Under your skin

Alarmed that I was putting on more than just the usual holiday weight, I strung together a minislideshow of photos of me from a couple years back to the present, in order to figure out where my sense of unheimlich came from. The "now" me who grinned back at its real self had enormous apple cheeks – of the Fuji kind – and other explosions of nature, like rolls, jowls, waves. This was not me, this was not the "I" I felt, the interior constructed image of myself I had grown to be familiar with and occasionally fond of. This was not my face.

Aging, genetics and my constant gym excuses can be blamed for the metamorpho-sis, indeed one achieving Kafkaesqe proportions, but the unrecognizability factor stealthily crept up on me when I was in a coma (probably a food coma) and settled in like an unwanted houseguest. I woke up and found an imposter, an imperso-nator in the mirror.

I wonder what Isabelle Dinoire will feel when the doctors finally unswaddle her head to reveal the partially-new face she acquired through the latest in medical ingenuity and derring-do. Will she too feel out of place, out of body, out of mind?

Dinoire, a French woman, was the first ever recipient of a partial face transplant. She was tragically mangled by her Labrador when it tried to wake her up after she overdosed on sleeping pills. Deciding she was way beyond a good lick, one thing led to another and the friendly nuzzling turned into carnivorous masticating on her nose, chin and cheeks. The story itself is horrific and contains many immoral lessons: one, a man’s best friend will eventually eat said man if left unchecked, and two, attempted suicide does not go unpunished.

The pathos thickens when Dinoire, now an embodiment (or disembodiment) of Billy Idol’s creepy/lovely "Eyes Without a Face," requested to have another person’s face grafted on, and the swathe of muscle and soft-tissue was taken from, incidentally, a fresh suicide victim.

Critics of the operation, mostly rivalrous American doctors, declaimed the ethical and scientific soundness of the transplant. I’d be troubled too knowing that the French doctor who performed the face-off was the same who attempted the first surgical sleight of hand, that is, the first hand transplant. Which failed, the wrist did not take well to the proffered hand, probably in the same way we are revulsed by clammy limp handshakes. The lend-a-hand consequently had to be amputated.

While the critics may be suffering from professional and national jealousy, there is something disturbing yet fascinatingly movie-like (and French!) about this story of suffering. Two suicides, one failed; two loss of faces, one borrowed; a dead woman brought back to life as another (the dog, by the way, was sent to an animal shelter and there mysteriously died). Dinoire, it turns out, sold the rights to a movie even before she underwent the switcheroo, further casting her in a shady light.

The problematic of face transplants has been explored in cinema before, most memorably in John Woo’s Face/Off, which featured nano-precision and zero swelling when switching back and forth between cop and criminal. Georges Franju’s 1962 Eyes Without A Face also depicted the crime of face-stealing for the purpose of covering up a woman’s gross disfigurement. Going down in the banals of history are the reality TV programs that exploit people’s endless unhappiness with their looks. Shows like Extreme Makeover and I Want A Famous Face purport to document – but also dubiously enable – the rabid phenomenon of physical self-reinvention. Cheek implants, orthondontics, nose jobs and brow beatings are considered structural improvements and not as drastic as tearing the whole face down. Pundits have it that once the stigma of changing faces is taken down a notch, we’d all be bidding for dead celebrities faces on eBay. One highly doubts that stars like Angelina Jolie will want their mugs to live on through the chattering classes and the tabloid junkies, the beastly crowd of eyes without faces.

When it comes to the face of a nation, some preserve, restore and nurture their architectural landscape, while others, particularly the nouveau countries of the East, are bent on constantly constructing edifices of the new, erasing traces of what is old, ugly and therefore unworthy. Our postmodern bodies are also these new sites of revisionism, and with a knife and clean sutures we reinvent our own histories, snip away that unwanted line of flesh, tie and tighten the loose ends, lift, shoot and suck. Only the sins will be revisited in our children (you didn’t get that nose from me…) and so the future of the future requires that we able to manipulate while in the mix, Darwinially eradicate all our perceived flaws.

The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari conceived of the face as an abstract machine, one that is being constantly produced, not something that is a given. We are born with two eyes and a mouth, but we only start to own a face through time and enculturation – our Face is created for us by the beauty industry, by the fashion industry, by cinema, by science, by dreams and visions and now the illuminating, invasive glare of the super-duper-mega-pixel camera. In stories, it is always the image of the person without a face, or with one that is scarred or burned beyond human expectation, which is the most harrowing. Because there in that empty lunar plane we can’t see our selves reflected, our humanity made up of smiles and tics and frown lines and tears. If we ourselves lose face, do we lose our point of subjectivity, our frame of reference to the world, as well as others’ reference to us?

When contestants on The Swan, another ghastly surgery show, finally reveal themselves and their new chiseled, sculpted, scalpeled features, they all sob with joyous disbelief and proclaim that their self-confidence and sex appeal have never been higher. However, just like winning the lottery regretfully doesn’t make a person any happier in the long term, physical augmentations and perfected cover-ups can’t be that much of a boon if your emotional and mental states resemble the aftermath of a nipa hut bitten by Hurricane Katrina.

Our ideal face is always a composite, a hybrid of the little parts and pieces we find pleasing in others. But while I can’t change my actual face (still waiting for further, less painful advancements) I can change the way I face, or interface, with myself and others. Milan Kundera wrote that our friends are reflections of ourselves, and what we admire or detest in them is what we admire and detest in ourselves. Therefore we are already a million little pieces, a million reflecting faces and not just this one strange one that perhaps only I blindly see.