By Carolina Rabasa Rucki
‘Sweety, plastics is just good grooming’
The Neon Demon (2016) directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and starring Elle Fanning (Jesse) portrays the arrival of a wannabe model into the Los Angeles modeling scene. This psychological horror film takes us along Jesse’s brief journey from a naive teenager to an up-and-coming modelling star, as she struggles with the industry and her competition.
The film introduces the idea of beauty from an early stage. In one of the first scenes, we can see a just-arrived Jesse being almost interrogated by two more experienced models and a make-up artist in the confines of the women’s toilet at an LA club.
This scene portrays two sides of grooming within the realm of beauty: that of the beauty practices carried out to achieve a certain look, and that of the educational practice around beauty. While one of the characters retouches her make-up, the others pose a series of questions to Jesse about the work she may or may not have done to achieve her look. ‘Is that your natural (hair) colour?’. ‘Is that your real nose?’. After Jesse affirms all her physical attributes have not been modified or worked on, the rest of the models go into a shower of praise and envy. The make-up artist points out one of them has just gotten out of the ‘body shop’, to which the model responds by comparing plastic surgery to brushing her teeth.
It is visible how beauty practices, being invasive -like in the case of plastic surgery- or non-invasive –like that related to coloring one’s hair or brushing one’s teeth-, are normalized as regular grooming altogether. This scene is an outspoken example of the current scenario around beauty practices all over the world. With cultural-contextual particularities, the democratization of beauty practices has flooded daily life.(1) What once were practices reserved for the upper classes with higher social and economic resources to achieve them, are relatively accessible. This also happens in relation to age appropriateness: what once were cosmetic procedures reserved for a certain age group have now become open and modified to accommodate most age groups. You have botox, and you have baby botox as a preventive measure for the young in their early 20s.
The scene also reveals a second sense for the relevance of grooming to beauty: it showcases the high levels of bodily surveillance and self-surveillance (2) carried throughout mundane situations. We see Jesse as a new gear to the impressive LA modeling machinery. As such, she is seemingly ignorant of the proper practices and standards such industry holds. Not even two minutes after meeting this group of models, she is handed a professional card of a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. Overall, this scene conspicuously depicts something we all face since early childhood, this is, an everlasting sequence of observations, signals and even corrections over how our body should (or must) look.
Models or not, we are both socially and culturally groomed into knowing what it is we call beautiful in terms of physical appearance.
Now we open the question: does this ring any bell regarding your daily life? Have you ever found yourself in such a position where your peers observed a new fashion trend, skin care practice or even hair treatment that appeared almost mandatory? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YieuxV88Cro
References
(1) Kuipers, G. (2022). The expanding beauty regime: Or, why it has become so important to look good. Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, 13(2), 207–228. https://doi.org/10.1386/csfb_00046_1
(2) Elias AS, Gill R (2018) Beauty surveillance: The digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism. European Journal of Cultural Studies 21(1): 59–77.
Elias AS, Gill R, Scharff C (2017) Aesthetic Labor: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (1st edn). London: Palgrave Macmillan.