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Surgeons Gone Wild Empty-V just got emptier. And so did the rest of the medium. The past season has seen reality television spawn a subset so mindless, materialistic, vain, vacuous, risky, and even lethal, it could only be a ratings bonanza—the plastic surgery show. Recently, I caught my eleven-year- old daughter watching ABC’s Extreme Makeover and ordered her to go watch some soft core porn on Showtime. On I Want a Famous Face, contestants have less of a chance of getting what the title promises than the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man have of getting courage, a brain, and a heart. After all the bloodletting, the patients don’t wind up looking any more like Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston than they did last Tuesday—just a bruised and battered version of who they were before the procedure. Typically, they are somewhat bruised and battered to begin with. And sadly, their only reflection is a well rehearsed gawk in the mirror at the end of the show. But even a fleeting moment of real reflection would prompt a question that goes a little something like this: Is a half-assed rendition of Catherine Zeta-Jones’s cheekbones really going to compensate for the fact that Mommy and Daddy didn’t love you? Candidates for surgery are psychologically screened, but who is screening the screeners? If these folks worked at JFK, they’d be putting 20-something males with turbans, an FBI rap sheet, and a shoe bomb in first class. Still worse is the fact that, in many cases, these shows prey on adolescents. As wayward, confused American youth run out of appendages to pierce, they will turn increasingly to self-negation. The least we can do is present them with a ready team of surgeons, producers, programmers, psychologists, anesthesiologists, and cosmetologists. In a country where teenage girls routinely mutilate themselves, there is perhaps nothing more wholesome than being a fly on the wall as doctors do it for them. The main difference between I Want a Famous Face and Nazi medical experiments is the Nielsen ratings. I miss the era when my insecure high school friends smoked a little pot and used fake IDs to get into bars. Gone are the days of coming back from spring break with a knowing grin. Now you come back with a new jaw line. Just like misguided teens who want to look like someone else, the format itself is being cloned. On Fox’s The Swan, two suicidal young adults are yanked from the precipice long enough to have their septum broken, their lips pumped with collagen, and their thighs sucked clean of cellulite. At the end of this grisly tunnel is a runoff between the two contestants to move on to the next round. All that’s missing is Simon Cowell telling them he’s just not feeling it. Meanwhile, on Extreme Makeover, the granddaddy of all mutilation shows, contestants are praised by family members based on how unrecognizable they are, suggesting that perhaps, as the theme from M*A*S*H went, suicide really is painless. If there is still a depth remaining to which television can sink, rest assured, a team of programming directors and market research analysts are upstairs at Viacom working on it right now. On Fear Factor: Patients, surgery-phobic young men and women undergo radical cosmetic procedures on a dare. On Who Wants to Look Like a Millionaire?, contestants answer increasingly difficult questions to qualify for progressively more invasive rhinoplasties, tummy tucks, and liposuctions. On The Plastic Apprentice, a group of young, aspiring corporate executives surgically acquire jowls, neck fat, and big hair in a race to look like the CEO. On Joe Average Plastic Surgeon, short order cooks dabble in facelifts, Botox injections, and scalp reductions. On Anorexic Makeover, young female contestants are starved to the goal weights of their diva role models. The runner-up gets a date with David Blaine. On Trading Faces, the prom queen and the math club dweeb swap appearances for a semester and see who gets laid less. Meanwhile, over at NBC, a show by the name of Midget Makeover is on the short list. Ironically, it is television itself that needs to go under the knife. Radical lumpectomy of all executives born after 1965 might help heal the patient, as might a lopping off of all cable channels above the number 35. Without such drastic measures, there is no end in sight to the programming obscenities. Today, they want to be like William Hung. Tomorrow, they want to be hung like William. True, there are advantages to filming these procedures, as the videotapes will aid in the litigation sure to follow. But we must have the fortitude to avoid the fulfillment of our most horrific cultural prophesies. At least in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, surgery was done in private. Today, what passes for entertainment is basically Abu-Ghraib with consent forms. Which, in turn, leads to the only logical conclusion—that the sick patient is America herself. The real problem with Janet Jackson’s right nipple was that it wasn’t her own. In the USA of 2004, not making the cut as a Wilhelmina model is considered disfigurement. That line from Paul Revere and the Raiders’ song Kicks (just keep getting harder to find) rings truer today than ever: You’ll never run away from you. But in modern America, there is no greater unexpressed disappointment than when your kids look like your baby pictures. As our once great nation slips deeper and deeper into the throes of general anesthesia, the private and public refusal to look ourselves in the mirror can only swell. If you’re a talented plastic surgeon, you have to ask yourself why you’re enlarging breasts in Darien, Connecticut instead of repairing limbs in Tikrit. As a voter, the question is can we wage war on two fronts simultaneously—leveling and reconstructing entire nations in the Middle East while shattering and resetting suburban adolescent jawbones at home? But perhaps the most inoperable condition of all involves the timeless question of whether we—either as individuals or as a country—possess what might be called a soul. And if so, can it be reattached? Click here to rant back. |