Borch-Jacobsen, pp. 111-113.
30. Hypochondria may be the switch term here between the material body and the body-as-image, because what else is hypochondria but the production of the appearance of symptoms of illness (the surface) with no underlying organic cause?
31. Freud, "On Narcissism" (above, n. 13), p. 94.
32. See research by Marcene Goodman, "Culture, Cohort, and Cosmetic Surgery," Journal of Women and Aging 8:2 (1996) 55-73; idem,"Social, Psychological, and Developmental Factors in Women's Receptivity to Cosmetic Surgery," Journal of Aging Studies 8 (1994): 375-396.
33. Freud, "On Narcissism" (above, n. 13), p. 95.
34. In The Ego and the Id (above, n.16), pp. 3-66, Freud speculates that identity itself is carved out of a series of early identifications-but it is a matter of degree, and the imitation of a star is of a higher degree than the series of partial identifications that shape the child.
35. Jacques Lacav, Écritis: A Selection, ed. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 263
36. Daily Mail, Oct 2, 2004, p.11.
37. Both Beyoncé Knowles and Drew Barrymore went so far as to personally contact women planning to alter themselves in their image, telling their respective fans that they were already beautiful as they were. Somehow, this did the trick-perhaps as a result of the star's taking the time to call them. Consider in this context Susan Sontag's famous theory about becoming "photographable." (On Photography, New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Girout, 1977).