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bodies, botches, One Battle After Another

(from source)

I’ve never really known Wes Anderson from Paul Thomas Anderson, although I know one does Quirky White People and the other does Brooding White People. I thought Fargo was Wes Anderson, but turns out it’s the Coen brothers; I thought No Country for Old Men was PTA, but that’s also the Coen brothers. A lesson, there. It’s strange anytime a new Anderson movie sets the internet ablaze, because I’ve never heard anyone talk about these films in real life. You weren’t watching There Will Be Blood in 2007, you were watching I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry like everyone else.

One Battle After Another is more or less what I expected: a three-hour talkie punctuated by violence, chases, and zingers. It’s a loose Pynchon adaptation, Diet Tarantino, and barely made back its $175 million budget. The characters have ridiculous names — Colonel Lockjaw, Perfidia Beverly Hills — and the white supremacists are written as cuddly, bumbling Mr. Magoo villains. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ghetto Pat is a militant left-wing radical, the moniker owing less to his background than his penchant for Black women. He’s either enlightened, a fetishist, or an enlightened fetishist.

The fulcrum is Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia, whose extralegal activism places her in the crosshairs of Sean Penn’s Lockjaw, a racist commando. His and Pat’s obsession with Perfidia — her figure, her dominance, her Blackness — is inextricable from the film’s. Perfidia disappears into witness protection, but decades later both men are still fighting for dominion, her hypothetical approval. It’s worth considering the substance of their objectification: One Battle After Another is about the lengths gross white guys will go for a woman who looks like Teyana Taylor.

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution

A b-list R&B singer, Taylor has never had a radio hit, no one knows any of her songs. She had a boring reality show and was married to a mostly-forgotten NBA player. She’s toured medium-sized theaters for fifteen years, during which time her face and torso have grown progressively sharper. The social media posts write themselves: if I had teyana’s abs i’d never wear a shirt again.

I’m unqualified to say which blephamastorhinoplasty procedures she’s had, which is to the surgeons’ advantage. They can dissemble, say it’s the makeup, or the weight loss, or Japanese sweet potatoes. Taylor is always telling interviewers she doesn’t even exercise: you too can look like a blowup doll if you dance and drink smoothies. Not a girl’s girl, not my problem. We’re reaching new and unprecedented standards of unattainable beauty, then calling them empowering and progressive.

Taylor is something of an edge case in that her cosmetic work does not make her look younger or ethnically ambiguous. Ciara and Zoe Saldaña’s noses have been sculpted into dainty Jessica Biel tips; so long as you straighten your hair and keep the weight off, you can be America’s middle-aged sweetheart in a T-Mobile campaign. Taylor is 34 but always getting cast in these stoic matriarch roles because her bionic visage is frozen in a scowl, and we all pretend, yes, that’s a believable face for a person to have, even when she’s in HD looking like Janet circa the Velvet Rope tour.

None of this matters in a Pynchon/PTA joint venture, a narrative hinging on weed-farming desert nuns, a film in which Junglepussy plays herself for some reason. My take is neither as informed nor nuanced as father_karine’s, although I think I agree with the premise — shit is a bummer. It is a uniquely American phenomenon, rooted in uniquely American strains of misogyny and white supremacy, and if you notice GloRilla has a different face than last year you’re the problem.

The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read

I need not cite the case of Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey, whose career tanked after a nose job that was, by today’s standards, fairly subtle. Audiences were spooked, but more importantly it signaled a lack of seriousness. We’re talking about performers renowned for their beauty — if not their talent — who’d throw it away based on flavor-of-the-month market dictums. How can you be a star if your face is interchangeable?

It’s poor taste to comment on a millionaire’s cosmetic modifications: the body is her jurisdiction, her choice. Her aesthetic pursuits, the image she projects to the world, is somehow not reflective of her or her values. On the other hand, a public figure who neglects her appearance should not be judged for it — that would be vain, hateful, we don’t know what she’s dealing with. These schools of thought are antithetical yet mutually valid, neither better than the other; you must hold space for both at once.

We must extend grace for affirmation of gender identity, as if all care is not gender-affirming. Running a half-marathon is gender-affirming. Eating carrots instead of Oreos is gender-affirming. Picking a scab and rubbing Vaseline over the wound is gender-affirming. These activities confer countless and contradictory benefits, but they also make you appear smoother and thinner and younger and hotter. When Bradley Cooper gets his eyelids lasered off it’s pathetic, a laughingstock, are men okay? But when Lindsay Lohan turns up on Netflix looking like a Stepford Wife it’s brave, iconic. I think they both have a lot more money than I do.

A common misperception, in the Discourse, is that it boils down to coupling: the male gaze, the female gaze, the white gaze, the queer gaze. We should be so lucky! Americans are always on the market, mindful of achievement gaps. If you are comfortably thin with cheekbones and a hairline you will, on average, outperform your peers. Some folks are blessed and cursed by the genetic lottery, the rest of us hit the gym and hope for the best. Here as elsewhere, it takes money to make money.

This is why it’s perfectly reasonable to call foul when Miley Cyrus has her cheeks vivisected, when Mindy Kaling or Luka Doncic drops fifty pounds overnight. They already had all the time and money in the world to make themselves hot and svelte, whereas for working people it’s a horrific ordeal: hours and hours of arduous cardio, skipped meals, lost sleep, fat jeans and skinny jeans. Scientists came up with biological hacks, which were then marketed to the Americans who needed them least.

I can count on one hand the number of old or bald or heavy or disabled folks I’ve encountered in white-collar environments. I’ve seen project managers return from vacation with new Bella Hadid noses, account execs who had follicles harvested from the backs of their heads, then the plugs fell out and the scars never really healed. Who am I to judge? In lieu of employment laws, there are stopgaps.

The precepts of purity and authenticity, so crucial when assessing art, are necessarily disregarded in matters of physiognomy and finances. They are fraught with normativity, the privilege of those who contemplate vanity. Suddenly, we are faced with two types of people: those who can purchase their ideal faces and bodies — within a margin of error — and those who can’t. Jennifer Grey, like most innovators, was ahead of her time. Today, a severe cosmetic procedure is proof of power as well as vulnerability; the most glamorous people on earth are above critique.

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