Kristi “The Body” Noem
Kristi Noem, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, has had so much plastic surgery and wears such heavy makeup that she no longer even looks like the same person as the Kristi Noem who first entered the House of Representatives fifteen years ago. She gets a lot of attacks and mockery for this, especially from the political left. I think there is a distinctly misogynistic tone to a lot of these attacks and a lot of this mockery, as is the case with other women in Trump’s orbit like Melania Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Yet the kind of hyperfemininity that people are reacting to when they launch sexist broadsides against the women of Trumpworld is off-putting for legitimate reasons. There is something Dorian Grayish about “Mar-a-Lago face,” in the sense that it is an active decision to physically, visually, outwardly represent the inward condition of the soul, only unlike Dorian Gray these people have to wear the portrait over and within their actual faces at all times.
Svengalis
I recently read the 1895 (give or take a year; I don’t feel like looking it up right now) novel Trilby, one of the most popular books of its time but one that is almost never read today. Even in 1946 George Orwell, who enjoyed the novel despite admitting that it is very bad, wrote a newspaper column lamenting that nobody was reading it any more. Orwell admitted this, though, in the context of also admitting the thing for which the novel is best-remembered, which is its intense antisemitism. Artistically, this isn’t even the biggest problem with the book, which is saying something. The book is by George du Maurier, grandfather of the much more famous Daphne; Daphne du Maurier, a writer I like very much, is more famous for good reason.
Bird of Paradise
Carole Lombard, the immensely popular comic actress who starred in movies like Nothing Sacred and To Be or Not to Be, died in January 1942 when a plane carrying her crashed into a mountain while returning to Hollywood from her native Indiana. She had been there selling war bonds, very successfully. America had entered World War II the previous month. Lombard died with her mother, to whom she was very close, and with the crew of the plane.
Femininomena
Dario Argento, the Italian horror director and father-in-law (sort of) to the late great Anthony Bourdain, is a very strange man who has had many contentious relationships and made a lot of enemies in Italian film culture over the decades. It’s probably a bad idea from a health-and-safety standpoint to let him keep making the kinds of movies he does, even though many of those movies are very good. Reading the things he said about his movies, at least in English translation, is almost as surreal and troubling an experience as watching them. It always reminds me a little of the commentary that Ikuhara Kunihiko did on individual episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena (translated in the liner material for my Nozomi DVD box sets of that show), except Argento is at least trying to invite his interlocutor, his Model Reader, to understand the movies on a somewhat more conventional level, whereas Ikuhara is more interested in adding more of the same.
Mr. Miyagi’s America
The aesthetic appeal of Japanese culture in the West has, I think, had at least as many points of continuity as points of rupture over the decades. Consistently Western observers of Japan have noted that it has an exceptionally beautiful visual and material culture, in ways that are difficult to define without lapsing into Orientalist cliché, regardless of what the observer thinks of the social and ideological aspects of Japanese life. Yet the way people in the West respond to this aesthetic appeal has obviously shifted over time; a Victorian artist’s model lounging in a kimono gives one a feeling of change-in-continuity vis-à-vis a cosplayer wearing a similar kimono at a late-2000s anime convention.