New York Magazine Bemoans Plastic Surgery's Freeze on Acting

New York Magazine recently published a piece criticizing how plastic surgery is changing the craft of acting. The article traces the history of acting technique, from the over-the-top facial expressions of Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow to the method acting epitomized by Marlon Brando to the "stilted, stylized and masklike" acting of today -- which the author, Amanda Fortini, attributes to the sharp increase in plastic surgery among female actresses.

Fortini demonstrates how plastic surgery has become such a fashion that awards show viewers, for example, no longer pay as much attention to gowns and hairstyles as they do to nips, lifts, and tucks. She interviews plastic surgeons who tell stories of planning surgeries around the parts of the face actresses must be able to move in order to continue to realistically play certain roles.

Fortini claims that plastic surgery is lending the same stiff, restrained nonchalance to a wide variety of roles because of the actresses' literal inability to move their faces. This ultimate artifice, the frozen ageless mask, is ruining the actresses' craft and making it impossible for us, the viewers, to believe in what we see.

I don't argue with the fact that plastic surgery makes Hollywood acting even more, well, plastic, and that it could lead to standardized, increasingly artificial expressions that make different characters all seem the same. Or, as Fortini also suggests, it could lead actresses to overact with elaborate gestures to compensate. But I don't really see the point in bemoaning this lack of naturalness or "reality" in Hollywood acting, since it was never there in the first place. Since when has the mainstream "entertainment industry" ever been about anything but artifice? Do we ever really expect Hollywood actresses, with their million dollar gowns and jewels and tantrum-throwing ways, to represent us? Don't we just want to ogle, mock, or idolize them?

What's more disturbing is that society puts so much pressure on women to stay young forever that plastic surgery has become a given. This is most clearly represented in Hollywood, because these are the women whose faces we analyze and pick apart as a national obsession, but it's not just relegated to the realm of celebrities. American society paints older women's sexuality as freakish and frightening: look no further than the cougar phenomenon. Older women are supposed to be matronly, docile, and wise; society shuts off their sexuality, dismisses them, and looks for the next Britney Spears. It is this phenomena, this dismissal of older women's beauty and this fear of aging, that leads to plastic surgery.

So who are we to tsk-tsk Hollywood actresses, who are held to the utmost of these ageist standards, for destroying their profession? That profession has always been about image and artifice, and our society is increasingly obsessed with showing women as more and more plastic and ageless. There seems to be a cruel paradox here: society can tear apart actresses' bodies and call them fat or old or ugly, and endlessly drive home the doctrine that women are only sexy when they're young and thin, but then it can also turn around and critique women for responding to this pressure?

If we want to "save" acting, well, we'd better start with the reasons why actresses feel the need to paralyze their faces: society's ageism and sexism. Maybe if we started celebrating older women as beautiful women instead of as "beautiful older women" or as "cougars," we'd see a return to natural acting.

Photo: AprilSander