I spent my day watching celebrity plastic surgery videos

and then I felt bad, but then I felt better

Welcome to the new schedule of Entropical Paradise! Every Friday you’ll receive a short essay from me, reflecting on writing, seeing, distraction, and presence (amongst other things).

---

I have always been obsessed with celebrity culture.

Some people grow up in intellectual families. Or political families. Or artistic families. Or outdoorsy families.

I grew up in an escapist family. My mom was a fan of reality TV before reality TV existed. She consumed it in the form of true crime books and shows like Unsolved Mysteries and COPS, as did my grandmother.

My primary friendship throughout my childhood was with the television. I was so intimate with the television that when I went to summer camp for the first time when I was thirteen years-old, I initially missed it more than anything else.

I was gone for a month— the longest I’d ever gone without watching TV. During the first few days I thought of the shows I was missing, but it didn’t take long for me to forget the television altogether.

At camp, there were so many revelatory moments of connection, intimacy, and community I’d never before experienced. As an only child raised in a transient, dysfunctional family, I had learned self-sufficiency and independence; not reciprocity. Up until that point, I’d never truly felt part of a group. I didn’t need television at camp, because I had friendship.

When I came back home, it was back to regular life. This was in 1995, during the O.J. Simpson drama. My mom was obsessed with it, and the TV was on throughout the day (though this wasn’t necessarily unusual). I remember arriving home practically overflowing with positive vibes and energy, entering the house only to have my mom and new stepdad turn their attention to the television instead of engaging with me, or each other.

For the first time, this felt wrong. All the joy pulsing inside of me ebbed away, and I sat on the couch with them as they watched. They were hypnotized, like zombies. The whole idea of television felt wrong. The commercials were propaganda. Everything was so fast, loud, and negative. How absurd, I thought, that so many people were spending their lives watching a screen. How sad, I thought, that I am back here, doing this.

It was as if I’d been given new glasses and could finally see things as they were.

Since that day, my relationship with all persuasive media has been deeply fraught. It makes sense that I now teach college students about the power of rhetoric, and critical thinking. It makes sense that I became a writer who takes thing a part in order to understand how they work. A reverse engineer of cultural phenomena.

In my teens, I had a journal I filled with pictures of celebrities I had snipped from magazines.

Baby me, at eighteen years-old.

I had the beginnings of an eating disorder that would eventually take over my entire life for over a decade, and which continues to persist. I thought I looked to celebrities for inspiration, but in actuality I was comparing myself to them. Each celebrity was a little dagger stabbing me. I could never be as beautiful as them.

But I was beautiful. We all were. Just as all young people are beautiful, with their awkward ways of being in the world. Teenagers are kids. I was a kid. So why was I consuming media that made me feel like shit? Why is that accepted as normal in our culture?

There were few people on television or in the media who looked like me, and as much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, that’s still the case for the most part, especially now that I’m in my forties.

I kept up my scrapbook of aspirational selves throughout my twenties, except now everyone was keeping them; it was called the internet, and “celebrity” was pretty much anyone who’d had enough plastic surgery to qualify.

On my bad days (which were most days), in the throes of what had developed into full-blown bulimia, I’d surf the gossip pages, ogling celebrity bodies and hating my own. According to pop culture, my soft stomach was ugly, and I would never measure up. But I almost killed myself trying.

Now, as an actual older person, I am not immune to the siren call of celebrity culture.

It’s almost like a drug, or like a toxic ex.

Did you know Marilyn Monroe had a bunch of plastic surgery, including a chin implant, a nose job, and breast implants? Me neither. (photo by Philippe Halsman/Magnum)

Recently I found myself on YouTube, scrolling through a list of celebrity plastic surgery videos.

First there was the video about the twin child stars, one of whom now looks remarkably different than her sister. A short discussion of how, when you get plastic surgery, you have to work with the features you have, or else you’ll look “uncanny valley.”

Before I knew it, I’d stayed up way too late watching these videos. They were hypnotizing. Their creator had even made a video about her own face lift, and that time she got necrosis of the nose from a botched nose job.

Yesterday afternoon I watched more of the videos. Video after video deconstructing the faces of famous people I both loved and hated, until I realized that almost every single actress, and many actors, has had plastic surgery.

Like, extensive plastic surgery.

It made me really sad.

If you’re expecting the usual “people can do whatever they want with their bodies,” you’re not going to get that here. Sorry! But really, I’m not sorry.

My complex opinion is this: It’s terrible that the film and entertainment industry at large seems obsessed with specific facial and body aesthetics, but it’s also terrible that established icons and reality stars are getting face lifts, ponytails lifts, cheek and jaw implants, eyebrow lifts, liposuction, etc. and not being transparent about it. I cannot respect that. And I don’t have to. People can do whatever they want with their bodies. And I can write about it.

---

Celebrities are getting facelifts in their twenties and thirties.

As I kept watching the videos, I started to wonder if I needed a face lift, while also aware of the how out of character it is for me to even wonder if I need a facelift.

I like my face. I like my skin. And after years and years of therapy, I actually like my body, which would be considered downright disgusting by Hollywood standards.

Turns out, Kim K. has spent millions of dollars on looking younger than her actual age!

I don’t want a facelift. I don’t want to be so obsessed with youth that I feel I am nothing if I don’t look young. That sounds like hell to me.

And I will never have a million dollars. If I had a million dollars, I wouldn’t spend it on plastic surgery. (Except for the top surgery I want, which has nothing to do with aesthetics).

I know this: that we are so much more than what we appear to be. That beauty is truly subjective. That capitalism has to create idealized images in order to sell products. It’s really that simple. It’s the same thing I saw in the commercials when I came home from summer camp: propaganda. Hatred. Fear-mongering.

And it’s wholeheartedly accepted by some of the most intelligent people I know. It’s insidious, and incredibly destructive.

I knew that if I watched enough of the videos I’d never want to watch them again.

What I didn’t know was that I’d also come away more immune to celebrity culture and marketing, because now I can spot plastic surgery in a way I couldn’t before.

If only I could go back and talk to my younger self, I’d be able to save myself a lot of strife, and maybe even save my health, which was greatly impacted from decades of bulimia and starvation.

Turns out, I’m just a regular person. With regular skin and wrinkles and lots of imperfections. I was raised in a world (and by a mother) that prioritized physical beauty above all else, to a tragic degree. But beauty is subjective, and beauty is not necessarily physical, and beauty is only one of many elements that make up the essence of anything.

---

This morning I went for a walk in my neighborhood and the clouds were smudged pink across the pale blue sky and flowers were blooming and the air was warm and suffused with a lovely smell I couldn’t place. My legs carried me. The whole world is alive.

What’s so beautiful to me is that we are connected to one another; to this earth; to every small and large thing in the universe. We are all alive together in each moment.

How small our worlds can become when we shrink ourselves into singular entities rating everything on hierarchical scales. How small our worlds can become when we forget that we are everything, and that everything is us. When we take for granted the gift of being in this moment, exactly as we are.

I once lived in that small world, and it beckons. Dipping my toe in, I recall the undercurrents. Their strength and velocity. All the deaths I’ve endured, losing myself in those waters.

I walk away, now; and towards.