In Ovid’s “Pygmalion” an artist creates an ivory sculpture of a woman so beautiful that he falls in love with it. He kisses his statue, adorns it with jewels and finery, and prays to Venus for a bride just like her. Venus answers his prayer. She grants the statue life, turning ivory to flesh. Pygmalion marries his ideal creation, later known as “Galatea.”
Artists have reimagined the tale of Pygmalion (written in 8 A.D.) for centuries, in countless stories of alluring dolls or automatons who either come to life or hover between seeming fully alive and being inanimate objects, from the ballet “Coppélia” to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” the 1987 film “Mannequin” (starring Kim Cattrall), the Spike Jonze film “Her,” and even Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” in 2023. In all cases though, “aliveness” is presented as the desired option.
But in our new, artificial intelligence-driven world, where human reality recedes ever further from our grasp, the Pygmalion paradigm is changing.
Instead of transcending from inanimate substance to human flesh, today’s Galateas go the opposite way, morphing into artists’ creations and subjecting their living flesh to tinkering and inanimate substances — gleefully announcing it all on social media, itself yet another form of irreality.
The mother-daughter duo of Kris and Kylie Jenner are at the forefront of this shift, ushering in a new era of beauty culture. Now not only can celebrities acknowledge plastic surgery, they might also reveal their doctors’ names and even drop surgical details, essentially stamping their aesthetically altered body parts with a medicalized luxury logo. Move over Balenciaga and Chanel, the poshest labels now read “Dr. Steven Levine” or “Dr. Garth Fisher,” the plastic surgeons cited by the Jenners.
Kris Jenner, 69, blew up social media last month when she was photographed in Paris looking decades younger, and sporting a coif reminiscent of an earlier American celebrity in Paris: Josephine Baker. The new ’do — ultra-black, short, shiny and slicked back — exposed every re-sculpted angle of Ms. Jenner’s face, and was punctuated by a perfect circle of a forehead curl. She looked a little like a cartoon drawing, and a lot like (and barely any older than) her daughter Kim.
Following much media speculation, a representative for Ms. Jenner told Page Six, “We can confirm that Dr. Steven Levine did Kris Jenner’s recent work.”
Next, Ms. Jenner’s youngest daughter, Kylie, went a step further, revealing on TikTok a startling level of detail about her breast augmentation: “445 cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!!!!! silicone!!! garth fisher!!! hope this helps lol.”
With this, not only do we know the doctor’s name, but the size of the implants, their style, the substance they contained and even the details of their anatomical placement. We also sense that Ms. Jenner finds none of this a particularly big deal. Rendered in her TikTok shorthand — no full sentences, exclamation points galore — major surgery sounds like lighthearted fun, no more serious than a lip kit. Dr. Fisher, relieved of both a medical title and capital letters, seems youthful and approachable. Nothing scary here, lol.
The elder Ms. Jenner can now wear her face and the younger Ms. Jenner her breasts as they would couture gowns. Their surgeons’ names anoint their body parts with the glow of purchased exclusivity, metamorphosing flesh into inanimate luxuries, like ivory or jewels, the Pygmalion story in reverse.
Admittedly, there is something refreshing about such honesty. Harper’s Bazaar praised the Jenners for coming clean about plastic surgery which, for all its ubiquity, is still shrouded in shame, secrecy and prurience. And it is tedious to read the rumors and speculations about stars’ procedures, or their coy denials and implausible explanations (“Only organic food!”; “I’m in love!”; “I bathe in olive oil!”).
Even celebrities who acknowledge their “work” rarely supply details and sometimes seem apologetic. Bella Hadid says she wishes she had kept the “nose of her ancestors.” Jane Fonda says she regrets her face-lift. Dolly Parton also keeps it vague, though upbeat: “If something is bagging, sagging, or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it, or pluck it.”
The Jenners cast all disingenuousness aside. In naming their surgeons or detailing procedures, they declare themselves art works for public consumption, dropping any pretense that a totally “natural” body is preferable to a perfected version, created by experts. For them it is not. That is their truth.
And in a way, it is also everyone else’s. We all grapple increasingly with determining what is real. The internet bombards us with messages of indeterminate provenance. Is that cute tiger cub real or A.I.-generated? Was that article written by an expert or a bot? And, as many professors now wonder: Did my student produce this assignment or did ChatGPT? Or both?
But relying on A.I. is now largely considered normal and acceptable, no big deal, despite the serious, inherent problems.
Always at the vanguard of culture, the Jenners have added their physical selves to the list of things generated by technology. In other words, they manifest the end of organically “authored” bodies, merging celebrity culture fully with A.I. culture.
This is perhaps the last step in a long process. Cosmetics were once considered deceptive or immoral. So too was hair coloring. Such qualms seem quaint today, in the age of celebrity makeup artists, stylists, fitness gurus and all the computer magic shaping our perceptions.
Adding physicians’ names and surgical specs is the final frontier, crossing the line from acknowledgment of temporary, superficial adornment into admission of permanent, technological reconfiguring, with proud shout-outs to the Pygmalions responsible for it: the doctor-sculptors who can now “sign” their work.
But this phenomenon is not confined to the Jenners. On Sunday night, the Tony Awards confirmed that Broadway, too, has entered reverse-Pygmalion mode: Sarah Snook and Nicole Scherzinger won awards for their performances in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Sunset Boulevard,” respectively.
Both plays are about people desperate to deny age and preserve beauty. And both productions make innovative use of technology, such as streaming video images of the actors, to blur the distinction between human beings and virtual simulacra. (This is especially interesting in the case of “Dorian Gray,” which is about a man merging with his own portrait — a painted simulacrum.)
In “Dorian Gray,” Ms. Snook portrays an astonishing 26 characters, many of whom appear only as filmed images, yet somehow, through stage trickery, can seem to be seated all together onstage, around a dinner table. Similarly, in “Sunset Boulevard,” cast members are visible both as real people onstage and as video projections. Often, the same actor appears in both forms simultaneously, forcing the audience to toggle back and forth between the realms of flesh and film.
Both plays force us to question the status of the bodies we’re watching. To wonder which to react to — the flesh-and-blood versions or the oversize ones, made of light beams. Both make live theater feel like cinema, and people feel like holograms.
This might be new on Broadway, but the Kardashian-Jenner clan has prepared us for it. It does feel good to acknowledge the obvious, to accept our reverse- Pygmalion, post-human world. To stop shaming personal choices or condemning technology. But outfoxing or denying time, flesh, nature, and especially reality, is a dangerous proposition. Dorian Gray and Norma Desmond both learned that the hard way.
Source: nytimes.com
