Selling one’s soul for eternal youth has been a literary device since the discovery of the first intransigent wrinkle (e.g., Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; the many literary and operatic treatments of Faust).
Now, in the twenty-first century, rolling back the physical clock is a $60-billion-per-year enterprise in the United States alone.
Having just peeked into the, er, lengths gay men go to keeping everything firm, taught and admired well beyond their best-before date (Christopher Hines’ The Adonis Factor—cross-reference below), Mitch McCabe’s study of mainly heterosexual women reworking themselves into objects of desire provides further insights—from a much more curvaceous point of view—into how something old tries to become new again.
The biggest difference between the two filmmakers is intent. For Hines, it’s all about transformation and belonging to the team; curiously—and unintentionally—McCabe is a Freudian delight: this production turns about to be a loving homage to her dad.
Soon after her father’s instant death (no one else was seriously injured) in a car crash while driving the family home from vacation at a Rhode Island beach, McCabe buys her first video camera and a filmmaker is born.
She recalls the irony of the sudden passing: "In just seconds, a man who spent his life helping others prolong [improve] their looks for years" was gone. Dr. McCabe was a very successful plastic surgeon.
Of course, the film is full of interviews with reconstructed women and men (and their medical workers and “suppliers”) who would rather miss a meal or mortgage payment in order to buy magical creams or wake up with non-sagging boobs. (Sherry Lee Mecom is a delight as she happily parades her new pair for the camera while her adoring husband positively salivates for these reconstituted fleshy pillows.)
Yet the frequent flashbacks to the good doctor’s albums and home videos gradually complete the picture of one exceptional human being. The before-and-after-shots (none more revealing than the tissue under repair) are silent testimony to the remarkable changes that result from implants and all manner of tucks, snips and transplants. Most compelling is a mercifully-brief montage of the wounded and dying during Dr. McCabe's year in Vietnam—like his own death seemed to Mitch, her father’s battlefield experience witnessing equally sudden injuries and demises put him on the path of wanting to help his patients feel better about themselves rather than just easing them to the other side.
An especially-telling clip is the Renaissance Plastic Surgery television ad where Dr. McCabe and his much younger partner extol the virtues of their services even as the more experienced of the two can’t quite get through his lines without a wee blemish. Here’s a man anyone would love to have dinner with.
The music selections are subtly at one with the subject matter. Two appearances of Ravel’s Bolero have more to do with the film 10 (as in “perfect”) than the love of French art; the snippet from a Beethoven piano sonata—rendered electronically—has much to say about the art of fakery.
Not surprisingly, Mitch finally succumbs and goes through a Botox-injection treatment of her own, and—although just thirty-eight and not hard to look at as she is—the improvement is obvious, causing new-found confidence to seep into in her attitude.
As good as all of that is, Mecom’s secret worry ("What happens if the money runs out [and I have to start looking the way I really am]?") will send chills into millions of patients but induce nothing but broad grins from the pharmaceutical giants (and their medical servants) secure in the knowledge that human nature will fill their pockets for evermore. JWR