The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  As for me, I’m not entirely sure even now what I was thinking when I started on this journey, or what I hoped for when I splurged on braces three years ago. Maybe I believed I’d finally accept myself as I am, that with the prospect of prettier teeth would come a glimmer of inner peace. As you may already have surmised, dentition and happiness are indirectly connected at best. But sometimes when I’m feeling particularly downcast right before bed, in the midst of my nightly ablutions, I’ll flash a smile at myself in the mirror just as I used to in the old days. Only now I kind of like what I see: that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion of self-doubt, if only for a moment, smiling to beat the band, secure in the knowledge that my teeth, at least, won’t let me down.

  ANDROID BEAUTY

  2007

  We have always been slightly uneasy—notwithstanding our growing cultural obsession with youth and physical perfection—about the enormous value we assign to female physiognomy, based as it is on nothing more substantive than an undemocratic rolling of the genetic dice. Clearly, although we have all been bequeathed a more or less similar arrangement of facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, neck, skin), there are some women who emerge, either by way of felicitous lineage or a hazard of good fortune, with mugs to die for. Audrey Hepburn. Vivien Leigh. Grace Kelly. Julie Christie. Julia Roberts. Halle Berry. Penélope Cruz. The variations may range from the gamine to the sultry, the classic to the exotic—stopping along the way for the slightly more Slavic (or these days, Slavic) look that often goes with blond lovelies—but the theme is the same. They are undeniably beautiful; we, by and large, however attractive or striking, are not.

  This undeniable and unearned differential (one that is becoming ever more absolutist in a “lookist” society) has led us to devise ways of minimizing beauty’s importance with dispassionate abstractions or consoling, somewhat grandmotherly mantras. If you want to get high-minded about it, you can clutch for solace at the conjecture of the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume that beauty “exists merely in the mind … and each mind perceives a different beauty” and hope that no one will notice that this observation, if it ever held up, preceded the invention of photography. Closer at hand is the adage “Beauty is as beauty does,” which is the kind of snippy comment Mary Poppins might have made if she came upon one of her young charges preening before his or her reflection. Then there is the old platitude, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” which attempts a similar leveling of the playing field.

  I suspect these reassurances never fooled any woman anxiously eyeing herself in the mirror before going out for the evening, and as we get older, this lifelong negotiation with the looking glass becomes only more fraught. (Many of us, I imagine, will eventually feel in sympathy with Bette Davis, who, as Queen Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, becomes apoplectic at the very thought of catching a glimpse of her ruined face, screaming, “Break every mirror in the palace! I never want to see one in Whitehall again!”) The really noteworthy fact, however, is not that these ploys ever much worked but how singularly irrelevant they have become over the last decade—almost like maxims from another planet. For one thing, the promise and gradual destigmatization of cosmetic surgery has led less-than-stunning women to believe that a gorgeous countenance is there for the paying. Another, more significant reason is that the contemporary archetype of beauty, as seen on the runways and in fashion magazines, is no longer applicable or even familiar. For that matter, it’s barely recognizable.

  The faces I’m referring to seem to have arrived here by spaceship from some silent lunar landscape, rather than by the bawling and bloody process by which ordinary mortals enter the world. The Platonic ideal of beauty is now as it never was: more humanoid than human, more the product of an art director’s digitized pastiche of desirable features than a naturally occurring phenomenon. The reasons for this include our increasingly sophisticated techniques for airbrushing flaws or imperfections out of the picture; our fascination with self-invention and technosexuality (also referred to as robot fetishism); our ever more phobic attitude toward aging and dying; and our worship of young, blank, unlived-in faces that resemble the baby-faced characters in Japanese animated films. Thanks to these influences, our aesthetic standards have mutated into an eerie image of female attractiveness that, if not unprecedented, has been relatively uncommon until now.

  I think of this new typology as Android Beauty: part intergalactic and part neonatal; part Tilda Swinton and part Miley Cyrus; part 2001: A Space Odyssey and part Bratz dolls (the post-Barbie fashion doll with exaggerated eyes and lips that looks, as Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker, “as if the doll had undergone successive rounds of plastic surgery”), with a little bit of Bambi and those kitschy Keane portraits of lollipop-eyed waifs thrown into the mix. You can, of course, coin any term you like, but I’m sure you know what I mean.

  The identifying signs of this change—a radical reconception of what makes for feminine pulchritude—can be readily enumerated. They include a high, rounded forehead; a giraffe neck; enormous eyes that are usually spaced low on the head and wide apart; an imperceptible nose; a pillowy or pouty mouth, but one with the lips always everted, as if ready to be kissed. Because the body on which this face is set is, needless to say, thin to thinner to twig-like, the head looks proportionally larger, even otherworldly. Think Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Victoria Beckham. Think, in a nutshell, Nicole Kidman at this year’s Oscars, whose weirdly vacant mien (especially unsettling in light of her native comeliness) had everyone (who managed to stay up) talking.

  The New York plastic surgeon Yael Halaas, who notes that the laws of beauty have been “amped up,” attributes Kidman’s cyboresque look to the “Vulcan eyebrows” that can result from too much or wrongly placed Botox. It might also have to do with the silicone-smooth surface of Kidman’s skin, from which all traces of emotional expressiveness—of having laughed or cried, struggled or aspired—have been erased, leaving a blank slate onto which we can read our own scripts. In this sense, Kidman functions both as herself and as a “sim”—a simulated version of herself, much like the Daryl Hannah character in Blade Runner. Where once we tried to understand the fractured nature of identity by way of psychological concepts that pointed to an interior life, these days we appear to have traded in that somewhat demanding approach for an exteriorized, sci-fi dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable divisions within ourselves. Goodbye, doppelgänger; hello, avatar. Goodbye, therapist’s couch; hello, Star Trek.

  But while the ubiquity of computer-manipulated movies, photographs, and other visual media may account for the extraterrestrial, “Beam me up, Scotty” aspect of Android Beauty, old-fashioned terrestrial science may help explain its equally disturbing, arrested-in-time quality. You might wonder, given the feminist legacy of self-determination and the long-ago (or what seems like long-ago) vision of power dressing, why women have suddenly been pushed back to, if not quite the cradle, then certainly a state of prepubescence. Which is where evolutionary biology and the theory of neoteny—the persistence of larval or fetal features into adult life—enter the picture. Zoologists like Desmond Morris, in his book The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body, have proposed that our species’—and especially men’s—apparent preference for juvenile features can be traced back to (or, if you like, blamed on) neoteny.

  This theory, which can be seen as a conceptual breakthrough or a bit of nonsensical speculation, depending on your view of evolutionary biology, is in truth no more than an extension of Darwin’s principle of sexual selection, which he developed to account for what appeared to be cumbersome and nonfunctional characteristics. (Until he figured out that gender-specific traits—like attention-grabbing fans on male peacocks—informed the dynamics of the mating game, which in turn trumped workaday survival needs, Darwin was in a state of despair about the validity of his revolutionary ideas. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” he once admitted before final
ly embarking on The Origin of Species.) Accordingly, Morris points out that women have more neotenic physical traits—twice as much baby fat, smoother skin, larger eyes, and puffier lips—the better to arouse a protective instinct in males. The zoologist Clive Bromhall, in his book The Eternal Child, goes even further, suggesting that neoteny has been misunderstood. In a hubris-smashing moment, Bromhall claims that the entire human species has become “infantized” in order to physically survive and emotionally flourish. We have regressed, it would seem, into a state of permanent childhood.

  Where, you might ask, does this leave us? No one needs to be told that the business of beauty is inherently superficial and pitiless, but it’s another matter entirely when it starts to depart from all prevailing norms. So here’s the burning question: Are Android Beauties ahead of the pack, leaving the rest of us who have not morphed to lag behind, fated to be nonbreeding singletons with our lurking expression lines, relatively small eyes, prominent (or at least visible) noses, and collagen-free mouths? Or do they point to an alarming future in which little girls will be eroticized without the constrictions—the civilizing restraints—of guilt or of culturally mandated taboos? A future in which the Humbert Humberts of the world will be just one of the gang, just another regular pervert, free to cruise the playground without pretext or disguise?

  In a remarkable essay, “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” which appeared last spring in the journal n + 1, Mark Greif makes a persuasive argument that the possibility of such a pedophilic scenario coming to pass is neither futuristic nor even all that unlikely. In fact, as Greif envisions it, the scenario has already taken place without our even noticing. The trend of the last fifty years, he observes, has been toward focusing our lascivious gaze with ever greater intensity on the prenubile rather than averting our eyes from them. “The representatives of the sex child in our entertainment culture,” he writes, “are often 18 to 21—legal adults. The root of their significance is that their sexual value points backward, to the status of the child, and not forward to the adult.” One doesn’t have to look far afield for confirmation. A study by the anthropologist Douglas Jones, in which he fed the images of various models into a computer that correlated the sizes and proportions of people’s faces to their ages, estimated the models’ ages to be six or seven.

  In which case, Stanley Kubrick was more prescient than even he suspected when he ended his sci-fi fantasy 2001: A Space Odyssey with a puzzling (and somewhat pretentious) image of a fetus. It might well be—it is certainly worth considering—that what our information-stuffed, overstimulating, and multitasking time has produced is not a yearning for new legal-age experience but rather a counter-yearning to evolve backward toward some beckoning galaxy where life has literally just begun and adult consequence is yet to appear on the horizon. Perhaps the emergence of Android Beauty finally suggests that rather than facing our respective futures with anticipation, we are, many of us, carrying a secret longing to tarry another day or two (make that a trimester) in the womb.

  III

  OUT OF PRINT

  FREUD WITHOUT TEARS

  (ADAM PHILLIPS)

  2003

  Adam Phillips doesn’t do e-mail. It’s not clear to me whether this is a Luddite impulse, a shrewd maneuver designed to enhance his glamorously elusive aura, or simply a pragmatic decision not to squander hours at the beck and call of everyone with a keyboard and a screen name. “I don’t want to be in touch,” he explains when I question him directly. “I want less communication.”

  That may sound like a decidedly antisocial remark for a man who trades in human connectedness. But then Phillips, an idiosyncratic literary talent and the celebrated maverick of contemporary British psychoanalysis, is nothing if not defiantly self-contradictory. He has made his name by questioning the orthodoxies of hard-line Freudianism, yet his most recent role is as general editor of the first major new Freud translation to appear in thirty years. This month, four volumes of a scheduled eight are being issued here as part of the Penguin Classics series. These hip-pocket paperbacks are each translated by a literary scholar, and the visually witty covers take their images from Magritte and other surrealist masters. They are as removed in tone from the weighty and astronomically expensive twenty-four-volume version edited by James Strachey as Freud’s office in London’s solidly bourgeois Hampstead neighborhood (now the Freud Museum) is from Phillips’s office in trendy Notting Hill.

  Phillips gives the bulk of his time, four days a week, eight hours a day, to his analytic work. “Therapy provides an opportunity to talk to people the way you don’t do anywhere else,” he says. Wednesdays are reserved for writing, and over the last decade and a half of Wednesdays, Phillips has produced ten books of nonfiction. Most are collections of essays and reviews, with the exception of several more sustained meditations, including Darwin’s Worms and Houdini’s Box, which focus on a single theme or set of questions. The books’ provocative titles—The Beast in the Nursery and On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored—hint at the uncategorizable contents within, which are characterized by Phillips’s droll humor, his penchant for the epigrammatic, and his wide-ranging, interdisciplinary affinities. The curious thing about reading Phillips is that he makes you feel smart and above the daily grind at the same time as he reassures you that you are not alone in your primal anxieties about whether you are lovable or nuts or, perhaps, merely boring.

  It is hard to think of another writer who, in the guise of intellectual inquiry and dazzling erudition, manages to always come back in some way or other to the conundrum of why our longings so often end in acts of self-sabotage. “People have traditionally come for psychoanalytic conversation,” he observes in the introduction to On Kissing, “because the story they are telling themselves about their lives has stopped, or become too painful, or both.”

  What do therapists talk about when they talk about love? If you’re Adam Phillips, you are likely to talk about the infinite human capacity for mangling desire—for hating what we love most. It is a Thursday evening at the end of May, and I am waiting for Phillips at the Walmer Castle, a packed bar around the corner from his office. The bar is on hippest Ledbury Road, amid shops that carry high-end bath gels and clothes in a range of sizes from small to smaller. Everyone looks to be twenty-five, and no one seems to have caught on to the dangers of smoking. Phillips has sent me off to read a book called Love of Beginnings, by his favorite fancy French theorist, J.-B. Pontalis, while he finishes up with his last patient of the day.

  I am sipping an outsize mug of draft beer when he comes in, a slight, graceful man with a ragged mop of hair, several days’ worth of stubble, and more than a passing resemblance to Bob Dylan in his prime. He is wearing a leather jacket and pointy suede shoes and has the rushed air of someone navigating the world incognito. Lighting up a cigarette, Phillips launches into his thoughts on the vexed subject of human relationships.

  “Sexual desire leads us awry,” he says, speaking softly yet authoritatively in his impeccable Oxbridge accent, the ideas spilling out in fluid sentences. “The erotic life is ashamed, conflicted, awkward, embarrassed, uncertain. The way to survive psychically is to find people to love. But in order to feel safe enough with other people, most of us feel we have to control them. If you fear losing somebody who you think you need, you try to enslave or addict them.” It is as though Phillips has taken Freud—whose emphasis on the vicissitudes of libidinal life was second to none, thereby casting him as suspect from the start—and given him a contemporary gloss, a kind of play-it-as-it-lays panache. So where, I wonder aloud, does all this amorous conflict leave us after the hostile passion subsides? Phillips shrugs, like a man who’s seen too much to be overly impressed by people’s ability to handle hard-core reality. “Then,” he says, pausing for a moment, “you fall into ordinary life.”

  Phillips combines the energy of the great Victorian polymaths like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin with the radical belief in the indeterminacy of all truth that defines the postmodernist
sensibility of Walter Benjamin or Jorge Luis Borges. (“There are no deep truths about human nature,” Phillips maintains. “There are more or less interesting or inspiring descriptions.”) His writings have brought him a cultlike following among serious readers (although not among serious psychiatrists, few of whom seem to have read him). Part of his appeal is that he is a graceful stylist, who writes airy yet charged prose. In the essay “On Translating a Person,” he glides from arcane references (Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Raymond Williams’s Problems in Materialism and Culture) to poignant vignettes culled from years of clinical experience. In “Clutter,” he writes about a fourteen-year-old boy who annoys his otherwise-tolerant bohemian parents by dropping clothes all over his room because he believes “our clothes should come and find us.” In one of his teasing, aphoristic asides, which is characteristic of his amused disengagement from domestic dramas, Phillips points out that “the art of family life is to not take it personally.”

  Freud, who virtually invented the art of taking everything personally, loved a good joke as much as anyone and would no doubt have appreciated the deadpan wit of this remark—and might even have chuckled at Phillips’s claim that the founding father of psychoanalysis was himself “resistant to therapy.” But Freud was also a man singularly of his own time, steeped in Old World culture and moral gravitas, and informed by the classical, premodernist perspective of his literary heroes, Goethe and Schiller. As such, his pessimistic interpretations of his patients’ conflicts were inseparable from a dark, if not tragic, view of civilization. Phillips, on the other hand, blithely asserts that the invention of therapy, in its emphasis on “suspending internal censorship,” neutralized the very judgmentalism of “what used to be called the moral life.”