Horror on the Inside

What possesses a human being who wasn't particularly lacking in the looks department to do this to their face and body?

To sacrifice their physical character and individuality to a cookie-cutter, factory-line plastic surgeon's ideal of beauty that makes her less rather than more memorable, and risks death to do it? Is it because some moron online said she had too big a chin, and now she can't move her face?

Is this what celebutard culture has come to?

I have no idea how many young women out there with twisted self-images will see this reality show icon as so fortunate to have been able to do this. My hunch is that it's one thing to get more subtle updates in plastic surgery, or to be made famous after surgery for your looks so that there's no preexisting mass impression of the celebrity without it, but that this kind of extreme mutilation of identifiable physical image once as famous as one will ever be (save for potential rubbernecking) instantly comes across as grotesque, and ultimately repels rather than attracts what it craves the most: the gaze.

Over time, I don't expect I'm going out on a limb here, our horror and, tumbling after, pity will turn darker, cautionary. There's no way to maintain this look with any sense of naturalness going into middle age and coming out the senior side. More treatments will be craved along the way, and if the celebrity survives they will spend anything necessary to get it, even if fallen from the D-list to the freak-list, even if there's no money any more and it has to be cut-rate chop-shop stuff. And it will be increasingly horrific, and that may overwhelm the pity.

One expects there's a moment in every extreme plastic surgery victim's life when they look in the mirror and wonder what the devil they were thinking. It may be more than a moment, may be multiple moments, may be long extended stretches or one long phase ending in the ultimate self-mutilation, self-ending a life. One expects it to haunt, sometime, somehow, and maybe earlier than they might have ever imagined.

Whether this one will have such a moment is an open question, since she seems to self-reinforcing in her rhetoric, using God as an instrument of her ego. What values are this that could ever morph into something more recognizably...moral?

There will always be writers and pundits pointing to a case such as this and drawing deeper but well-trod conclusions about our contemporary society and values. The fact is there have always been those desperate to change their basic appearance, hating themselves from in the inside out, and measures crude to elegant to attempt their twisted rectification. But up to now there's never been a way to do it so extravagantly and permanently, and still be able to be seen in public.

Here the question is simply one of character, of the solitary individual, God's child like the rest of us if, despite her own self-absorption, not an iota more so than any of us, and the fallen narrative of her life, the trap she so willingly walked into or, more accurately, pursued.

It's a good story, and a shame it had to happen to a real person.

For her.