In the latest season of “The White Lotus,” old friends Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie meet at the show’s typical luxury hotel, this time located on Thailand’s Ko Samui. Their talk quickly turns to looks. They give exaggerated compliments to each other. They say things like, “No, you look amazing,” “You look just like you did 20 years ago,” and “Who’s your doctor?”
CJ Hauser wrote in her book “The Crane Wife,” “To keep being a woman means doing a lot of work to change yourself.” In our time, “tweakments” and cosmetic work are becoming more common. The pressure to control and shape our appearance is getting stronger. This work to make ourselves better, or “self-erasure” (however you want to define it), where our body’s uniqueness is slowly taken away, is finally being shown on screen. Movies and TV shows are shining a light on the gendered beauty standards that often get hidden by new cosmetic procedures. They do this by showing how hard modern beauty routines are, both mentally and physically.
In the 2024 movie “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s body horror shows the female body as a place of violence and oppression. Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl” also looks at the strict beauty standards for successful corporate women, though not as directly. And the third season of “The White Lotus” makes fun of the beauty concerns of wealthy women. It seems that Hollywood is starting to look at its own problems and the problems of the patriarchy more closely. These scenes on screen show how youth and beauty are still important, especially for successful women in the public eye.
In “Babygirl,” Romy (played by Nicole Kidman) is a top CEO at a company like Amazon that makes robots. Her character is all about being tight, restricted, and always trying to make herself better. She gets Botox, does cryotherapy regularly, and goes to intense therapy sessions. She’s trying hard to reach a kind of perfect, plastic-like state, both in her mind and body. This is as tiring as working late at the office and dealing with corporate hustle culture. Her body is like a place of industrial productivity. It makes sense that the movie’s fake company deals with robots, because it’s like the new, almost inhuman body standards. It’s the relationship she has with her intern Samuel (Harris Dickenson) that gives her a break. It’s a way for her to let go of control over her body and enjoy its physical side. “The Substance” also looks at work and image. It follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former fitness TV star. She’s dealing with losing her job because of ageism. She has to take a strange, but very realistic biotech “substance.” Sometimes, a younger version of herself comes out of her body in really gross transformation scenes. The makers of the substance keep saying, “Remember you are one,” but in a time when people are afraid of getting old, age and youth can’t mix. It’s no surprise that having two different bodies ends badly. Elisabeth changes so much that she becomes a strange, mutated version of herself.
When we really think about these beauty ideas, we see that beauty is a kind of work and the body can be a place of oppression. Demi Moore said about “The Substance,” “What really hit me was how cruel we are to ourselves. It’s not about what others do to us, but what we do to ourselves.” Her character ruins herself because of the false promise of youth and beauty. In “Babygirl,” Romy’s daughter also asks her, “Why do you do this to yourself?” It’s a tough question that makes us think about how women are part of these beauty standards.
Before, women used to strongly deny having cosmetic procedures. But now, these procedures are being faced directly. Seeing Nicole Kidman lying in a surgery chair with Botox being injected into her face and a blue bruise left behind felt like a big moment. The scene seems to say, of course she (either the actor or the character) is getting Botox, because it’s the new normal. These movies deal with these topics in a smart way, helped by casting Kidman and Moore. It’s like they’re saying, “We know about the pressure and public attention these actors have faced because of how they look, especially when it comes to cosmetic work.” For example, when Demi Moore walked in a Fendi Couture show in 2021, a lot of people said mean things about her “botched” face work. Watching these movies makes us feel two things. It makes us think about how we, as the audience, play a role. In both movies, other characters talk about the women’s bodies. Romy’s daughter and Samuel notice the Botox bruise on Kidman’s face. TV executives talk about Elisabeth’s body, and the camera shows lots of shots of Margaret Qualley and Elisabeth from a male point of view. These movies make us wonder, how do we look at women in real life? Do we need to think about how complicated our own looks at them are? What ideas about women’s bodies have we just accepted without question?
Dr. Anatalia Moore, an NHS GP and aesthetician, said, “The trend now is for treatments that you can’t tell someone has had.” But “The Substance” and “Babygirl” show the violence done to the body, even in a time when procedures are hard to notice. These movies go beyond the idea of neoliberal ‘choice’ feminism. They show that the female body is in a complex web of beauty and gender politics. To have real control over our bodies, we need to look outside the beauty industry. Thinking that a cosmetic procedure is just about empowerment and is only the individual’s decision is too simple.
It’s hopeful that “Babygirl” shows the female body as a place of great pleasure, not just shame, change, and pain. We see Romy getting on her knees on a hotel floor, her hair loose as she has an animal-like orgasm. She uses wildness as a way to resist. The sexual body is very different from the earlier scenes of the perfect body. The perfect body was made to look shiny and perfect, but now the sexual body is shown as a real, living, physical thing. Pleasure can escape the high beauty standards and still be there. “The Substance” hints that Elisabeth could have found freedom if she had gone on a date with her old classmate, but her insecurity won. She rubs her carefully done makeup off angrily, with lipstick smeared on her cheeks like blood. Pain wins over the chance of pleasure. The feeling of being imperfect makes her miss any chance to connect with others.
You Might Be Interested In:
