Hollywood's shallow pursuit of perfection
AS I wrote last week, I have been making a documentary in Hollywood, which must be the most vain and self-absorbed place in the entire world.
If we think that the cult of physical perfection has taken hold here, with 10-year-olds dieting themselves into anorexia and magazines advertising miracle cream after miracle cream, all I can say is that we haven’t seen anything yet. If this nonsense crosses the Atlantic, then heaven help our young.
Out there, it is a standard “grad-uation” present to give 16-year-olds “nose jobs” to show off at the school ball. As one former model told me, seriously, there are a few weeks of the year when it seems as if every other girl is walking around with plaster on her nose!
An image consultant told me of hundreds, yes hundreds, of cosmetic procedures which might be available. I can advance no more detail before the programme is aired but that alone should give you a pretty good flavour of what I found. Even the camera crew was occasionally open-mouthed with disbelief. Britain suddenly seemed sane by comparison.
Let us, for a moment, forget the risks associated with plastic surgery, the anaesthetic, the knife, the pain, the times when it all goes wrong, the unexpected adverse reaction, the occasional death.
Let us forget all that, even if it does seem like child abuse when applied to a 16-year-old – and I learnt of girls younger than that undergoing cosmetic surgery – and ask ourselves instead what all this does for mental and spiritual welfare.
A recipe for a happy life must surely include a sense of proportion and it seems only common sense to say that what you do is more important than how you look.
To be a good parent is more important than being a good looking one. Yet we are producing a generation in which people, and especially girls, are judging themselves by the degree of physical perfection they have achieved.
It is shallow and pitiable but the victims believe it reasonable.
Once, people worried about getting to Heaven and, therefore, about leading a good enough life to qualify, which is another way of saying that they were focused on what they were doing and its effect on others.
Today’s scorn for religion has distorted that very basic order of priorities and left so little in its place that the gap is filled by the trivial and an obsession with triviality, such as size and looks and adornment.
Magazines devote pages to stories about diet and paragraphs to stories about meeting need and helping others. Christian reflection has been replaced by tarot readings and psychic messages. The drive for materialism has replaced the drive for spiritual fulfilment.
Hollywood is a hothouse of competition but the competition is to look better, earn more, wear glamorous clothes and catch the eye of some film-maker.
Never mind the talent, what about the waist size? Never mind the kindness, it’s the kind of car that counts.
Other people? What other people – and do they look better than me?
Don’t let your daughter go to Hollywood, Mrs Worthington, and don’t let Hollywood come to her because
if we are only 10 years behind America, then it is certainly on its way.