An Op-ed from YouthDrs: Sunshine in Paradise Hollywood Part 3

Botox was savvy enough to hire drag queen Yuhua Hamasaki to do one of their ads. Among wealthy White women in Orange County, Botox might have suggested conformity and compliance, but drag recontextualized constructions of womanhood as inventive and individualistic. In the spots, Hamasaki suggests that Botox, like makeup and wigs, is a tool to break free from a gender binary, rather than to police one. There is, however, a limit to that sympathizing spin.

Kidman was cruelly ridiculed for appearing in a teaser trailer for Being the Ricardos, a 1950s-set movie where she plays Lucille Ball, a woman known for her expressive face. Even among Hollywood actors, such procedures are still taboo. Elsewhere, it has more somber undertones. In Botox, the grim Iranian-Canadian movie circulating in festivals this year, it becomes an acute metonym for self-delusion.  The protagonist, a fortysomething housewife in Toronto, is addicted to Botox and fillers. When she is diagnosed with cancer, she refuses to believe it, instead fantasizing that her doctors are lying to her so they can get their hands on her money.

The movie is about two sisters who are reeling from their brothers horrific disappearance, and how they have come to rationalize the events, to even forget them. When the sisters are not physically distressed–they spend most of the movie carrying, shoveling, and grunting–they are languishing at the health club where one works. In one scene, the aesthetician is selling Botox to a customer.

“Botox means youth, eternal, keep on dreaming forever,” he says. She adds, preposterously, that it has roots “in an Eastern Rite of Tibet, and Mayan tribes of Latin America, who believed that death was the only way you could be eternal”.

Even in the marketing meant to push Botox, the morbid shadow lurks. The ad for Errol Morris has an unsettling quality. The dim lighting and sombre music suggests the subject is suffering a terminal disease – and, I guess, it is, since age ultimately leads to death.

Since years of derision against Botox has failed to banish it from foreheads (Americans spent almost $2.5 billion on the procedure in 2019, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons), we are left navigating stages of grief, from denial and anger to bargaining and acceptance. It strikes me that womens wrinkles are stigmatized not just for making them seem older, but for making them seem angry, sad, startled, pained–they make them look lively.  Botox, by contrast, offers a kind of anesthesia for the face, which can be purchased in small vials for as little as $10.

The Economist recently published an article about how Botox might be used to treat depression. The idea is that if you cannot make certain facial expressions, you might feel less sad. Even if Botox becomes the staging ground for women who are in danger of being thrown off by Hollywood, it comes across as a stark reminder of what has been lost. Female film stars are no longer laid to rest at a certain age; they are embalmed instead.

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