We recently finished watching the second season of The Bear, which I thoroughly enjoyed, even more so than the first season.
In many ways the season had it’s peak, at least from an intensity point of view, in episode six, where we have a flashback to a family gathering at Christmas time.
I won’t go into the details in case you haven’t seen it, but I felt like I needed to mention Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance, which was absolutely masterful, raw, intense, and heart wrenching.
But the other thing that I was so happy to see is that Jamie Lee Curtis looks the way one might expect once you start getting a bit older. There is no hint of botox, face lifts, or other cosmetic adjustments that seem to be so common in older (and not-so-old) actors these days.
This obsession with erasing the signs of aging perplexes me, but more than that, I find these aged blemish free faces to be so strange and inscrutable – it is not just the signs of aging that have been erased, but also the story that our faces tell, and in many ways the ability to be expressive.
In actual fact, she did have minor plastic surgery operation in 1989, but this led to years of struggle with opioid addiction. She recently stated:
The current trend of fillers and procedures, and this obsession with filtering, and the things that we do to adjust our appearance on Zoom are wiping out generations of beauty. Once you mess with your face, you can’t get it back.
Jamie Lee Curtis interviewed by Fast Company
Amen Jamie.
Of course it is something which is driven by a culture obsessed with image, and is almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better. My younger brother demonstrated to me recently the horrendousness of ‘beautifying’ filters on Instagram (an app which I have never gone near thankfully). He showed me the feed of one friend of his and compared it with real-life unfiltered images – it was barely recognisable as the same person.
The body-image peer-pressure this must impose on people must be immense.
So I applaud any movie or tv production which is willing to show people in a realistic light.
I find nothing wrong or off-putting about grey hair, wrinkles, and other signs of aging – it’s all part of a rich story, of a life well-lived, of laughter lines, of that scar from that foolish thing you did 30 years ago.
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