Requiem for an Ideal Body

Narrowing the Waist Line: The Unbearable Body Weight

‘Requiem’ is a death-song composed for a death ceremony. In the movie, Requiem for a Dream, all the characters go through near-death experiences while chasing their dream-targets: to lose weight; to earn quick money; to score drugs; or to remain perpetually high and happy. The female protagonist of the movie, Sara Goldfarb, gets a call one day. The voice on the other side tells her that she has won a chance to be on her favorite television show. It is an invitation to display herself on TV, which had been her only preoccupation for long.

The moment Sara gets a call to be on TV, she starts looking at her old photos in a red dress and desires to fit into it again. The visual reference is her image during her son’s graduation ceremony. The point of comparison is her youthful body, which is quite impossible to achieve again. While trying on the red dress, she discovers that she has put on a lot of weight, as she struggles to zip it up. She places immense weight on weight-loss. The desire to fit into the dress gives her a reason to be alive. Soon, this becomes her only aim in life. The Red Dress is a sign of lost youth that she wants to hold on to, or return to. It is an aspiration to narrow her waistline through the consumption of certain beauty products. The motivation to be on TV is a manifestation of her attention-seeking behaviour, revealing how terribly lonely she is. Red is the color of passion, desire, and excitement—all of which she lacks as a widow, who has a son (Harry) who is emotionally detached from her.

Sara is offered a diet book that promises 10-pound loss in ten days. The diet book is full of No’s: no sugar, no red meat, no dressing. Restrain, denial and deferral are at the heart of ‘thinking thin’, as we know. She constantly declares to her friends that she is ‘thinking thin’. Her fridge continually stares at her. The fridge soon becomes a metaphor for her repressed desire for food—a sign of deprivation; an allure for the food denied. She convinces herself that she’ll feel better in the red dress than with Danish cheese, but the fridge continues to scream at her: ‘feed me Sara’, which is presumably her inner voice. She starts hallucinating about all sorts of food that she cannot have falling from the ceiling.

Self-Care and Self-surveillance: Removing the ‘Unwanted’ and the ‘Extra’

Self-scrutiny and self-surveillance require volunteering private information to be made public through the use of personal panopticon (mobiles) that we carry in our palms and pockets. It also necessitates constant self-care. The self has to be sufficiently toned, tamed, and trimmed before display across social media platforms. An assemblage of several regimes contributes to self-care: diet, cosmetics, clothing, exercise, surgical intervention, and counselling.

Once a sense of inadequacy has been successfully injected, self-reforming tendencies need not be forced upon as they are voluntarily chosen. These tendencies do not require any coercion or policing. One is seduced to flirt with the self to attract more likes, comments, and attention. And in that scheme of things, extra weight, extra age, loose flesh, wrinkles—everything is an issue. It is an open war against ageing and sagging. All these issues are established as ‘unwanted’ needs to be removed out of sight. Apps and software can remove pimples, enhance curves, get rid of sagging handles, tone the tummy, and sharpen the jawline. Movies, TV shows, and advertisements further celebrate and validate these beauty standards. Moles, pimples, fat, body hair, body marks, or bruises can be, and should be, removed by a team of specialists: dermatologists, dieticians, beauticians, nutritionists, and trainers. If one of them fails, others can pop up as viable options.

In Requiem for a Dream, when the diet regime fails to provide satisfactory results, Sara desperately turns to a clinic, and starts consuming pills to aid in weight loss. At the clinic, when Sara is asked how she is, she disappointingly says, “I am enormous. That’s why I am here. I have 50 pounds to donate.”

It is not just Sara’s concern. The cosmetic, fashion, and beauty industry has firmly established notions of ideal body types: the muscular-ideal; the size-zero-ideal; the slender-ideal; the curvaceous-ideal. Such ideals are a form of erotic capital or body currency to be consumed and emulated. One’s body has to be reconfigured through body work, self-care, and control to sexualise and eroticise ourselves. The incentive of reworking the body lies in confidence-building, attractiveness, and display.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman had coined it quite profoundly: “The fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed.” The worked-upon body is a tailor-made image for consumption and appreciation. And its task is to keep reproducing the idea of the ideal-type across popular platforms.

Visibility and Ideal-type as Traps: Enchasing on Inadequacies

Visibility of the ideal-type is a trap because body projects are premised on new makeovers, perpetual deferrals, and endless waits. There are, and there will always be, new targets to achieve—new weight targets, fairness targets, diet targets, and much more. In that targeted scheme of things, the body becomes a huge liability. All these targets are based on continual restraint on the body and discontent about it. One is made to feel apologetic about oneself. One remains perpetually dissatisfied with one’s body. It produces self-hate and displeasure with one’s own body. One remains immersed in regular self-modification and self-improvement.

Ideal-type is a trap because its idea is extremely illusive and shortlived. It is illusive because the visual references of the ideal-type are products of digital manipulation. It is shortlived because its idea continually shifts its goal posts. The market keeps reinventing the redefining the notion of the ideal-type in order to sell new images and new beauty products to achieve new goals. Market invents new problems, and then offers new solutions for them through commodities and their images. Purchasing power plays a significant role in sexualising and beautifying the self, as the market offers endless possibilities to modify the existing body, either in real or through interactive digital mediations. You are not feeling confident, use this deodorant. Your hair isn’t shiny enough, use this shampoo. You are not so fair, here is another variant of ‘Fair and Lovely’.

Ideal-type in itself is also a trap because the market repeatedly induces anxiety and inadequacies. We are encouraged to constantly review and rework our bodies influenced by the standards of capitalist and patriarchal beauty regimes. One is made to question oneself—am I fair enough, glowing enough, curvaceous enough, slender or slim or muscular enough? Is my nose sharp enough? Are my cheekbones high enough? Is my jaw line prominent enough? Is my hair voluminous and bouncy enough? Are my thighs and calves toned enough? How can I get the body I deserve? How do I reshape my body? One remains in a self-scrutiny mode in parts, or in whole.

Self-disciplining requires bodies to be punished and policed for endless betterment. Popular media legitimises the perpetual race for grooming and achieving these beauty targets with full force.

Unwanted and Inappropriate: Condemning Deviation and Encouraging Confirmation

The parade of perfect bodies condemns the non-perfect ones, which are rendered unattractive, inappropriate, and invisible. By setting rigid beauty standards, it cancels out the different types of bodies—the disabled ones, the non-conforming ones, the racially-diverse ones. The tyranny of beauty-fascism shames the imperfect bodies quite unapologetically. The project is purposefully patriarchal and commercial. The agenda is to make bodies conform to certain types and marginalise or alienate the standard deviation as extremely unwanted or inappropriate.

The ultimate promise of ‘choice’ actually highlights the lack of it. The glorified assurance of ‘empowerment’ is essentially oppressive. The marketed liberation through the consumption of diet regimes and cosmetics is nothing but a global mechanism of repression for monetising and making a profit out of one’s imperfections. Imperfections that are decided by a force located outside one’s body.

One is free to choose a type, but that choice is limited, dictated, and governed by the popular body types that are in circulation. By condemning deviation and encouraging conformation, the beauty industry injects insecurities to increase the consumption of its ideal-types. Simultaneously, it pities and condemns those who are refusing to fall in line.

Manifesto of Erotic Capital: Against the Body As It Exists

Like the project of accumulation of savings and cultural capital—(every) body turns into a site of erotic capital. Body becomes a sign of success, seduction, and simulation—successful and alluring only when it is sufficiently groomed. Imagination of the ideal-type that is propagated by the beauty industry conceives the body increasingly in parts—fragmented disembodied and fetishised. It curates and proposes different products and procedures for each of these parts. It directs us to select, focus, and polish specific parts.

The pressure to live up to the set expectations intensifies through relentless submission to the established body ideals. Like pornographic gestures and milieu, it is highly predictable, repetitive, synthetic—yet, loathing. It aims to milk more muscles and curves. It seduces the relentless spending on products and procedures of self-care and self-improvement that were unheard of or unimaginable at the beginning of the 21st century. Liposuction, laser-therapies, mole-removal, scar-treatment, skin-glow, oxy-glam, wrinkle-reduction, lip-job, nose-job, and a range of other cosmetic interventions…it is a declared war on the body as it exists.

The manifesto is loaded with possibilities of making the body chase and desire an obscure myth of perfection. We are convinced that we have to anti-age. We are persuaded to self-hate. Media-fiction sways us to purchase body stereotypes, as we catwalk as non-reflective consumers and window-shop the ideal-types. We have allowed the march of the market to colonise and conquer the most personal and intimate frontiers of our existence. We have surrendered our bodies for market-manipulation that blindfolds us, as we let ourselves be judged by some exterior set standards. Those overpowering standards ensure that we remain unsighted.

Pathological Chase and Loss of Control: A Point of No-Return

In Requiem for a Dream, Sara kept popping weight-loss pills—the laziest way to lose weight. When she doesn’t get a confirmation call from the TV studio, she starts imagining that the studio has come to her house with a crew and camera. Her house transforms into a studio. She imagines herself to be the host of the show. The imagined host, wearing that red dress, appears in fragments—out of the TV, walking into her drawing room. She gets ridiculed for being old and poor. One day, out of desperation, she ends up arriving at the actual studio. By then, she is already showing signs of insanity. Medicines do not work on her any longer. The lure of visibility, and regaining youth has driven her so insane that while being carried away on the stretcher, she keeps uttering—“I’m going to be on TV”. Sara and her son Harry (shown to be a drug consumer and seller) are shown to be hand-capped for different reasons. Both have turned pathological. While the mother refuses to eat and has to be force-fed; the son forces another dose of drug by injecting himself in that part of the arm which has already gone sore.

The trio of an asylum, hospital, and prison—all mandated to control the deviant body—gains primary significance in this turn of events. In the climax, all the characters turn docile. Docile bodies are juxtaposed. Sara undergoes a shock treatment—only to come out of it fragile and broken. Harry’s arm has to be amputated. Harry’s friend and partner in crime, Tyrone, gets arrested and is humiliated in prison. And Marlon, Harry’s girlfriend, starts having sex for money to procure drugs. Sara loses her sanity and health. Harry loses his arm. His friend loses his freedom. And Marlon loses control over her body. None of them remain in control of their dreams of getting thinner, richer or higher in a state of ecstasy. All of them become drug-dependent. All of them fail to escape dependencies of different kinds, and they eventually turn pathological. A perennial sense of lack and inadequacy—while chasing elusive targets—destroy each one of them. They all become addicts and lonely—reaching a point of no-return.

Relooking at the Self

Self-defeating chase often becomes the cause of death. Glossy images of the ideal-types are often morbid. In the digital era, it might be easy to fuel imaginations and tame images, but it contains the potential of tormenting a body, if it is used as a reference blindly. The cover of a fashion magazine endorsing slenderness; the hoarding of a face wash boosting spotless skin; the full-page advertisement of a body lotion promising the cleansing of unwanted body marks; the leaflet of a clinic advocating return-to-youth—are agents of beauty mercantile.

They can espouse fantasy, but we often forget that the fundamental problem lies in its unnatural pledge to resolve. Glowing radiance is the least cosmetic and more of a consequence of several other hard-earned merits. It is time to look at the mirror for closer skin analytics that goes beyond the surface—for bodies are not just images for visual consumption. And we are humans, not cannibals.

About The Author

Sreedeep

Sreedeep is a sociologist with Shiv Nadar University and the author of Consumerist Encounters. Shivanshi and Vaishnavi are undergraduate students of International Relations at the university. Bhavika and Paavni posed for the representational images