Nip/Tuck: Television That Gets Under Your Skin 9780755697298, 9781845118624

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To Our Surgeons

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acknowledgements My thanks are due to Rob Hansen and Avedon Carol for persuading me to persevere with watching the first season of Nip/ Tuck. Craig McGill and Nick Proimakis made it possible for me to watch some episodes I might not otherwise have seen. As usual, I would like to thank Philippa Brewster and all at I.B.Tauris, and Kim Akass and Janet McCabe for useful advice and help with the call for papers. Thanks are also due to our contributors for putting up with a change of plan that made this a book about the entire run rather than just the first four seasons. As always, my thanks to Paule for putting up with sudden silences, bursts of wild enthusiasm and the other inconveniences of living with a writer. RK My thanks to Hollywood Video’s ninety-nine cent rental deal, without which I would have never started watching Nip/Tuck; also to Melissa Stevenson and Kate Bolin, whose appreciation of good television and FX, respectively, led me to start watching the series. Also gratefully thanked are the editors and publishers at I.B.Tauris. JS

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notes on contributors Jenn Brandt holds an MA in popular culture from Bowling Green State University and is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. At URI, Jenn teaches for the Women’s Studies programme and is finishing a dissertation that looks at the role of the body in the literature of 9/11. Mark W. Bundy is Lecturer in English and Composition at the University of California, Riverside. His emphases include LGBTQ studies, the Gothic genre, Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Poetry, Art History, and Visual Culture/Media Studies. His other contributions to I.B.Tauris’s ‘Reading Contemporary Television’ series are included in Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (I.B.Tauris, 2006), Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (I.B.Tauris, 2005) and Reading Sex and the City (I.B.Tauris, 2004); he has an essay in the book EntreMundos/Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldua (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and he also wrote the topic entry of ‘American Gay and Lesbian Poetry’, which appears in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, 5 vols (Greenwood, 2005). Dr Erica D. Galioto is Assistant Professor of English at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches classes in American literature and psychoanalysis, English education, and writing. Her research focuses on a concept she calls ‘real-world therapy’: everyday experiences in fiction and life that occasion therapeutic effects outside a clinical setting. ‘Split Skin: Adolescent Cutters and the Other’ is forthcoming in an edited collection entitled Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis.

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Isabel Clúa Ginés obtained her PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She belongs to the research group ‘Body and Textuality’ (SGR2009/65). Her research focuses on the study of gender and identity construction in fin-de-siècle European culture, which she develops within the research project ‘Corpografías de la identidad. Estudio cultural del cuerpo como lugar de representación genéricosexual y étnica del sujeto’ (FFI-2009–09026), coordinated by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Also she investigates contemporary popular culture from the perspective of feminist cultural studies; this line is developed within the research project ‘Feminismo y género en la cultura popular actual. Escritura de las mujeres en la literatura, cine y soportes audiovisuales en España (1995–2007)’, funded by the Spanish Women’s Institute (exp. núm. 091/07) and linked to the centre Dona i Literatura (UB). Roz Kaveney is a well-known poet, writer, reviewer and activist, living in London. Her books include Superheroes! (I.B.Tauris, 2007), Teen Dreams (I.B.Tauris, 2006) and Reading the Vampire Slayer (I.B.Tauris, 2003), and, as co-editor, Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel. A volume of her poems, The Abigail Sonnets and Other Selected Poems, will be appearing shortly. Susan Santha Kerns is a PhD candidate in Modern Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she is finishing her dissertation entitled, ‘When We were a Child: Conjoined Twins in Popular Culture’. She teaches in the Film Studies department at UWM while also making films. Her first feature film as a screenwriter, Resurrection Ferns, is due out in spring 2011. Dr Alison Peirse is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle. She has published widely on horror in film and television, including ‘A Broken Tradition? British Telefantasy and Children’s Television in the 1980s and 1990s’ in Visual Culture in Britain (2010) and ‘The Impossibility of Vision: Vampirism, Formlessness and Horror in Vampyr’ in Studies in European Cinema (2009). She is currently writing a book on Russell T. Davies and contemporary British television drama



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for Manchester University Press, and another on 1930s’ horror films for I.B.Tauris. Jennifer Stoy studied literature and popular culture and has an MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is her second co-edited volume for I.B.Tauris. Jennifer works as a writer in the Washington, DC area. Concepción Cascajosa Virino, PhD in Media Studies (2005), is Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication at the Carlos III University of Madrid and member of the research group ‘Television-cinema: Memory, Representation and Industry’. She is the author of three books and more than a dozen articles about American television drama in academic journals in Spain and Latin America. She also is the editor of the academic anthology La caja lista: television norteamericana de culto (Smart Box: American Cult TV, 2007) and a contributor to Reading “The Shield” (forthcoming, Syracuse University Press).

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introduction Roz Kaveney

Nip/Tuck: Television that Gets Under Your Skin is the first serious critical study of this controversial television series about cosmetic surgery, the celebrity culture and the aspirations of the ‘Boomer’ generation. Chapters in it consider the show from a variety of perspectives – Nip/Tuck can be discussed in terms of a psychoanalytic reading, an examination of its use of neo-Gothic tropes, or the nuts and bolts of cable television. When Nip/Tuck first appeared on the FX cable channel in the US, and then on British television, it was thought of by many as a show which tried to do for plastic surgeons what Six Feet Under did for undertakers. It was praised for the technical skills involved in its graphic portrayal of plastic surgery in sequence that make heavy use of prosthetics, but disapproved of by some people for the equally graphic portrayal of sexual encounters – notably those of the rakish Christian Troy with a variety of women, some of them patients. Six Feet Under was primarily a family drama about the effect on the Fishers of having perpetually to deal with other deaths while in mourning for their father. The essays in this book argue that the overall effect of Nip/Tuck is not just an examination of the complex disfunctionality of the extended family of Sean McNamara, his wife and their children – a family that also includes Christian and his various significant lovers, and the anaesthetist Liz Cruz – but a positioning of this group as a microcosm of the social structures the ‘Boomer’ generation have built for themselves.

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Like many other artists from a Catholic background, its creator Ryan Murphy is obsessed with paradox as a way of looking at the world – chapter 1 places Nip/Tuck in the context of the rest of his work. This is a show which from its first episode criticizes the endless pursuit of youth and beauty via artificial means, but also shows cosmetic surgery as often having a positive effect on people’s lives; many of the harshest criticisms of cosmetic surgery over the show’s six seasons are voiced by psychotics and yet Murphy has in interviews also been quite negative about the industry he is portraying. More generally, the show plays with larger paradoxes about truth, beauty and lies, and the shadings between them. Nip/Tuck is a show whose criticism of the beauty myth goes hand in hand with a critique of celebrity culture, particularly in its last two seasons when Sean and Christian move to Hollywood. At the same time, it constantly plays with the notion of celebrity through continual use of prestigious guest stars, some of them as a variety of extraordinary patients and some – like Joan Rivers and Burt Bacharach – playing themselves. In all of this, there is of course a further element of paradox. Nip/Tuck is at once a serious drama and one whose storylines would be considered to push the envelope of plausibility even in a Latin American soap opera. In the course of six years, it handles incest, addiction, amnesia, serial killing of various kinds, castration, defenestration, rape, torture, burial alive, Nazism, Scientology, organ theft, and drug cartels as well as more standard plot elements like infidelity, love and divorce. Chapters in the book consider storylines both in terms of ‘sensation’ TV and in terms of other shows’ use of similarly hyperbolic tropes. As well as the more common face-lifts, tummy-tucks and breast enhancements of plastic surgery, the show includes more unusual procedures like face transplants and the separation of conjoined twins. A lot of the time the surgeries performed and the dilemmas of the clients reflect situations in the lives of the surgeons and their families as concretized metaphors – in a way akin to the use in Buffy the Vampire Slayer of supernatural and mundane teenage issues to comment on each other. Murphy’s aesthetic is a high camp one, akin to opera in its outrageousness.



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As more than one chapter points out, music plays a large part in the show, primarily but not exclusively through the music that the surgeons put on their stereo while performing operations; music that regularly functions as a choric commentary on the states of mind of surgeons and patients. Other forms of popular art – notably television drama itself in the fifth season of the show – are also used for commentary. For a show that at one level is pitched as exploitation drama full of the consolations of melodrama and prurient observation of sex and surgery, Nip/Tuck is a nuanced show capable of immense subtlety. Its use of paradox is one of the more obvious examples of this, but it is also a show which repays close analysis from a variety of intellectual standpoints. Chapter 7 considers Christian in the light of nineteenth-century aestheticism and dandy culture; chapters 2 and 10 offer a semi-Marxist analysis of the commodification of individuality. The show’s handling of various sexual and ethnic minorities has come in for criticism – but in most cases the show is cleverer than some of its critics, playing with standard negative imagery about minorities in order to subvert that imagery and affirm minority identity in positive ways. In spite of some mis-steps – and its fifth year is generally acknowledged to have been severely its weakest – Nip/Tuck was at once a popular show with audiences, one that received respect and awards from the industry, and one that well repays serious study.

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Ryan Murphy and nip/tuck: the diminishing returns of misanthropy Roz Kaveney

Nip/Tuck is a much-praised, occasionally condemned television show that ran on the FX cable channel in the US from 2003 to 2010, ending with its hundredth episode. It was widely syndicated abroad, mostly in Europe and the English-speaking world. It won an Emmy (for prosthetic makeup) and a Golden Globe (for Best Television Series, Drama) as well as garnering many Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for show and cast members. It got what were at that point the highest ratings for a cable show for the Season Three finale (‘Quentin Costa’ (3.15)) and the Season Four première (‘Cindy Plumb’ (4.1)); after that, its ratings gradually declined in the course of its fifth and sixth seasons. Some of its award nominations were for guest stars. As a show that dealt in part with celebrity culture, it made sense that it should regularly include stunt casting. (Perhaps one of the most inventive examples of this comes in ‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8) when an uncredited Burt Bacharach appears playing the piano to an idealized younger version of Mrs Grubman, on whose corpse Christian Troy is operating.) Its show-runner and creator Ryan Murphy had a major cult success before it, and a

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smash hit show after it; Nip/Tuck would be interesting as a phase in the career of a major television creator even were it not a significant achievement in its own right. As its title jocularly suggests, Nip/Tuck is a show about plastic surgery, and its two male protagonists, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), are accomplished surgeons who have made it their specialty. Sean in particular is brilliant – he often experiences guilt that he let his friend talk him into a specialty which is primarily about money, when he could have been working in the Third World – but Christian is only somewhat less so. It may be the case that, when in ‘Dan Daly’ (6.11), they receive an award from their medical school for their work, it is partly the result of Christian’s making a significant donation to the institution, but it is not shown as being something that anyone else in their profession regards as undeserved. The citation given them at the ceremony includes specific surgeries we have seen them perform in the course of the show; when, at the end of the episode, Sean smashes the award with a sledge-hammer, it is an expression of his self-doubt and self-contempt about the life he has chosen, not an accurate assessment of his skills. Sean’s self-doubt, as well as his sense of an only intermittently honoured vocation to heal, comes from his past as a child disfigured by a hare-lip, whose parents split up over his mother’s decision to spend his college fund on repairing his face. He has largely repressed the memory of this – one of the central pillars of his character is his capacity for intense self-deception – but it has left a mark in a perpetual sense that his life is built on falsehood. One of the major subjects of Nip/Tuck is that the American Dream is flawed from top to bottom: Sean has success, is married to the woman of his dreams and has three children, yet everything in his life is either deeply flawed or going to be taken away from him. By the end of the sixth season, he has walked away from the clinic he has built to pursue his vocation in the orphanages of Romania; his wife is long gone, his elder son is permanently estranged from him, his two younger children are miles away, and his principal focus is the welfare of a disfigured waif. He has sacrificed almost everything to the ambitions of his best friend and it is his friend who has, with his best interests in mind, sent him away in the end.



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Christian Troy has ridden to success on his own ambition and the skill of his more accomplished colleague. Part of the truth about Christian is that he is a child abused by a foster-father, abandoned by his mother and fathered by a rapist; in a dream sequence in ‘Christian Troy II’ (6.17) he struggles with his father, who whispers to him that ‘My darkness is in your DNA’. He is a self-obsessed rake and dandy who damages every single person who cares about him or whom he cares about. His second wife and long-term lover Kimber Henry commits suicide when he breaks up with her. Another lover, Gina Russo, literally falls to her death off his penis. The woman he idolizes, Sean’s wife Julia, only saves herself when she finds herself entirely emotionally disentangled from both him and Sean after the death of her lesbian lover. About the only people Christian cares about and does not destroy are his adopted son Wilbur and his first wife, the lesbian anaesthetist Liz Cruz, whom he hurts and humiliates deeply, but who is strong enough to withstand him and remain his most solid link to humanity. It is because Liz is still there in his life that we do not feel his eventual renunciation of Sean, the elective brother whom he in some sense loves, as tragic; it is an act of grace which leaves us thinking that perhaps he is not entirely a damned soul after all. A serious problem with the later seasons of the show is that Julia is less present than she was in the first four seasons; it is of course arguable that her story arc was done by the end of Season Four, but the necessities of contractual obligation said otherwise. Joely Richardson, who played her, was largely caught up in private family concerns (a seriously ill daughter and, during the last months of shooting, a dead sister) and was thus less available. Her arc is accordingly incomplete – after seven episodes of absence, she returns in the show’s last three episodes to announce that she has got over her husband and her lover, as well as the dead Olivia, and is moving to England with an older man. This is a transparently clumsy plot device to give her character arc a conclusion and we believe it even less than we did her brief experimentation with lesbianism in Season Five. Julia is a woman who has given up her own ambitions in order to be a wife and mother, in accordance with an older ideology which still held sway in large parts of the USA at the beginning of the

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twenty-first century; it is perhaps significant that Ryan Murphy has said of his own mother that she was ‘a beauty queen who left it all to stay at home and take care of her two sons’ when she also wrote five books, and he has said elsewhere1 that she became a feminist in the 1970s as a result of seeing Gloria Steinem on television. Julia is conscious that life has passed her by – her successful psychiatrist mother Erica makes sure constantly to tell her so – but knowing this is not the same thing as doing anything about it. Though she has some brief success running a beauty spa in Season Three, she abandons it when she gets pregnant with her third child and remarries Sean; we are reminded of this in ‘Magda and Jeff’ (5.10) when Gina mentions losing money on the spa in which she had invested her real-estate earnings. Even when Julia falls in love with the alternative-medicine guru Olivia, she seems largely content to live off her partner. Until she becomes too sick to continue, she is content to cheat on Olivia with Christian, and to despise her for her weakness during a car-jacking episode (‘Dr Joshua Lee’ (5.7)). She is also a mediocre mother, completely failing to notice that her daughter Annie is pulling out her hair and eating it (‘Briggitte Reinhart’ (6.3)). Julia’s near-fatal poisoning by Olivia’s daughter Eden with a fruit-cake (Season Five), which Julia continues to eat when it is killing her, to the point where it one of the few things she can eat, is only the most glaring example of the way that she continues to be addicted to what is bad for her, most notably Christian. Her framing of her mother Erica for cocaine smuggling in ‘Alexis Stone II’ (6.7), like her unsuccessful attempt at matricide in ‘Sal Perri’ (3.12), can be seen as a successful attempt to change her own patterns, as preparation for her quiet rejection of both Sean and Christian in favour of a new husband in ‘Christian Troy II’, but none of this deals with Julia’s fundamental failure to create a life which works for her on her own terms. The other most important character in the show, especially in its later seasons, is Liz Cruz (Roma Maffia), the anaesthetist who is the third member of the McNamara–Troy practice and is belatedly acknowledged as such when they formalize her as a partner in ‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19) and she gets, for the first time behind the consultation desk, to use the firm’s catchphrase on a client – ‘Tell



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me/us what you don’t like about yourself.’ Liz is always a subversive element in the show, unapologetically lesbian where the other three are caught up in an erotic triangle, and is content – usually – to be middle-aged, slightly overweight and with her original features. One of the subsidiary themes of the show is her not especially happy love life – one lover turns out to be one of Escobar Gallardo’s organ thieves and Liz loses a kidney, another is obsessed with improving her, and another is an experimenting wife who rejects the erotic abandon Liz brings her. Liz is one of the show’s principal truthtellers – a role otherwise taken by antagonist characters like Escobar and Ava, though secondary characters like Kimber and Gina sometimes take the role as well. Herself attracted to Olivia (‘Damien Sands’ (5.6)), she is not merely being self-serving when she tells Julia’s new lover that Julia is fundamentally not a lesbian, something borne out by subsequent events when Olivia’s suggestion that Julia sleep with Christian to get him out of her system turns into an extended covert affair. Largely without illusions about Christian, Liz is at least as much his best friend as Sean while for a long time staying clear of his emotional baggage and regularly holding up a mirror to his faults. She is kind – a key example of this is her accompanying Kimber to an abortion clinic in ‘Wesley Clovis’ (6.10) and bonding with her over their shared experience of loving Christian in spite of the selfishness that has made him demand that they abort his child. She is often the most compassionate of the three doctors in their treatment of their patients, partly because the show is set up so that Sean and Christian are often in denial about the extent to which the surgeries people want mirror their surgeons’ issues rather than their own, and partly because she is, simply, a better person. One of the show’s most controversial storylines came when Christian, believing himself to be dying of cancer, asks Liz to act as the guardian of his adopted son Wilbur, and seduces and marries her. Some of this objection was ideological. In the late stages of the Bush presidency, with same-sex marriage an election issue and the Right pushing the argument that gay men and lesbians could choose heterosexuality if they opt to go into therapy, a storyline in which a lesbian woman is persuaded by good sex to fall for a man

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was always going to be controversial. This was especially the case when the storyline was created by Ryan Murphy, who is himself unapologetically gay. Yet the story was never about Liz ceasing to regard herself as a lesbian – her first reaction to having had an orgasm with Christian is to date another man to check whether she has genuinely acquired a taste for penile penetration (she hasn’t) and to retaliate to Christian’s infidelity by sleeping with women. Her feelings for Christian come partly from sexual attraction, partly from compassion for a dying man and partly from her long-standing affection for him, an affection which outlives her anger when he discovers that he is not dying, and proceeds to divorce her. The storyline is clumsily executed – Liz’s vengefulness towards Christian during the divorce is played for crude comic effect – but nonetheless intermittently touching. Kimber originally plans to disrupt the wedding and comes to realize that Liz is at least as much Christian’s soulmate as she is, and considerably stronger in her survival of bad treatment from him. Kimber is one of the two characters in the show whose presence demonstrates to us the damage caused by the culture of celebrity and surgical self-improvement. She approaches Christian in the first season to have her looks upped from an ‘8’ to a ‘10’. She becomes a successful porn star and model for a sex doll – and has an affair with Sean. In Julia’s anaesthetic-fuelled dreams in ‘Julia McNamara’ (2.12) Kimber is the lover of both Christian and Julia, and pregnant with Christian’s child. In Season Three, she becomes engaged to Christian and is kidnapped and mutilated by Quentin; she recovers from this by converting to Scientology and marrying Christian’s son Matt; she becomes an addict, recovers and becomes a porn star again. Ousted from her career and marriage to impresario Ram by Olivia’s daughter Eden, she has to rebuild her life as a single mother and electrolysist. Engaged to Sean and Christian’s colleague Mike, she drifts back into an affair with Christian, who makes her abort his child as a condition of their marriage, and becomes infertile. She has a second affair with Sean; even without knowing this, Christian gets bored and throws her out. Faced with the slow decline of her looks, and believing she has lost Christian for ever, she walks off the end of Mike’s boat.



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This career is a cautionary tale about sex, the sex industry and the pursuit of beauty at all costs; it is also a rather moving human drama because Kimber gradually acquires some wisdom and human insight. ‘I truly hate myself,’ she says to Christian in ‘Lola Wlodkowski’ (6.8), ‘and the reason I always go back to you, Christian, is that you hate me the best … You hate yourself like I do, and that’s why you always come back to me, because you think I’m all you deserve.’ One of the show’s many dark ironies is that Sean helps drive her to death by what would be good advice if he even began to understand her – he tells her that being free of him and Christian is her best chance to make her own life by an act of will. ‘Jump’ he says in ‘Joel Seabrook’ (6.13) and she does – off the end of Mike’s boat. Matt, Julia’s son, reared by Sean, but actually, as we discover at the end of Season One, accidentally fathered by Christian just before Julia and Sean’s wedding, is a terrible object lesson as to the consequences of the American belief in second acts, constant self-reinvention, and wiping away scars with surgery. On two occasions, in ‘Cara Fitzgerald’ (1.8) and ‘Cherry Peck’ (3.14), he has his supposed and actual father repair people he has injured; he becomes a racist skinhead, a Scientologist, a drug addict, a mime, a convenience-store robber (in his mime’s white-face), a convict, and a carpet salesman; he marries his father’s ex-fiancée and abandons his second bride at the altar. His lovers include a lesbian schoolfellow, a white supremacist, his hideously scarred burns counsellor, and (inadvertently) his half-sister, and on each occasion he tries to convince himself that what he is doing is entirely right and reasonable. Matt injures himself trying to do a circumcision; he blows himself up cooking methamphetamine; he drops out of pre-med at college; he is nearly forced to have breast implants by a fellow convict whose punk he has become. He throws a tantrum when Sean refuses to perform liposuction on a convicted rapist and murderer (‘Wesley Clovis’) as part of a deal that will bring him early release. When his fathers do the surgery on Clovis, he does not share with them prison rumours of Clovis’s innocence, and this has more to do with sparing their feelings than anything else; he seems to take seriously a fellow convict’s claim that he

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has a duty to use his freedom, well bought as it is with innocent blood. Though his life gets on track after this, Matt has not lost his capacity for clueless cruelty, enabling Erica’s attempt to get custody of his younger siblings by his testimony concerning Sean and Julia’s bad parenting (‘Alexis Stone’ (6.6)) and announcing his intention to sever all ties with his three parents during Sean and Christian’s relationship counselling sessions in ‘Dr Griffin’ (6.16), even if he later relents. About the only thing he does that we can regard as selfless is care for Jenna, his daughter by Kimber, and even her he neglected during his period of drug use, though not as badly as Kimber did. His fathers regard his affair with Ava as one of his most self-destructive moves; it is far from clear that the show endorses this, even though Ava does not love him as much as he loves her. Though there is something staggeringly creepy about the way he persuades Ava to let him come away with her by offering her the chance to bring up Jenna (a child Ava sees as perfect) as their daughter, the show presents this as somehow an ironic redemption for both of them rather than the ultimate bad choice it might have more obviously seemed. This is perhaps the culminating example of the show’s pronounced moral ambiguity and love of paradox. As I argue at greater length in chapter 9, ‘Telling Truth and Selling Lies’, views which see the show as simply and straightforwardly a critique of the American Dream in general and of plastic surgery in particular – Murphy has himself described the show in these terms – are under a fundamental misapprehension as to Murphy’s aesthetic choices. Though often flawed by clumsy writing and plotting, and characterization which is sometimes fascinatingly paradoxical and at others woefully incoherent – with a thin dividing line between – the show is much more interesting than that. Many of the show’s most profound criticisms of plastic surgery are voiced by moral monsters – the racist Ariel, for example, or Quentin Costa – and much of the time, especially when the surgery-addicted Mrs Grubman leaves a bequest which funds pro bono work, Sean and Christian repair faces and lives. Can it honestly be maintained that Cara Fitzgerald, or Joel Seabrook, who smashed his face in a suicide attempt he regrets, or Sheila Carlton (6.14), who had her face ripped



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off by a friend’s monkey, would be better off living with their disfigurement? Even Rachel Ben Natan (5.9), an Israeli mutilated by a suicide bomber and perhaps the show’s most eloquent and sympathetic advocate of putting up with your disfigurements, has to have fragments of the bomber’s teeth and bone removed from her body and face, and moves from that to having some reconstructive work done so that she looks less inhuman. Sean, Christian and Julia are subjected to the most withering of moral audits in the course of the show, and many of the chapters here (especially chapter 10) point out how often they fall short, how they are typical Baby Boomers in their sense of privileged entitlement. Yet the show also shows them – even Christian – as doing much good in the world as well as much harm; they remain, as the Catholic Murphy would doubtless say, open to the possibility of grace in themselves and others, right down to the end. Dealing all over again with the manipulative Ava and with Julia’s desire to take their children off with her to England, Sean is inclined to be vengeful (‘Walter and Edith Krieger’ (6.18)) but he observes Holocaust survivor Edith forgive her husband Walter, who disguised himself as a Jew but was really the camp tattooist. ‘Where does it come from, this capacity to forgive?’ he asks her. ‘How do you do it?’ ‘How do you not?’ she answers. Sean operates on Ava’s son, takes responsibility for the boy when Ava will not, lets Julia leave with their children, and goes off to do good works in Bucharest. If the show was often a ridiculous, campy melodrama, it also had, right down to the end, moments of grandeur and insight intermingled with the nonsense. It is worth at this point giving some brief consideration to Ryan Murphy’s other work – the high school shows Popular and Glee, the pilot for the uncommissioned show Pretty Handsome, and his first feature film Running with Scissors. A later film, Eat Pray Love – based like Running with Scissors on a best-selling memoir – was awaiting release at the time of writing. Popular, which ran from 1999 to 2001 on the WB network, was a high school comedy whose central premise was the rivalry of two high school cliques, one made up of cheerleaders and jocks and the other of so-called outsiders like the editor of the school newspaper and the school’s leading animal rights activist. Actually, as the

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presence in the show of real pariahs – two unattractive and occasionally dirt-eating twins, the chess club and a young fogey with an inappropriate manner – indicates, the ‘outsiders’ are nothing of the kind, merely an alternative popular clique. Ryan Murphy’s tendency to moderate schematized moral perceptions by outbreaks of paradox is perfectly embodied in the plot device whereby clique leaders Brooke and Sam suddenly find themselves being stepsisters and sharing a bathroom. The show comprised a constant game of tropes turned on their heads and expectations reversed – an episode in which the cliques unite to protest against the dismissal of a teacher who is undergoing gender transition is one in which everyone learns a valuable lesson, but the lesson involved is that sometimes people want a quiet life rather than to be the subject of protest. Like Nip/Tuck, Popular was knowingly postmodern in its refusal of the pieties of the Christmas episode – one of the two was a version of A Christmas Carol and the other of It’s a Wonderful Life. It was cancelled at the end of its second season – one factor in this decision is rumoured to have been Murphy’s plans to have Sam come out as a lesbian in the course of the third season. Various members of Popular’s cast appeared in Nip/Tuck – most of them as one-off characters such as one of Quentin’s victims, or a soldier he seduces and then outs; Leslie Grossman (Mary Cherry in Popular) played the publicist Bliss Berger in three episodes of Season Five. Murphy, like many other television directors, has a group of actors he likes working with; Jessalyn Pilsig, who played Gina in Nip/Tuck, plays Terri Schuester in Glee, and Iqbal Theba, who played Raj’s overbearing father in Nip/Tuck, plays Principal Figgins. Running with Scissors is an intelligent adaptation of the real Augusten Burroughs’s memoir of his childhood and adolescence and adoption by his poet mother’s deranged psychotherapist, treated by Ryan Murphy with his usual sardonic, misanthropic comic hyper-realism. Like his television work, it is full of flashy material for actors to the extent that even Annette Bening, Jill Clayburgh and Brian Cox feel like recurring guest stars in a film of which they are notionally the stars; the bad mother or the corrupt doctor or the abused wife come on for a few minutes and do their comic turn and then disappear again. What sympathy Murphy has



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as writer and director is reserved for the hapless adolescents Augusten and Natalie, and even they are roundly if gently mocked for their pretensions and eccentricities. Some have accused Murphy of misogyny, and certainly Deirdre in his hands (even more than in Burroughs’s own portrayal of his mother) is a comic monster of egocentricity, bad art and emotional dishonesty. Bening plays her at full throttle and high camp, in the vein of the evil cheerleaders Nicole and Mary Cherry in Popular and the neurotic porn star Kimber. Like those characters, Deirdre is a creature of almost preternatural vitality; we watch Bening’s appearances on screen fascinated as by a gaudy serpent, yet Finch’s doormat wife Agnes and deranged elder daughter Hope are equally inventively portrayed characters. Yet Murphy is no more indulgent of his other, male monsters and no less generous to the actors who play them; Alec Baldwin (Barrett Moore, Ava’s husband and creator/surgeon in Nip/Tuck) is excellent as Augusten’s father, the stiff drunken Norman, and Cox more or less steals large parts of the film as the crooked, manipulative guru Finch while convincing us that, in his own head, he is a man of exemplary virtue and therapeutic talent. As Augusten, Joseph Cross is more than a victimized ingenu; he is convincingly a very strange young man who is both complicit in the terrible things done to him and busy taking notes on them for future use. The look of the whole film is intentionally and comprehensively garish, from the mould on the kitchen floor to the pasty pale makeup worn by Evan Rachel Wood as Natalie; all of the characters, grotesques and otherwise, are shot in a clear crisp and unforgiving light. Similarly, the singles and individual album tracks that make up the noisily busy score both set each scene or narrative thread and convey the passage of time through the 1980s. This is a film in which everything is heavily considered and nothing is accidental; it is scabrous and viciously bitchy and takes enormous pains to be so. Some may find all this over-determined and hyperactive film-making, but it is clearly a film with little accidental about it, a first feature that was a personal project for Murphy. Pretty Handsome is the lost Murphy project, a pilot for a show that FX declined to commission, preferring to make him fill out his contract with more episodes of Nip/Tuck; given the weakness of the

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later seasons of that show, it is perhaps a shame that FX did not take the chance, as Murphy was trying to break new ground even for cable television once again. Pretty Handsome was to be a five-year arc about the transition of Bob (Joseph Fiennes), a New England gynaecologist, and the effect of Bob’s becoming a woman on a loving but dysfunctional family. Treating a trans man, with a trans woman partner, for ovarian cancer forces Bob to face personal crisis and cease to be in denial – ‘waiting too long’ becomes a phrase that applies both to the patient and to Bob, as does the episode’s other catchphrase ‘Nature, at its best, is complicated.’ Even in the pilot episode, we get other crises – Bob’s wife Elizabeth (Carrie-Ann Moss) is inchoately aware of something wrong with her marriage, finds herself flirting with her older son’s friend, and is seriously drawn to her husband when Bob crossdresses at Halloween. Scotch (Robert Wagner), Bob’s father, is planning to leave his snobbish Republican wife Bunny (Blythe Danner) for his African-American receptionist. The younger son Oliver goes on an internet date with what he expects to be a rather older girl and is in fact a male sexual predator; the older son, Patrick, delivers his girlfriend’s child – they have hidden the pregnancy – at the climax of the episode. This would have been a show about secrets and lies and the consequences of making them manifest – about the inexorable revenge of the repressed – a theme that occurs regularly in Murphy’s work; it is a shame we will never see more of it. Not everyone feels this – Murphy has a long history of being condemned by the Religious Right for promoting immorality and showing the unshowable. He has also been criticized by some trans advocacy organizations2 for his alleged transphobia. It is clear that Murphy has often portrayed doubtful stereotypes of trans women – the magic trans woman who teaches everyone a valuable lesson in tolerance, the deceiver, the tough street kid with the golden heart – but all of these portrayals are more complex than summary would suggest. (See below for an extended consideration of Ava in chapter 9.) Another charge against Murphy is that Pretty Handsome was originally to be called 4 oz (from the average weight of a penis) and this is held to be offensive, namely to see trans women in terms of what they have dispensed with. In the context of the pilot, it is clear



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from a speech in which trans man Mario explains why he has not opted for a phalloplasty that 4 oz refers to masculinity in general – and if Murphy is to be held accountable for a title about which he had second thoughts, what hope is there for any of us? What can be acknowledged is that Murphy, in matters concerning the trans community as elsewhere, has a knack for touching raw nerves. Alexis Stone (6.6, 6.7) detransitions and retransitions, but this is seen as her being not a silly person who cannot make up her mind so much as someone who is zeroing in on the right choice. Bob’s move towards transition in maturity is a portrayal of a decision some trans people make later in life – this is a real situation. The accusation of transphobia – as opposed to that of being a sympathetic gay man who does not always get things right – is self-evidently ludicrous when we reflect that Murphy has worked with trans actors and has portrayed trans people – however problematically – in each of his shows so far with the exception of Glee. Instead of Pretty Handsome, we got the slow and intermittent decline of Nip/Tuck and then, slightly out of the blue, the delights of Glee, a show in which Murphy went back to high school and had what is so far probably his hugest hit. (Apart from its viewing figures, Glee is making him something of a fortune with its spin-off records.) Murphy has always been intelligent in his choice of music – the songs played during Sean and Christian’s surgeries are usually carefully selected commentaries on the situation, and Pretty Handsome makes telling use of The Dresden Dolls’s ‘Sex Changes’ and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Centring his new show on a school glee club, taken over by a teacher anxious to recapture the glory of the team he was part of, gives Murphy a chance to play these games again, but also to produce his sunniest work since Popular. Glee has, like most of Murphy’s work, been criticized for its under-portrayal of minorities, but this is not wholly fair – as the show proceeded, more and more of the multi-ethnic cast/team got their moment in the sun. A show that is about a close harmony show choir is inevitably going to concentrate slightly more on the pretty people with higher voices because most of the music does the same, but it cannot function without its gutsy soul diva Mercedes or

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its gravelly disabled bass player, Artie. The show is also elegant in the way it portrays teen crises – Quinn’s pregnancy and disowning by Glenn Beck-admiring parents – as well as the collapse of Will Schuester’s marriage to his acquisitive wife Terri, his pursuit of the obsessive-compulsive counsellor Emma, and his love-hate relationship with his nemesis, the cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch). As I demonstrate in chapter 10, Murphy shares Joss Whedon’s obsession with shadow doubles – Murphy has used Whedon as a guest director on Glee. Will and Sue are much more like each other than either of them would ever admit; her attempts to get the Glee club shut down has far more to do with this than its posing any threat to her own career. Both are using adolescent ambitions to bolster their own fear that they have failed and that life is passing them by; both are in the business of making art, of a sort, but both are also manipulators who sell faded dreams. In a variety of ways, Glee continues in a comedic vein Murphy’s treatment of themes of celebrity, ambition and the American Dream of success that Nip/ Tuck treated satirically. That treatment was far more successful in Nip/Tuck’s first four seasons than in its latter two, when its popularity and ratings gradually slumped – and, let us be frank, so did its quality. In a way this is surprising, given that the milieu of the show shifted from Miami to Hollywood, the very centre of celebrity culture and great American Dream factory, and that one of its major storylines has Christian become the star of a television show. A part of the problem is that many of the substantive points get made far more succinctly in ‘Damien Sands’ (5.6), the episode in which Christian persuades Sean to participate in a disastrous reality show pilot. Celebrity is a perpetual close-up which shows all our flaws – Hollywood drives its stars mad. This is not a very original perception, and it is one to which Murphy adds little, offering us a closeted gay director, a stoned satyr, a self-destructive neurotic and a deluded surgery addict as his representative sample of what Hollywood has to offer. I would argue, though, that the disappointments of this shift of locale are not the crucial flaw of the last two seasons, which is probably an accumulation of factors, some of them artistic failures



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and some of them mere misfortune. I have mentioned above the family crises which made it difficult for Joely Richardson and her mother Vanessa Redgrave to give the show proper attention; there was also whatever problems caused the replacement of the excellent Katee Sackhoff by the lacklustre Rose McGowan in the part of Teddy, during the gap between Seasons Five and Six. The climax of that storyline – Teddy’s attempted murder of Sean and his younger children, and her own death at the hands of a randomly encountered serial killer – was not something in which McGowan shone; Sackhoff, for whom the storyline was devised, would have brought it a manic glee McGowan entirely lacks. It is not even as if – in a show about plastic surgery, and given a character in love with fast motorbikes – any attempt were made to make the shift of actress plausible. In addition, there was the writers’ strike which suspended production two-thirds of the way through the fifth season. Knowledge that this strike was pending perhaps led to some episodes being rushed through production in too much of a hurry – this would explain some unusually sloppy plotting such as the failure of the police in ‘Candy Richards’ (5.14) to check hands for gunpowder residue in the aftermath of Julia’s supposed attempted suicide, actually a murder attempt by Eden when Julia discovers that Eden has been poisoning her. On the other hand, such sloppiness occurs in the sixth season when no issues of hurriedness apply. The show had always telescoped recovery times to an almost ludicrous extent; the long slow process of Alexis Stone’s detransition appears to take days rather than months, and Alexis’s retransition happens in the very next episode, so that Christian can flash mentally between the insertion of her implants and his fear that he will be forced to carry out the same procedure on his own son Matt. This is lazy and further evidence that part of the problem with the show’s later seasons was simply that Ryan Murphy’s full attention was no longer on the show – he was not even on set for the end of shooting; other projects past and future were now closer to his heart. Another problem has to do with the internal structure of the later seasons. Even Season One had an impressive villain – though Escobar Gallardo only appears in the first episode and the last two,

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he is a strong enough presence to feel more important to that season than he actually is. Season Two had Ava as antagonist, even if she is only marginally a villain; Season Three had the Carver – and Kit and Quentin feel sufficiently like antagonist figures that they count as such even before we know that they are the Carver. Season Four has Christian’s fiancée Michelle, and her evil mentor James – and behind them a returned Escobar. Having a supervillain per season may be crude melodrama but it is undeniably effective – the more so in retrospect when we look at the seasons in which an actual supervillain was replaced by theoretical constructs like Hollywood, or the downturn, or Sean and Christian’s relationship. (The latter was always the subject of the show and to fetishize it as if it had somehow changed or got worse is a falsification.) It further did not help that the closest thing the show could give us to the wonderful florid villains of previous years was a sequence of evil, murderous and deranged women – it is at least arguable that in Season Five in particular, Murphy’s misanthropy spilled all the way over into misogyny. The deranged fake talent agent Colleen, the teen sexpot Eden, the adrenalin-fuelled Black Widow Teddy – it is not that these are more evil or deranged than Kit or Michelle or James, it is that they are not balanced by a Quentin or an Escobar. Further, there is a contempt present in Murphy’s portrayal of them and a refusal to show us anything of how they became the monsters they are; the fascination of earlier female villains was that Murphy made us understand them, whereas Eden is just a self-centred brat with a phial of mercury and the will to use it. Is Murphy really implying that the child of a lesbian New Age guru single mother will automatically become a bad seed? I doubt that was his intention but that is how it looks. It is in the context of this negative portrayal of rapacious, murderous women that the already problematic storyline about Liz’s affair with, marriage to and divorce from Christian was seen in a far more merciless light than might otherwise have been the case. Part of the problem with the latter seasons is diminishing returns – there are only so many times that we can see Christian badly treating women about whom he at some level cares deeply about without coming to the conclusion that he abandoned therapy with Faith Wolper too early. Matt’s career as a white-face mime stick-up



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artist produces great moments like a suspect’s line-up of mimes, but it is one of those points at which even a hardened admirer of Nip/ Tuck like myself raises an eyebrow, others being the doctor who shags furniture (‘Allegra Caldarello’ (5.21)), the woman Teddy kills with leeches (‘Briggitte Reinhart’ (6.3)) and the angry feminist performance artist and stripper who smashes items of furniture with her over-sized breasts (‘Jenny Juggs’ (6.4)). If Murphy wanted to avoid the imputation of misogyny, the creation of Jenny was not his best plan. Yet there are fine episodes in Season Six when Murphy can be bothered to focus – the episode in which Christian sleeps with a happily fat woman (‘Lola Wlodkowski’ (6.8)) and Sean with a woman who has had her nipples removed to make her more like Barbie, sounds grotesquely offensive in synopsis, but is not only touching but life-enhancing. The episode in which Murphy uses the Holocaust earns its final epiphany about forgiveness, and ‘Wesley Clovis’ (6.10) – the episode in which Sean and Christian become part of an execution team to save Matt – is extremely powerful. One of the reasons why the show returns to form in the second half of Season Six is probably the simple fact that Murphy knew he was almost done with it and had to give various themes and characters a proper send-off. Part of depicting the end of the Sean/ Christian relationship is showing us its beginning in college in ‘Dan Daly’ (6.11); part is showing them talking through their mutual irritation and contempt in ‘Dr Griffin’ (6.16). Kimber, a character whom the show had sometimes treated harshly and sometimes with contempt, gets a sequence of moving epiphanies, a touching death and some reappearances as the closest thing Christian has to a conscience. It is possible, of course, that Kelly Carlson is in these scenes due to the absence of Joely Richardson. Those who argue that Ava is a transphobic creation need to reflect that the big scenes between her and Sean in ‘Walter and Edith Krieger’ (6.18) and ‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19), restrospectively make two of her worst actions – her fleeing the scene of her son’s suicide in ‘Joan Rivers’ (2.16) and her decision to abandon Rafaelle – understandable and sympathetic. That decision enables Sean’s redemption – Romania wants its orphan back and Sean goes with him. Ava’s final victory over Sean and Christian, her departure with

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Matt and Jenna, is not presented ironically. ‘Different is ugly,’ she says to Sean, and ‘I’m not a monster; I’m the monster’s victim’; in the end, humanly flawed and self-created, she stands for all the characters in the show who undergo surgery – which includes its protagonists – and the show’s ambivalence is foregrounded one last time. Everyone leaves – it is not clear whether or not Liz stays, having decided to quit her new partnership when Sean showed too much interest in the child she is having with his sperm. In a final scene, Christian picks up a blonde in a bar, using the same patter he used on Kimber early in Season One; ‘I’m a plastic surgeon,’ he announces in the show’s final line, and the Hollywood sun glints on his shiny skin. Like the near-monstrous person Christian has made himself into, Nip/Tuck is there to be loved and hated; it is a show which sometimes disappoints massively and often surprises us with brilliance, and if it ended up somewhat less impressive than it had once been, shocking us by its crass exploitation of the weak and its casual misogyny, it also finally redeems itself. Notes 1 Movies Online, http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_10178.html. 2 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ashley‑love/the‑hypocrisy‑of‑glees‑ry_b_582 029.html.

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reading nip/tuck as an interrogation of hegemonic masculinity and cosmetic femininity Jenn Brandt

A complex and provocative drama, the FX series Nip/Tuck (2003– 2010) focuses on the medical practice of Miami South Beach (and, in later seasons, Los Angeles) plastic surgeons Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) and Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh). Through the lives of these doctors and their patients, Nip/Tuck examines the growing trend of cosmetic surgery and its surrounding lifestyle in the United States in the post-9/11 years of the early twentieth century. While the show takes a negotiated standpoint towards plastic surgery, where both the pros and cons are given equal consideration, reading Nip/Tuck through the lenses of postmodernism and postfeminism provides insight into contemporary constructions of the body and the ways in which men and women define their masculinity and femininity alongside notions of feminism and ‘postfeminism’. These conditions of postmodernism and postfeminism advocate a split between the mind and body, resulting in the individual’s perception of the body as a separate identity that has moved from bodily determination to the possibility of endless transformation. Nip/Tuck plays with this idea,

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revealing the tenuous line plastic surgery straddles in contemporary society. In doing so, it provides an interrogation of hegemonic masculinity and Westernized concepts of beauty and cosmetic femininity. While not outrightly condemnatory of plastic surgery, Nip/Tuck allows for exploration into the consequences of a shift towards the fracturing of the mind and the body, and examines the impact of this shift in relation to gender and its connections to race, class and the American Dream. Beginning in the late 1980s, the belief that one can be anyone s/he wants to be has been taken to the extreme with the contemporary emphasis and focus on personal transformation through diet, exercise, cosmetics and surgery. Discussing the growing effects of plastic surgery in her book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), Susan Bordo writes (p. 245): A technology that was first aimed at the replacement of malfunctioning parts has generated an industry and an ideology fueled by fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed, the very materiality of the body. As Bordo correctly points out, by the early 1990s the body had come to be less a fixed stance on who one is, and more of a canvas on which the individual can craft his/her desires. The body can be added to or detracted from, depending on the individual’s needs or wants. Like the mannequin brought to life in Nip/Tuck’s opening credits, in moulding the body one can make him/herself beautiful, with the hope that in doing so, s/he can create not a ‘perfect lie’, as Nip/Tuck’s theme music suggests, but a perfect life. Viewing the body as a site of endless choice and transformation is an ethos embraced and promoted by film and television’s creation of the ‘postfeminist heroine’. Similar to criticisms of postmodernism, postfeminism stresses the appearance of the body as an image and is related to popular culture and consumerism. These postfeminist heroines, and their real life counterpoints, are preoccupied with constructing their identities through consumerism, diet, exercise, and, when necessary, cosmetic surgery. With these ‘enhancements’ comes the subsequent, albeit false, suggestion that,



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through this ‘work’, one is empowered and the belief that anyone can be the creator of his/her own transformation. This leads to the conclusion that one can have it all, as long as one is willing to pay the price. The postfeminist heroine is a hyperbolic representation of this assumption, constructing an image, rather than a stable identity, through the acquisition of goods and commodity fetishism. There is less critical or media attention devoted to the creation of the ‘postfeminist man’. In Postfeminism: Cultural Text and Theories (2009), Stephanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon argue (p. 136): Masculinity in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries has assumed a variety of shapes, forms and subject positions. Many of these new manifestations have been derived in part from the commercialization of masculinity witnessed from the 1980s to the present day, as new masculinities have become part of selling lifestyle choices to men across the social spectrum. Similar to the treatment of women’s bodies, male bodies have begun to come under the same scrutiny and objectification as women’s bodies that have been troubling feminists for years. While this was certainly not the type of equality second-wavers were fighting for, a commodification of the male body has become increasingly stressed in the last thirty or so years. This commodification, coupled with the advancements of feminism, has resulted in a renegotiation of genders – both male and female – within the confines of patriarchy. As a result, masculinity, particularly the dominant form of white, hegemonic masculinity, has been interrogated and redefined. One result of this redefinition is the creation of the ‘metrosexual’. As Mark Simpson (credited with originating the term in 1994) defines him, the metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis – because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. (‘Meet the Metrosexual’, Salon.com, 2002)

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A precursor to the postfeminist man, the metrosexual is closely related to this subsequent construction and representation in film and television. Nip/Tuck’s Drs Troy and McNamara are prime examples, with their obsessions with appearance, sex and ‘the good life’. Although Nip/Tuck often queers its text through the relationship of Christian and Sean, ultimately these two echo Simpson’s assertion that the metrosexual’s ultimate love object is himself. Throughout the run of the series, as Christian and Sean grow out of their metrosexual phase and get older and face various personal, professional and financial struggles, they wrestle with a masculinity that is ‘coming to terms with being displaced and/or wounded’ (Genz and Brabon, p. 133). This results in the postfeminist man ‘who frequently relies upon a prosthetic appendage to his masculinity … in order to disguise the fact that he is no longer whole and hegemonic’ (Genz and Brabon, p. 134). This need for a ‘prosthetic appendage’ is not only seen in Christian and Sean, but is also seen with the numerous male patients they treat. Plastic surgery, then, becomes an attempt at making their masculinity ‘whole’ again. Within the context of the American Dream, both male and female bodies are regarded as another site of achievement, the most visible indicator of success. When Nip/Tuck’s Drs McNamara and Troy ask, ‘Tell me what you don’t like about yourself’, they, along with the show, give the appearance of solving a complex question with a simple solution. As my reading of the series shows, however, Nip/Tuck suggests this is an illusion; or, as the opening credits suggest, ‘a perfect lie’. From the Carver’s eerie decree ‘beauty is a curse on the world’ (Season Three) to the fractured lives of all the main characters, Nip/ Tuck reveals the contradictions associated with plastic surgery, the underside of the American Dream – greed, corruption and superficiality – and the damage and scars that modern cosmetics cannot mask. While the nuances of Nip/Tuck reveal the show does not entirely denounce plastic surgery, the show does provide a discourse for examining the internal, as well as external, implications of cosmetics. One of the main criticisms of both the postmodern and postfeminist body is that it is a body of privilege. Issues of race, class and sexuality are often ignored, and it is only the advantaged few, with the freedoms of time and money, who have the luxury of such options. Nip/Tuck addresses these issues, challenging the notions of



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the postmodern and postfeminist body and their place within the American Dream of equal opportunity and having it all. At the same time, the series considers these issues in light of how plastic surgery has gone from being seen as a privilege for the wealthy few to being regarded as within the budget of a great many people. Despite, and perhaps because of, the over-emphasis on the transformative power of plastic surgery, time and again, through its characters and storylines, Nip/Tuck demonstrates that, regardless of status and outward appearances, real change can only be achieved internally. Written and directed by the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, Nip/ Tuck’s pilot episode lays the groundwork for the characters and themes of the series. In the pilot, Sean has a consultation with the mother of a young burn victim. She has come to plead with Sean to perform her son’s much-needed skin grafts. Her HMO, however, will not cover the surgery and therefore Sean turns her away. Disgusted, she leaves, but not before admonishing Sean, ‘The next time you’ve got some size-four on your table and you’re giving her liposuction she really doesn’t need, you think of my Joey and what you could have done for him. Shame on you’ (‘Pilot’ (1.1)). Here plastic surgery is seen as a medical necessity. The idea is not to transform the body into something else, but rather to heal it in an attempt at restoring it to what it was. This introduces one of the series’s main themes – the conflict between the utility of reconstructive plastic surgery versus cosmetic plastics. Sean is particularly tormented by this dichotomy, and the consequence of the woman’s speech and everything else that happens in the pilot is that the practice starts using the money they make to do pro bono work of precisely the kind she requests. The common societal association with plastic surgery is in relation to improvement and transformation. This connects to the idea of the postmodern body, which sees the physical self as entirely removed from the internal self. Christian, who in the series’s early episodes represents the glitz and decadence of South Beach, is a strong promoter of this idea and sees the body as a site of creation separate from the individual. Christian’s practice of ‘trolling’ bars for women with whom he can have sex, and later engage as clients, leads him to encounter Kimber Henry (‘Pilot’), an action that has lasting consequences throughout the series. Through their interactions, sexual and non-sexual, Christian’s association of plastic surgery with

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transformation and hard work reveals itself, primarily in post-coital conversation. After a night of coke-fuelled sex, Kimber declares to Christian that she is considered a ‘perfect 10’. Christian, discounting any internal influences on beauty, judges her only on appearances, and declares her an ‘8’. ‘It takes a lot of discipline and work to get there to be perfect,’ he tells Kimber, ‘but, uh, you fix the flaws and you could absolutely be a ten’ (‘Pilot’). Hurt by Christian’s comments, Kimber responds, ‘I don’t want to be pretty. I want to be better. I want to be perfect.’ Although Christian’s character evolves at times throughout the series, initially, and on the surface, he promotes the idea that being better – being ‘perfect’ – can most readily be achieved through surgery. After marking her body with lipstick to point out her ‘imperfections’, Christian tells Kimber, ‘Don’t be upset. Let your shortcomings and flaws fuel you, let them push you further than you ever thought you could go. When you stop striving for perfection, you might as well be dead’ (‘Pilot’). Here Christian advocates the idea that the body, and as a result the individual, can be anything one wants it to be. ‘Flaws’ become the impetus for change, and with enough willpower and work, perfection can be achieved through the body. In achieving this perfection, the individual can transform him/herself into whatever s/he desires. Age is on Kimber’s side, and through surgeries she is able to transform herself from model, to porn star, to business woman. On the one hand her ‘having it all’ reflects the model of the postfeminist heroine. Closer examination of what this ‘all’ includes – numerous surgeries, drug addiction, and abuse – reveals the underside of this ‘empowerment’. Although she is beautiful to begin with, her fragile confidence is never satisfied and she continually seeks minor improvements. She is never perfect in her mind, and therefore never truly happy. Her adoption of an anti-plastic surgery position as a result of post-Carver Stockholm syndrome is more of the same, as is her adoption of Scientology. Even at her happiest, when she is about to marry Christian in Season Three, she still requests liposuction so that she can fit into her wedding dress and be the ‘perfect’ bride. A defining feature of the postfeminist heroine is her youth, and therefore any sign of ageing is seen as a weakness. The character Hedda Grubman (Seasons One to Four) exemplifies the ‘scalpel slaves’



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of South Beach who are on a never-ending quest for youth and beauty. After performing numerous surgeries on Mrs Grubman, Sean and Christian try to cut her off cold-turkey, only to have her threaten a malpractice lawsuit on them, due to Sean’s negligence during a procedure. Although Mrs Grubman is much older than Kimber, Christian is able to use his ‘charms’ on her in a similar way in order to get her to drop the lawsuit. Lying in bed next to Christian, Mrs Grubman begins to cry and tells him, ‘But if truth be told, that always was my fantasy. That you would look at me one day, think I was beautiful. That you made me beautiful. That you’d want me’ (‘Nanette Babcock’ (1.3)). Again, the body is seen as something that can be shaped as a means to a desired end. Mrs Grubman views her body as something that Christian has created and, in doing so, has made beautiful. Christian becomes the ultimate symbol of patriarchy, Mrs Grubman’s god. At the same time, her body becomes a commodity and, despite her wealth, in her mind her greatest asset. Because she sees her body as separate from herself, she cannot realize when she has gone too far. She eventually drops her lawsuit, but only after Sean and Christian agree to give her whatever surgeries she wants, pro bono. When Mrs Grubman’s daughter is diagnosed with cancer, she requests yet another procedure, telling the doctors, ‘Call me shallow, call me pathetic, but beauty is my strength and my armour, and I owe it to my girl to look like a million goddamn bucks’ (‘Mrs Grubman’ (2.4)). Again, the body is seen as something separate, her armour. She believes that looking good will give her the strength to deal with the emotional pain of her daughter’s illness. Her obsession with physical perfection has dramatic consequences, however, when she suffers a stroke on the operating table. Embarrassed by her physical impairments, she exiles herself from society. When she returns again in the fourth season, she informs Christian she is dying of cancer and wants him to make her the best-looking corpse possible. She plans an elaborate funeral to mark her ‘return’ to society, but when she passes away, Christian is the only one to attend. Instead of eulogizing Mrs Grubman, he addresses the corpse, telling her: Truth is Mrs Grubman you were a huge pain in the ass. Pretty much everybody hated you; no wonder they boycotted your

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funeral. You were obsessed with your looks and plastic surgery, and in the end it cost you every relationship you ever had. But, I know somewhere inside you meant well. You were funny, you were honest, and you stuck up for yourself. I love the fact you never let me off the hook. Life was more interesting with you in it, and I’m gonna miss you. And I love you, too. (‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8)) Christian’s speech is contradictory in that it both condemns and defends Mrs Grubman’s actions. He recognizes the destructive consequences of her vanity, but still praises her character. This is an example of Nip/Tuck’s complicated relationship with plastic surgery, where it both mocks and upholds its practice. The ultimate fate of Mrs Grubman, her sadness, and her alienation, exemplify the negative outcomes of a divide between the mind and the body and cautions what the ultimate fate will be for the ageing postfeminist heroine. Despite her makeup, surgeries and outward appearances, she dies sad and alone. When viewed from beginning to end, the relationship between Christian and Mrs Grubman is seen as poignant and sweet. There is beauty in it, but there is also ugliness in the fact that these two could never have a relationship that was not facilitated with plastic surgery. Christian’s final surgical procedure on Mrs Grubman, juxtaposed with her performance of ‘This Girl’s in Love With You’, is a homage to their relationship. While her portrayal evolves from being a comic stereotype of a plastic surgery patient – rich, vain, older, white – to being something a lot more nuanced, in the end she is seen as sad as well as triumphant. Kimber, Mrs Grubman and similar characters are on a constant quest for improvement that involves heavy maintenance and numerous procedures over time. In contrast to these patients are those that are looking for dramatic change, often all at once. This notion of transformation is taken to the extreme with the patient Silvio Perez (‘Pilot’). He visits the offices of McNamara–Troy requesting a whole new face. While Sean thinks he might have Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Christian deduces that Perez is running from something. Despite this, he agrees to take Perez on as a patient after he offers to pay $300,000 for the surgery. Christian’s greed in taking



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this case proves to be problematic when it is revealed that the ‘something’ Perez is running from is the fact that he molested the six-year-old daughter of Colombian drug lord Escobar Gallardo. Perez is hoping that, with a new face, he can have a fresh start (and evade justice). When he visits a young girl in the paediatric ward while recovering, however, it becomes clear that his transformation is only skin deep. Although the exterior can be transformed, the interior is not fixed so quickly. The ramifications of taking Silvio Perez as a patient haunt the practice throughout the series. At the end of the first season, Escobar Gallardo demands repayment from Christian and Sean for the $300,000 Perez stole from him in order to pay for his surgery. He also coerces the doctors into performing surgery on his drug mules, women he flies in from Colombia who have been given drug-filled breast implants. When Sean warns Escobar about the serious medical complications and risks for these women, Escobar replies, ‘Small price to pay for the chance at the American Dream. That girl begged to be my mule just to get into this country. Who are we to judge her for wanting something better for herself? Something you two take for granted every day’ (‘Antonia Ramos’ (1.12)). Here the body is again seen as separate from the individual. It becomes a tool for desperate women to use to better themselves. Although this is an extreme example, in a way it is not that different from Kimber’s attitude. By transforming and manipulating the body, the American Dream can hope to be achieved. Unfortunately for them, Escobar’s scheme is a sham, and these women end up being sent back to Colombia penniless and disfigured. In terms of privilege, as immigrants hoping to gain access to the US, Escobar’s mules are at a disadvantage. Therefore, for these women, the toll taken on the body, and the risks associated with it, is far greater than it is for others, revealing the racist underbelly of the American Dream. Along the same lines, the strict code of beauty – white, thin, and upper class – promoted by the postfeminist heroine echoes this racism by advocating a body and feminism that fails to address the diversity of women and their situation. As the situation escalates, Escobar finally demands of Sean, ‘Give me a new face. Get rid of all this pain. The snake wants to shed its skin’ (‘Escobar Gallardo’ (1.13)). Again, the idea is transform the face,

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transform the life. Not only will it serve the practical purpose of allowing Escobar to escape arrest, but he also hopes it will get rid of his internal problems as well. Christian and Sean, however, take advantage of this situation and give Escobar the face of one of the FBI’s most wanted. In the ultimate accomplishment of the postmodern body, they are literally able to turn Escobar into someone else. When Escobar returns in the fourth season, he blackmails Sean and Christian into making his face into what it was before. The face the doctors have given him is that of a paedophile, something Escobar abhors. He tells Sean and Christian, ‘I want to go back to being the man that I was, the Escobar people feared … I’ll take spending an entire lifetime in here as the man I am before I live another day as the bottom feeder I’m seen as now – a pervert’ (‘Merrill Bobolit’ (4.10)). In this instance, the face has ‘made’ the man and he is perceived as something he is not. His original transformation, fuelled by corruption and deceit, did not lead to the American Dream, but to a nightmare. Escobar is so desperate to be restored to his former self, he is willing to set his own face on fire. As Nip/Tuck repeatedly demonstrates, the freedoms associated with plastic surgery are afforded to the wealthy and powerful, while the disenfranchised are denied access to this sort of transformation. Characters such as Kimber Henry, Hedda Grubman and Escobar Gallardo have the time, money and/or power to dedicate to making themselves over. Even though these transformations ultimately do not give them the lives they want, they are at least provided with the opportunity for this type of change. This opportunity is not the case for many others, regardless of need. When Sophia Lopez, a Hispanic transsexual, first approaches Sean about corrective surgery, he curtly tells her, ‘I’m afraid pro bono on this type of operation is out of the question. We only do that type of work on people who have suffered accidents or birth defects’ (‘Sophia Lopez’ (1.4)). To which Sophia replies, ‘Being one gender on the inside and another on the outside is a birth defect. You think I chose to look like this?’ Sean’s response, ‘Having elective surgery for cosmetic reasons regardless of the outcome is what I consider a choice, yeah’, not only reveals his prejudice, but also highlights the fact that choice is only the privilege of some. As a Hispanic transsexual, Sophia Lopez is doubly ‘othered’.



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After Sean agrees to fix the scarring on her neck, Sophia summons Sean to the hospital to help with a friend who has had a botched gender reassignment operation. As Sophia again defends the doctor that did this, she tries to explain to Sean her own need for gender reassignment surgery to make her feel whole. She cries, ‘I also know of an honourable bank teller who makes no money, who hasn’t yet become what she’s supposed to become.’ Sean, coming to the realization that for transgendered individuals it is not a ‘choice’, agrees and tells Sophia, ‘I’ll help you find that person, free of charge.’ In explaining her reasons for surgery, Sophia highlights the difference between her need for surgery versus someone like Kimber or Mrs Grubman. She tells Sean and Christian’s anaesthetist, Liz, A façade does not determine a person … my façade is hiding my person. I’m not trying to be a beautiful woman; I know I’m no Salma Hayek, okay. I’m just trying to get rid of the man on the outside as much as I can so I can somewhat reflect what I am – a woman. (‘Sophia Lopez II’ (1.9)) For Sophia, the quest is not for beauty or for perfection, but a chance for her to let her external represent her internal. This is in sharp contrast to the other characters discussed so far, whose main goal is to polish the exterior in the hopes of glossing over problems on the interior. For Sophia, her chance at the American Dream is not to be a cookie-cutter version of everybody else, but rather to just have the chance to be herself. Throughout the series’s run, Nip/Tuck further explores the implications of plastic surgery and the transgendered community with numerous characters, the most notable being Ava Moore (Famke Janssen). Ava is able to ‘pass’ throughout the second season before it is revealed that she is transgendered. Unlike Sophia, who is practically martyred, Ava is portrayed as a villain. When Christian discovers that Ava used to be a man, Sean and Christian use this information to blackmail her to get out of town and leave Matt. Whereas Sophia’s desire for a sex change comes from an internal need, Ava’s operation is a desperate attempt to be with the man she loves, Dr Barrett Moore (Alec Baldwin). Barrett transforms Ava; however, their union fails

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because, as he explains, ‘I couldn’t see her. I could only see my own work’ (‘Joan Rivers’ (2.16)). In a sad twist relating to the postmodern body, the split between who Ava was and who she had become, coupled with Moore’s role in the process, was too great for him to overcome. Before Ava leaves town, she requests one last surgery, ‘Finish me. Correct the one flaw that gave me away so I’m never found out again.’ With her transformation finally complete, Ava flees the country. Her transformation does not come without a cost, though, and in the end Ava is seen as tragic, not evil, as she loses both her son and lover. When Ava returns in the series’s final season, she continues to occupy a contradictory position. She returns with a baby that she has stolen, only to abandon him when she fears that his physical imperfections cannot be fixed and he will not be ‘perfect’. Still, she is at least in part vindicated when, in one of the last scenes of the series, she and Matt, along with his daughter Jenna, go off together, presumably to share a life based on mutual love. Similar to Nip/Tuck’s stance on cosmetic surgery, the show ultimately neither vilifies nor validates Ava, but rather allows her to be a complex character that is not entirely good or evil. As a transgendered woman she attempts to embody the postfeminist ideal of youth, beauty and conspicuous consumption, but with the twist that she was once a man. Matt, who over the course of the series battled his conflicting feelings towards Ava and the transgendered community, also challenges the machismo of hegemonic masculinity by accepting Ava and choosing her over the more ‘suitable’ Ramona. As a white, upper-class woman, Ava is able to transform herself into the appearance of the postfeminist heroine in a way that Sophia Lopez is not. In doing so, she continues to affirm the racist implications that are associated with Westernized standards of beauty. Nip/Tuck addresses this in the third season through Matt’s involvement with neo-Nazi Ariel Alderman (Brittany Snow). Ariel grills Christian and Sean about their practice of ‘wiping out the physical characteristics that make up the ethnicities in our culture … making everyone look white and Aryan’ (‘Madison Berg’ (3.10)). Unfortunately, instead of posing this question as a critique of Western standards of beauty, it quickly becomes apparent that Ariel is motivated by racist ideology. This comes to a head when Ariel’s



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father kidnaps Matt and the transsexual Cherry Peck, threatens them, and ultimately forces Matt to castrate Cherry. Despite this brutality, the show does not turn Cherry into a victim. She saves Matt’s life, killing her captor before he can kill them. Through this action, the show validates plastic surgery and the transsexual, while condemning the Aldermans and their bigotry. Nip/Tuck also addresses issues of race when, in Season Two, disgraced plastic surgeon Merrill Bobolit starts peddling his knock-off Botox, Bobotox. Making house-calls and working out of the back room of Mme Rose’s nail parlour, Bobolit performs hack-job procedures, at a fraction of the cost. The majority of his clientele is Hispanic and of a lower income bracket. He is first seen giving Bobotox injections to a group of maids, who are discussing in Spanish how their rich employers should not be the only ones able to look young. However, the Bobotox causes a horrible reaction, scarring and disfiguring the women at the site of their injections. Christian confronts Bobolit, who defends his practice, proclaiming, ‘Bobotox is a revolution Christian. For the first time all women, not just the privileged, can afford to look good’ (‘Oona Wentworth’ (2.13)). The irony, of course, is that not only do they not look good, but they end up hideously disfigured from the injections. Not only do they lack access to quality cosmetic treatment, but they also cannot afford the medical costs associated with fixing the damage caused by Bobolit. Bobolit’s practice reveals an underside not only to plastic surgery, but also to the American Dream. Bodies are increasingly becoming commodities and indicators of success, but only a certain body will do. Youth is praised, as are bodies that are slim, lifted and white. Society is increasingly being held to these strict standards, regardless of ethnicity or class. In her book The Male Body (1999), Susan Bordo notes (p. 222): We bob our “family noses,” lift our aging faces, suction extra fat, remove minor “flaws” with seemingly little concern for any “deep” meaning that our bodies might have, as repositories of our histories, our ethnic and racial and family lineage, our personalities.

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Although postmodernism makes great claims for diversity, only one body is being upheld as the standard – the white bourgeois ideal – despite the range of shapes, sizes, and colours that exist. What is at stake with this is that it erases markers of ‘otherness’ in an effort to squash diversity. The show hints at the effects of this erasure through the claims of Ariel, but quickly invalidates her opinion before the ramifications of her words are fully addressed. In terms of the postfeminist heroine and the postfeminist man, Nip/Tuck reflects the ways in which postfeminism fails to address the important issues of race raised by third-wave feminism. Race becomes another commodity that can be bought, sold, or erased, as with the real-life procedures such as blepharoplasty, more commonly known as ‘Asian eyelid surgery’, or rhinoplasty to make noses look less Jewish. While Nip/Tuck questions these practices, often addressing them from a different angle, it still conforms to the idea that race is another aspect of the body that is susceptible to transformation. Character Kurt Dempsey (‘Kurt Dempsey’ (1.5)) may want eyelid surgery to look Japanese in order to gain the approval of his fiancée’s family – an inversion on most blepharoplasty procedures – but, nevertheless, he provides an example of racial identity being fetishized through plastic surgery. In addition to age and race, Nip/Tuck also examines the effect of class and the body in the fourth season with the introduction of the character Dawn Budge (Rosie O’Donnell). A recent lottery winner, Mrs Budge hopes to transform her husband, daughter and self from ‘trailer trash’ to South Beach. Her tastes are seen as gaudy, and she ‘needs’ Christian to give her lessons in style and taste. Of course, it is the white, upper-class lifestyle that is promoted. Yet, as Mrs Budge learns, sometimes money can’t buy everything. Despite the surgery, wardrobe and jewellery, she walks around her McMansion all alone. The one thing that has eluded her during this transformation is happiness. Her husband and daughter leave her, and despite outward appearances of success, she is sadder than she has ever been. When she later encounters Sean and Christian after they have relocated to Los Angeles, she is still struggling to find ‘happiness’. While characters such as Dawn Budge are a subtle dig at greed and the American Dream, Nip/Tuck takes more drastic measures to explore the darker side of beauty and the American Dream in Season



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Three. Introduced in the second season, the Carver terrorizes the characters of Nip/Tuck throughout the third season, raping his victims and slashing their faces while reproaching, ‘Beauty is a curse on the world.’ To prove his point, the Carver kidnaps Kimber, and tortures her while ‘undoing’ all of the procedures she had undergone over the years. When Kimber is finally released, she is both traumatized and disfigured by her experience. She tells Christian, ‘You made me think I needed them [the surgeries] for you to love me. It’s true, beauty is a curse on the world’ (‘Cherry Peck’ (3.14)). Christian, choking back tears, can only reply, ‘I’ll make you a 10 again sweetheart, I promise. I’ll make you a 10.’ For Christian, the body is still separate from the person. He cannot rationalize that the horrors Kimber suffered externally only pale in comparison to her internal anguish. He thinks that in restoring her appearance to its former beauty, he can make their relationship be what it was. Kimber asks Christian to ‘fix’ her, but after the surgery tells him, ‘I don’t want any mirrors … I don’t want any mirrors ever. I had you fix me so the rest of the world could see me and not run screaming. I’ll never be able to look at myself and not see the pain.’ At this point Kimber, reeling from the effects of Stockholm syndrome, is so traumatized she blames plastic surgery for what has happened to her. She explains to Christian: I can’t do this anymore Christian. I can’t be this beautiful couple that spends $600 a month on tanning salons, who takes an hour to get ready just to go to the gym. Who measure people’s worth by their body fat percentage … He [the Carver] wasn’t my captor. You were. Porn was. He was just the man holding up the mirror to our beautiful superficial lives, showing me how grotesque they were. It’s just ugliness hidden by a perfect mask. How am I supposed to be with you when your job is to give everybody those masks? Here Nip/Tuck again shows its ambivalence towards plastic surgery. Kimber’s statement is an accurate attack on the shallow lifestyle she and Christian carefully cultivated for themselves. Time and again the show seems to be a satire, mocking the superficiality of plastic surgery. At the same time, it validates the practice, such as when Kimber is

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returned to her pre-Carver appearance. Although in the fourth season she seeks out Scientology to heal her inner wounds, by the end of the season she is dissatisfied with the new life she has created for herself and misses the beauty and glamour she had with Christian. Plastic surgery was never the problem, and therefore can never be the fix Kimber really needs. Again, with the character of Kimber, Nip/Tuck plays with the idea of the postfeminist heroine and the internal struggles that result from an identity based on appearances and empowerment based on consumerism. For Kimber this proves fatal, as she ultimately commits suicide in the show’s final season. If Christian and Sean are the heroes of Nip/Tuck, then the Carver is one of its ultimate villains. As an interrogation of hegemonic masculinity, the Carver/Quentin is a grotesque parody of the ‘postfeminist man’ embodied by Sean and Christian. As Genz and Brabon write, ‘the “postfeminist man” is defined by his problematic relationship with the ghost of hegemonic masculinity as he tries to reconcile the threat he poses to himself and the social systems he tries to uphold’ (p. 143). Born with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, Quentin is a hyperbolic representation of wounded masculinity – he is literally born without a penis. As children, both Quentin and his sister Kit endure years of plastic surgery in order to conform to social standards of appearance. As the Carver, though, he rejects the beauty standard, stating, ‘I came to this city of flesh to heal it, to free it from the tyranny of beauty. To save it, body and soul, from grotesque unnecessary face-lifts and ridiculous calf implants’ (‘Quentin Costa’ (3.15)). He represents the schism to which Genz and Brabon refer, denouncing the Western social system based on appearances, while upholding it at the same time. Further, although there may be a twisted logic to what the Carver says, he is still a raping, murdering madman. As the ultimate postmodern bodies, Quentin and Kit recreated themselves to escape from their painful childhood. It becomes obvious, however, that despite their outward appearances of normalcy, Kit and Quentin never truly recovered from their painful pasts. Although they claim to abhor plastic surgery for excessive attractiveness, they themselves exemplify the very standards of the image system they reject. Yet they fail to recognize their own hypocrisy, and when they are last seen, they have fled the country looking for more victims they can ‘free’ from beauty.



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As victims of the Carver, the bodies of both Sean and Christian are sites of opportunity and power that are feminized through their attacks. Thus they represent feminism’s perceived threat to hegemonic masculinity. This ‘threat’, then, has been inscribed by the media through its creation of the ‘postfeminist man’, and is embodied through the characters of Sean and Christian. They grapple with their masculinity in an age and industry where the body – both male and female – is increasingly used as a signifier for status. Although as plastic surgeons they are part of the industry that promotes unrealistic standards of beauty and an image-fuelled lifestyle, they are also prisoners to these same standards. This reveals not only their vulnerability, but also the danger in postfeminism’s promise of ‘choice’, which in reality only offers a false sense of empowerment. When race and class are considered within this ‘empowerment’ of the American Dream, its fallacies are even more evident. Perhaps more than anything, Nip/Tuck is a cautionary tale. The show suggests that as a slight enhancement or a medical necessity, plastic surgery can have a positive effect. But, when the individual views his or her body as a constant work zone free of any inner associations, the consequences can be deadly. This is especially true when only one type of body is seen as perfection, and as a result becomes the ultimate representation of success and the American Dream. Still, as Nip/Tuck reveals the ugliness associated with plastic surgery and the American Dream, it also upholds the illusory image of the transformative possibility in all of us. The partnering of the show’s heroes, Sean and Christian, works to reconcile the duelling ideologies of plastic surgery that these characters, and Nip/Tuck, embody. It also exemplifies what Genz and Brabon argue is the postfeminist man’s display of ‘a compound identity, revealing the fact that numerous representations of masculinity may coexist’ (p. 143). By extension, the show reveals the fallacies of consumer power as they relate to the postfeminist heroine and the implications of cosmetic femininity. By interrogating these identities, Nip/Tuck acknowledges their existence while providing an alternate frame for understanding their assumed privilege at the expense of not only others, but the internal self.

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Works Cited ‘Antonia Ramos’, Nip/Tuck, written by Jennifer Salt and Brad Falchuk, directed by Elodie Keene, FX, 14 Oct. 2003. Bordo, Susan, The Male Body, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. ——— Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 1993, Los Angeles: University of California Press; rev. edn 2003. ‘Cherry Peck’, Nip/Tuck, written by Brad Falchuk and Hank Chilton, directed by Craig Zisk, FX, 20 Dec. 2005. ‘Conor McNamara’, Nip/Tuck, written by Jennifer Salt and Hank Chilton, directed by Patrick McKee, FX, 24 Oct. 2006. ‘Escobar Gallardo’, Nip/Tuck, written by Ryan Murphy, directed by Ryan Murphy, FX, 21 Oct. 2003. Genz, Stephanie and Benjamin A. Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. ‘Joan Rivers’, Nip/Tuck, written by Ryan Murphy, directed by Ryan Murphy, FX, 5 Oct. 2004. ‘Madison Berg’, Nip/Tuck, written by Jennifer Salt, directed by Greg Yaitanes, FX, 22 Nov. 2005. ‘Merrill Bobolit’, Nip/Tuck, written by Brad Falchuk and Sean Jablonski, directed by Charles Haid, FX, 7 Nov. 2006. ‘Mrs Grubman’, Nip/Tuck, written by Jennifer Salt, directed by Jamie Babbit, FX, 13 July 2004. ‘Nanette Babcock’, Nip/Tuck, written by Ryan Murphy, directed by Lawrence Trilling, FX, 5 Aug. 2003. ‘Oona Wentworth’, Nip/Tuck, written by Sean Jablonski and Jennifer Salt, directed by Scott Brazil, FX, 14 Sept. 2004. ‘Pilot’, Nip/Tuck, written by Ryan Murphy, directed by Ryan Murphy, FX, 22 July 2003. ‘Quentin Costa’, Nip/Tuck, written by Ryan Murphy, directed by Ryan Murphy, FX, 20 Dec. 2005. Simpson, Mark, ‘Meet the Metrosexual’, Salon.com, 22 June 2002. ‘Sophia Lopez’, Nip/Tuck, written by Sean Jablonski, directed by Michael M. Robin, FX, 12 Aug. 2003. ‘Sophia Lopez II’, Nip/Tuck, written by Sean Jablonski, directed by Nelson McCormick, FX, 23 Sept. 2003.

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nip/tuck and the literal unconscious Erica D. Galioto

‘We work what’s on the surface, not what’s underneath,’ Nip/ Tuck’s Dr Christian Troy tells one of his prospective plastic surgery patients, but this admission is contradicted from the first episode until the last, seven seasons later (‘Trudy Nye’ (2.14)). Throughout the series, the direction of many episodes is the slow revelation of the concept that psychological problems do indeed manifest as physical ones. These revelations are found not only through the physical transformation of each show, but also, and more importantly, through the talking that takes place among the characters. In a sense each episode is an analysis through talking, like ‘The Talking Cure’ popularized through psychoanalysis. In stark contrast to the superficial Hearts and Scalpels satirized during Season Five, Nip/Tuck, literally and metaphorically, goes beneath the surface through talk and action to represent the difficulty of getting the outside of one’s appearance to match the inside of one’s psyche. As the series progresses, viewers, patients and the main characters themselves learn that the border separating inside from outside is fluid and permeable, so, contrary to Christian’s above comment, working on the physical surface is working on the psychological underneath. In the show, the therapeutic nature of the consult, the expression of patients’ hidden lives and the presence of psychological jargon all point to the correlation of plastic surgery and therapy by Ryan Murphy and the other writers.

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Nip/Tuck does more though than flirt with psychological concepts and throw out technical mumbo-jumbo. It in fact literalizes unconscious processes that have no visual referent in the real world; these actualized metaphors are sometimes crude and disturbing, but at other times are more benign. This range is particularly true of Christian and Sean, whose dynamic is often mirrored by patients. Like Christian and Sean, who work on their own psychological issues as their patients work on similar ones, viewers of Nip/Tuck are able to consider how the unconscious may affect conscious behaviour. The merit of Nip/Tuck resides in how its storylines push viewers to confront the intersection of psychological reality and physical appearance, and the effect of one upon the other. Psychoanalysis, or the study of the unconscious, can be used as a tool to explain how what we see on the screen actually reflects what is deep within the recesses of psychic space. If external identity is never identical to interior identity due to the unconscious, then it is impossible for appearances to be exactly what they seem. Nip/Tuck exposes this falsity of surfaces to reveal that the unconscious lying beneath exerts the power. Reading Nip/Tuck from this psychoanalytic perspective allows us to analyse the complex psychology of these compelling characters through their nuanced behaviours, desires and relationships. Nip/Tuck’s literal unconscious reflects the complementary theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, and opens the show to the rich interpretation of negative space. Frisky, or the Return-of-the-Repressed A minute detail from the first season of the show may stand as an easy reference point for this literal unconscious. In the pilot episode (1.1), Sean presents his daughter Annie with a gerbil, which she names Frisky. Annie’s obvious seven-year-old delight is contrasted sharply by Julia’s fury. Julia sees Frisky as one more thing to take care of, one more household chore, one more ‘shit’ to clean up. Frisky intensifies the current fight between Julia and Sean over his (then) mid-life crisis, because the gerbil exemplifies Sean’s insensitivity towards his wife. Throughout this foundational



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episode, we see Julia’s frustrated efforts to maintain Frisky’s basic needs. After Frisky tumbles out of the cereal box and tramples her medical school application, Julia takes a squirming Frisky by the tail, consciously dangles him over the toilet bowl, and proceeds to drop and flush her nemesis. This action provides her with temporary relief, and Annie’s ‘lost gerbil’ signs tell us that Julia fails to admit her role in Frisky’s death and thus represses the whole murderous scene. The unconscious, in addition to being the inaccessible site of numerous psychological processes, is also a repository of repressions: feelings and memories that we don’t want to face because it would be painful to do so. In an effort to avoid the pain, we tuck the feelings and memories away for self-preservation. As Freud emphasizes with italics in ‘Repression’ (1915), ‘the essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness’ (p. 105). While this avoidance may work in the short term, these unconscious repressions eventually betray themselves in the long term through signals like psychological symptoms that affect conscious behaviour: ‘… they are derivatives of the repressed, which has finally by means of these formations wrested from consciousness the right of way previously denied it’ (pp. 107–08). The pain resurfaces in a new way and demands attention. In psychoanalytic terms, this is called the ‘return of the repressed’ (pp. 111–12). Though Julia has repressed Frisky, he will surely return. One episode later, this repression betrays itself as a signal through clogged sewer pipes (‘Mandi/Randi’ (1.2)). Unable to stay buried for ever, Frisky’s rotting carcass emerges as a symptom, telling the house that something out of sight can still be what the plumber calls ‘a wicked big clog’. When he removes the dead gerbil, Julia is confronted with both her crime and her concealment of it, and she must deal with the reality she was desperately trying to avoid. Frisky’s return gives us the visual representation of an otherwise unconscious process: repressions always break the surface of consciousness and demand working-through. In the words of Freud, ‘We recall the fact that the motive and purpose of repression was simply the avoidance of “pain”’ (‘Repression’, p. 111). Frisky’s return confronts Julia not with physical pain, but with the emotional pain of change called working-through. Whereas remembering, or re-experiencing a

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painful memory, and repeating, or re-enacting a set of behaviours, stagnate an individual and arrest movement by reiterating past events, working-through is a process of confrontation with the truth and moving forward. In the case of Julia, Frisky’s return prompts the working-through of her internal identity crisis between returning to study medicine and continuing her current role of stay-at-home mum. It is, after all, Frisky’s damaging of her application forms that precedes the killing scene. In addition, along with attending anger management classes for her blatant cruelty, Julia must confront her expulsion from the carpool group of suburban women who no longer find her acceptable. Julia’s painful working-through of this event forces her to look at her life head-on and consider her own identity, her lack of identification with her current social circle, and her deep-seated violent emotions. Had the repression been complete, Julia might have never made these conscious acknowledgements and then changed as a result of them. Nip/Tuck provides countless examples of the return-of-therepressed in other storylines. Matt’s paternity, Escobar Gallardo’s continual resurfacing, and Michelle Landau’s debt to James, are other prominent examples; in each case, what was once hidden is always eventually exposed. Rather than decreasing and disappearing, examples of the-return-of-the-repressed only increase in the final season of the show: 15-year-old Aurelia Gallardo replaces her father as a living reminder of Silvio Perez’s buried body in the Florida swamps (‘Virginia Hayes’ (6.15)), Ava returns with an infant she stole from a Third World country who demands medical attention (‘Walter and Edith Krieger’ (6.18)), and Kimber reappears to Christian a number of times after her suicide (‘Joel Seabrook’ (6.13)). These significant returns, combined with countless other patients who resurface in California after McNamara–Troy moves there, illustrate how the cycle of repression, return and working-through is a process that never ends. Some repressions need constant conscious work, while others, like that related to Frisky, only need to be expelled once; and still others are fresh repressions that begin the circuit anew. For the viewers, seeing repression and its return repeated in numerous storylines provides literal examples of the many repressions we all hold unconsciously, but only until they force themselves out. Nip/



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Tuck is a show about false surfaces; when the façades break, we are presented with messy, painful working-through writ large. Dreams as Wish Fulfilments If psychological symptoms like anxiety betray incomplete unconscious repressions, dreams are another way in which the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind. During sleep, when the barrier that usually separates unconscious from conscious relaxes, some of the unconscious material may seep between the cracks and appear in dreams. When Sean says to the decapitated head that talks to him during recertification, ‘This is my subconscious talking’, he explains a number of other dreams and visions that occur throughout the series (‘Adelle Coffin’ (1.10)). This moment highlights Sean’s knowledge of how dreams, and in this case hallucinations, pass unconscious messages to the conscious state, and it also emphasizes the imagined nature of these visions. Knowing that the head is not actually speaking or that the dream is not actually happening does nothing to lessen the power of the message. Some dreams are nearly indecipherable and require analysis to understand the unconscious message, while others are lifelike and portray experiences that we want or do not want to happen. In Freud’s foundational text, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he presents a dream theory based on his concept of the unconscious, and, like the unconscious, his theory is not stagnant, but dynamic and changes as he interprets more dreams by his patients and himself. Opposing the apparent meaninglessness of absurd dreams, Freud writes, ‘On the contrary, they are psychical phenomena of complete validity – fulfillments of wishes …’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 155). Wish fulfilment dreams, as they are called, define the bulk of Freud’s early dream study.1 An unconscious desire motivates a wish fulfilment dream, while the resulting dream content fulfils this desire. These wish fulfilments are peppered throughout all seven seasons of Nip/Tuck and can be seen not only through characters’ dreams, but also in their conscious hallucinations. In all cases, these wish fulfilments make what is unconscious conscious and force the characters to consider their true desires.

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Of all the central characters, Christian experiences the most straightforward wish fulfilment, early in the series in particular, and usually they are visions of Julia during intimate sexual moments. He visualizes Julia during an early foray in a tanning bed, and, later in that same episode, when he is unable to become aroused by a stripper (‘Mandi/Randi’ (1.2)); he also believes he sees her at ‘The Scene’, the swinger party that endorses adultery (‘Cliff Mantegna’ (1.7)); perhaps, most graphically, he imagines it is Julia he is pleasuring, not Manya Mabika, a survivor of female genital mutilation, in the episode of the same name (2.3). Because viewers know about the complicated history between Christian and Julia and how each has unresolved feelings for the other, these visions are easily aligned with wish fulfilments. Christian not-so-unconsciously wishes he could pursue his physical and emotional desire for Julia, so he often imagines he does. These visions both give him what he wishes he could have and prompt him to consciously acknowledge feelings that are just barely hiding beneath the surface. Similarly, in Season Four, Christian’s wish fulfilment dreams allow him to explore his homosexual feelings. When Christian dreams that he and Sean are at the gay male resort, Christian’s casual strut to ‘find a chaise’ contrasts sharply with Sean’s tense body language and worry about skin cancer (‘Faith Wolper, Ph.D.’ (4.6)). Christian fits into this scene, while Sean does not, so the realization is that Christian can be gay, but not with Sean. Sensing Sean’s unrest, Christian remarks, ‘I know it’s hard, Sean. Studies show that coming out late in life is the psychological equivalent of dealing with a death’ (4.6). Though spoken to Sean, these words are actually directed by Christian’s unconscious to his waking self, but the warning’s double message should not be missed. While coming out as an adult could mean the psychological death of one’s previous self, ‘little deaths’, or orgasms, could also align this process with unlimited pleasure. In this complicated space of double meanings, the dream turns into Sean’s actual death, and Christian’s attempt to resuscitate him, and then into a hypnogogic dream of pure romantic kissing between them. The trajectory of this dream allows Christian to work through his homosexual desire without erasing the complexity inherent within it. Christian’s conscious mind learns that his love for Sean has to stay platonic, but his homosexual desire remains. What may become actual death for



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Sean could become a host of orgasmic ‘little deaths’ for Christian. In this wish fulfilment dream, Christian experiences a wish for Sean and realizes its real-world impossibility, but his own potential homosexuality demands exploration outside the safe space of dreams. Under the safety of anaesthesia during her facial reconstruction, Julia finds herself as the subject, not object, of her own wish fulfilment. In this memorable episode, Julia dreams of her life as it would have evolved if she had married Christian instead of Sean (‘Julia McNamara’ (2.12)). In this calculated dream, she gives herself what she always lusts after: a marriage to Christian, a successful career as a plastic surgeon herself, an exciting sex life, and a daily existence unencumbered by children and household routine. When the dream inserts Sean into this new reality, her idealized vision of what-could-have-been reveals itself as only a façade of perfection; Sean and his alternate life, the one she currently embodies in her conscious state, become what she covets. When she comes to, the message her unconscious has sent her conscious mind is that her wish is faulty. Upon fulfilling her wish, Julia learns that, in fact, it is not what she wants. Her consciousness then prompts her to make changes in herself, not the trappings of life, to move towards contentment. When Ava, her dream-guide, says, ‘Life is a hallucination, Julia’, she means that we have the power to turn the wish fulfilments of our dreams and fantasies into conscious reality (2.12). The corollary to the idea that we can actively turn dreams into reality is the theory that our dreams are so powerful as to create reality on their own. In Season Four, Sean’s repetitive visions of his former lover, Megan O’Hara, and his present nemesis, Escobar Gallardo, as his good conscience and bad conscience, respectively, clearly illustrate his internal conflict over ending his twisted affair with Monica. With Monica’s rape threats, newborn Conor, and a tenuous relationship with Julia, Sean needs and wants to erase Monica from his life. Though not directly caused by Sean, her eventual death externalizes Sean’s inner violence, spoken through Escobar’s diatribes. When Monica runs into the street outside McNamara–Troy into oncoming traffic and is smashed by a bus, the scene is so surprising, abrupt and final that viewers may at first question whether it is a dream or hallucination (‘Faith Wolper,

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Ph.D.’ (4.6)). As Sean runs out and Monica lies lifeless on the pavement, we learn that this is, at least temporarily, the perfect solution to Sean’s predicament. It is so perfect that, like a wish, the whole scene could have been orchestrated in Sean’s mind and become so powerful as to affect conscious reality. Monica’s tragic accident allows viewers to see that it is also possible for reality to be made from dreams, not just that dreams are made of bits and pieces of reality. In a blatant echo of Sean’s earlier fulfilled wish for Monica’s death, the death of Julia’s lover Olivia also perfectly aligns with another of Sean’s psychical wishes. While Olivia lies lifeless on his plastic surgery table, Sean hallucinates her prodding words: ‘Kill me, why don’t you? You’d like to, wouldn’t you? Your life would be so much easier if I wasn’t in the way’ (‘Roxy St James’ (5.17)). When Olivia, does, in fact, die during that surgery, Sean once again experiences his own omnipotence of thoughts, and afterwards admits, ‘I wanted her to die.’ Conveniently, the deaths of both women remove a blockage between Julia and him, though neither death is enough to revive their troubled relationship. Viewers later learn that Olivia failed to report pre-existing medications that would interact negatively with the anaesthesia, but the correlation between Sean’s psychic wish and eventual reality remains an eerie presence. Julia also has a dream that predates reality, not as a wish but as a premonition (‘Joy Kringle’ (3.13)). Before the results of her CVS test are revealed and subsequently not discussed, Julia has a jumbled dream about her baby, where she sees the infant as an object behind a curtain in need of medical attention. As we learn throughout Season Four, her dream foreshadows the reality of Conor’s ectrodactyly condition. A Freudian analysis, however, contests the prophetic nature of this dream: ‘Thus the creation of a dream after the event, which alone makes prophetic dreams possible, is nothing other than a form of censoring, thanks to which the dream is able to make its way through into consciousness’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 664). This quote indicates that prophetic dreams do not exist in pure form, but only appear as premonitions due to our own limited knowledge. Since Conor’s ectrodactyly exists in the uterus, the dream postdates the reality of his condition. While Julia lacks this precise knowledge, it exists nonetheless; she is unconsciously



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censored from what is. In this dream, her censor relaxes and coincides with a reality that already exists. When she wakes, Julia must face the difficult knowledge she would rather sleep through. This disturbing dream is similar to the famous ‘Dream of the Burning Boy’ which Freud analyses and Lacan later extends in Seminar XI. A brief rehearsal of the contents of this dream consists of a father who falls asleep with his ill son in the room nearby. While he sleeps, the father sees the image of his son, who says to him, ‘Father, can’t you see I am burning?’ (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 34). Informing the father of the reality of the next room, the dream speaks the truth because the son, in fact, is burning due to an overturned candle. Like Julia’s dream of Conor, reality and dream merge, where the son’s words represent another reality. Since this dream contrasts Freud’s early theory in which a dream fulfils a wish, his analysis represents a shift in his original thinking, a shift that becomes all the more applicable to Julia’s scenario. Acknowledging that the father does not wish for his son’s death, Freud modifies his thinking by transforming his hypothesis to state that ‘the dream satisfies only the need to prolong sleep’ (Lacan, p. 57). This modification, as Freud explains, means that one would rather sleep than wake to reality.2 In the case of this particular father, he would rather remain in innocuous sleep, where his son is alive for another minute or two, than wake to the reality of his tragic death. And in this way, all the previous dreams display the powerful ‘wish to sleep’, Freud’s catch-all term to define all dreams (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 268). Much later in the series, Sean experiences his own waking-dream when he becomes an actor and literally experiences the psychoanalytic notion described by Lacan in which reality is a dream, a protective shield against the traumatic Real we can only encounter in small doses (Four Fundamental Concepts). Throughout the first half of Season Five, Sean gets to live his dream; his own wish fulfilment comes true when the practice first moves to Los Angeles, and it is Sean, not Christian, who experiences celebrity. Quickly moving from the technical medical adviser for Hearts and Scalpels to lead actor, while Christian gets cut, Sean finally experiences the role reversal with his best friend and partner that he has always desired (‘Carly Summers’ (5.1)). Recognized for the same traits he always admired

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in Christian, Sean becomes a sex symbol in ‘50 Most Eligible Bachelors’, spends time with the show’s stars Aidan and Kate, and pursues numerous sexual encounters. At the same time, Christian envies Sean for reasons other than plastic surgery skill. In a clear identity exchange from the seasons that have preceded it, Christian humbly jibes, ‘C’mon, like you don’t like being Mr Celebrity Plastic Surgeon?’ And Sean confidently replies, ‘I admit it, I like getting attention. After years being in your shadow, I like the limelight’ (‘Damien Sands’ (5.6)). While Sean experiences his own waking-dream, so too does Christian, as he and Julia pursue a covert relationship for an extended period of time rather than isolated one-night stands or imagined fantasies. Julia, however, is none of what Christian has desired for more than twenty years. Unlike the beautiful and forbidden sexual object of age twenty, Julia is sick, weak, needy and ugly, and unknowingly being poisoned by Olivia’s daughter Eden. Christian’s wish fulfilment is more like a nightmare, and he admits it. ‘In my head, you were so perfect,’ he says. To which Julia replies, ‘It’s not the same, is it?’ (‘August Walden’ (5.13)). Ultimately, both Christian and Sean learn that dreams are better off left in the sleeping, rather than waking, world. When dreams remain something to desire, they propel us forward; when they become reality, they often arrest our new movement. Even Sean admits, ‘I lost myself. I lost my priorities, my values. I chased the dream like a silly teenager, and look what’s happened’ (‘Candy Richards’ (5.14)). To punctuate the end of each man’s lived wish fulfilment, Sean is stabbed by his unstable former agent as the song ‘Fame’ plays in the background. The first half of Season Five ends by returning to Freud’s notion of the interminable wish for sleep; upon awakening, dealing with the revelatory unconscious message in reality is imperative. Self-circumcision as Incomplete Castration While returned repressions and wish fulfilment dreams obviously tap into mainstream popular knowledge of psychology, Nip/Tuck presents viewers with many other literalized representations of the unconscious. One such example is Matt’s attempt at self-circumcision,



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the literal representation of an unconscious psychic process called castration, Freud’s ‘bedrock’ of individual psychic life and psychoanalysis as a whole (‘Mandi/Randi’ (1.2)). While castration is commonly defined as emasculation through the removing of one’s testes, in psychoanalytic terms castration means something else entirely. Psychic castration differs from physical castration in the following important ways: 1) Castration happens in our unconscious minds, not to our bodies. 2) Castration happens to both males and females at a very young age, not just to males. 3) Castration allows us to experience desire, not its extinction.3 Psychic castration is still a cut, but it is not a physical cut that includes blood; it is a cut that separates us from the imagined fullness with which we are all born. At birth and throughout early childhood, an infant sees him/herself as complete and still in a union with the mother. Basic needs are often met instantaneously, the separation of the mother’s and child’s bodies is still not understood completely, and the mother often finds the fulfilment of her desires in her child. From the child’s perspective, s/he is as one with the mother and has no need for anything else from anywhere else; there is no desire because there is already complete satisfaction. This state of total union needs to be broken though because, as Lacan states, ‘man cannot aim at being whole’ (‘Signification of the Phallus’, p. 287). Enter a third term: it can be a father, a job, a lover, whatever, something to interrupt the union between mother and child. This interruption is a desire for the mother and her attention away from the child; the moment the mother turns her desire from the child to respond to this outside force, castration occurs. When the mother turns, she leaves a cut, or a hole, in the child. Once that hole is formed, the child tries to fill it, and so desire is born. In other words, castration, the first cut or lack, initiates the economy of desire. This cut also forms the unconscious and, as such, is invisible but powerfully determines our behaviour.4 The saga of Matt’s self-circumcision, through the first three episodes of Season One, is a visible representation of the unconscious process of castration. But even before the cutting scene, two other factors align his self-circumcision with castration: Sean’s impotence and Matt’s desire. In psychic castration, it is usually the father with his sexual desire who interrupts the mother–child bond and enacts

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the cut. Lacan explains, ‘Of course, [the child’s] future depends on the law introduced by the father into this sequence’ (‘The Signification of the Phallus’, p. 289). In Matt’s case, it can be assumed that Sean does not enact the Law-of-the-Father due to his own weakness, a powerful theme throughout the whole series. Sean tells us he does not give Matt a circumcision at birth, because he was six weeks premature, and does not want to perform one now, because he views it as only a cosmetic procedure. These refusals, combined with Sean’s perceived weak masculinity, show that Sean has not performed his paternal function as the agent of castration, and has thus left Matt uncut. As a result of this incomplete castration, Matt’s desire, which is manifesting itself sexually, is askew. Lacan explains that castration is necessary because ‘without [this] he would be unable to identify himself with the ideal type of his sex, or to respond without grave risk to the needs of his partner in the sexual relation, or even to accept in a satisfactory way the needs of the child who may be produced by this relation’ (‘The Signification of the Phallus’, p. 281). Though Matt does not become a father until Season Five, at this point in Season One we already see he has difficulty in identifying with his two father figures. Father/son conversations with Sean fail to meet Matt’s needs, as evidenced by his unanswered charge to ‘[g] ive me what I need’ (‘Pilot’ (1.1)). But the free condoms, stripper parties and pleasure lectures of Christian’s overt sexuality feel just as alien. Improper masculine identification contributes to Matt’s faltering desire. His emasculation is felt viscerally when his high school girlfriend Vanessa looks at his uncut penis and says, ‘It looks like a Shar Pei. Are you part Arab or something?’ (‘Mandi/Randi’ (1.2)). Armed with a self-circumcision website, sharp cuticle scissors, and cheap red wine, Matt attempts to circumcise himself. Though Matt is correct that his uncircumcised penis is the source of his misfired desire, he incorrectly assumes that he can right it himself. Circumcision, like castration, must be initiated by one other than the self. Matt makes one cut, sees blood, and passes out (‘Mandi/ Randi’ (1.2)). Now that Sean is finally prompted out of necessity to erect his masculinity, he barks, ‘I’ll give you a proper circumcision’ (‘Nanette Babcock’ (1.3)). On the operating table, Matt faces the surgical cut that he should have experienced psychically as a young



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child, yet Sean’s earlier bravado falters. Shaking hands betray the same weakness that prevented the original cut, so Christian must step in and perform surgically what should have already occurred psychically. Later, when we learn that Christian is Matt’s biological father, this scene can be read retroactively to coincide perfectly with unconscious castration, since it is usually the biological father who enacts the cut. In Seminar VII, Lacan explains this point: ‘The real father, Freud tells us, is a castrating father. In what way? Through his presence as real father who effectively occupies that person with whom the child is in a state of rivalry, namely, the mother’ (Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 307).5 As Matt’s real father and Julia’s true object, Christian, not Sean, is the agent of castration that allows Matt to go on to experience desire. Modern-day Oedipus While Matt’s castration early in Season One should initiate his economy of desire, the truth of his complex paternity prevents a seamless transition. Like the ‘Dream of the Burning Boy’ discussed previously, Matt burns within from a source he does not yet know. Referencing the general applicability of the burning boy, Lacan explains the cause of the son’s burns: ‘What is he burning with if not with … the weight of the sins of the father, borne by the ghost in the myth of Hamlet, which Freud couples with the myth of Oedipus?’ (Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 34). This nodal quote links the burning boy, the sins of the father, and the Oedipus complex, and their interrelationship can be explained by following Matt’s trajectory to autonomy as a modern-day Oedipus. His truth is the same as the burning boy; he has inherited the sins of both his fathers without his conscious acknowledgement. The sin Christian passes to Matt as his biological father literalizes the unconscious sin that passes between all fathers and sons. The sin of each father, Christian included, stems not from his individual relationship with his son, but from his membership in the fraternity of the primal horde who murdered the father of prehistory, as outlined by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913). In this myth the original father had direct access to all enjoyment; he had absolute

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power and possessed numerous women. Because of this undeserved power, the clan rises up against the father and kills him, instituting the fraternity of brothers. Yet once this father is killed, they are not free to enjoy all of the women, for they fear another murder directed at themselves and feel guilty for the one they committed. With its remainder of shame and sin, this original act is integral to the father–son relationship; the killing of the original father is passed through guilt to the son, and the impotence of the brothers affects the father’s ability to exert his own masculinity. In this way, all fathers are only brothers in the fraternity formed after the murder; they are inadequate equals who form a kinship of brotherhood. The shared brotherhood between Christian and Sean, not to mention their shared fatherhood of Matt, clearly places them within this horde. And, in Matt, we see how their failure passes from father to son from generation to generation. As a junior member of the horde, Matt inherits the secret of his paternity, as well as the failures of his fathers and their fathers. Christian’s father, a rapist, and Sean’s father, a critical dead-beat, actualize the failure illustrated through this myth and compound Matt’s inheritance. Heavy with past failures, Matt struggles with the Oedipal complex that emerges as a result of the horde’s kinship. ‘They thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex’, Freud explains (Totem and Taboo, p. 143). The brothers’ determination to limit their own enjoyment after the father’s murder leads to two prohibitions that form the two repressed wishes: the unconscious wish to marry the mother and murder the father. When Ava reveals that Christian is Matt’s biological father in ‘Naomi Gaines’ (2.7), Matt’s realization of his true paternity sets into literal motion the killing of the father and marrying of the mother that are usually unconscious desires. Even before this revelation, Matt’s weak Oedipal triangle is symbolized through two emasculations following his circumcision. Matt first feels unmanned post-surgery when he walks in on Vanessa and her cheerleader girlfriend kissing in Vanessa’s bedroom (‘Nanette Babcock’ (1.3)). He attempts to restore his masculinity by having threesomes with the two women, and subsequently excluding Vanessa, the lesbian object of his desire



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(‘Megan O’Hara’ (1.6)). The parental intervention that follows these trysts deflates Matt’s transitory masculinity, but he soon finds himself buoyed by his relationship with the older, beautiful, life coach Ava. Prior to Matt and Ava’s first sexual encounter, Ava suggests that they remove their clothing to symbolize the bare truth their words reveal (‘Bobbi Broderick’ (2.6)). Nude on the couch, Ava says, ‘We rarely believe what we see when we don’t want to see it.’ Here, Ava refers both to Matt’s paternity and to his ignorance of her body, for his second unmanning occurs after their sexual relationship when he learns that she is transsexual and has slept with Christian. After Ava’s oracle-like admission of Matt’s paternity, he first attempts to exert his masculine potency by beating up Cherry, a pre-op transsexual on whom he displaces his anger towards Ava, in ‘Kiki’ (3.2), and then he sets out to emotionally kill both fathers, the brothers from the primal horde. As a modern-day Oedipus with a dysfunctional triangulation, Matt needs to physically and psychologically separate himself from both Sean and Christian to assert his own identity. Psychoanalytically, this separation is an unconscious and then conscious distancing from a parent, to ensure the child’s own autonomy, and Matt’s literal separation is a violent one. After prompting Sean to punch him in the face in ‘Derek, Alex, and Gary’ (3.3), Matt serves him a ‘Machiavellian bullshit’ restraining order in ‘Rhea Reynolds’ (3.4). Similarly, Matt’s usual banter with Christian is replaced with ‘Friends don’t sleep with other people’s girlfriends’: an intentional understatement regarding their relationship and Christian’s transgression of it (3.3). Matt’s absence from the altar as one of Christian’s best men gives the best visual representation of how he removes himself from the horde to which he belongs – not to mention his collapsing male-dominated triangle (‘Madison Berg’ (3.10)). The verbal and physical violence that characterizes these separations are aimed at the two fathers even when they are inward-directed. Every time Matt gets drunk, takes a pill, or picks a fight, he is lashing out against the fathers who forced him to unknowingly take on their sins. As he separates from his two fathers, Matt continues the emotional violence by sliding into the Alderman family, who characterize themselves by hating others. During his relationship with Ariel, Matt’s identification with the family’s anger causes his physical

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transformation, as well as his participation in racist conversation and acts. Since Ariel claims, ‘I am a purist’, Matt finds himself attracted to that which he wishes he was; his parentage and his sexual experiences remove the possibility of his own purity (‘Madison Berg’ (3.10)). Ariel’s critical stance against his father’s plastic surgery business and their homogenization of difference only adds to his attraction. He eventually steals patient files and passes them on to Mr Alderman to react against insurance companies that are too lenient. Ariel’s botched attempt to bleach her snow-white skin is Matt’s turning point, as he says, ‘They’ll go on living their lie and no one will ever talk about it’ (‘Joy Kringle’ (3.13)). Unlike the Aldermans’s refusal to confront their octoroon origins, Matt is ready to confront his through an eerie repetition of his attempt at circumcision. Trapped in a basement with Alderman, the feared and violent literalization of the primal father, Matt nearly experiences physical castration until Cherry offers herself instead (‘Quentin Costa’ (3.15)). By offering herself as a pre-op transsexual, Cherry reclaims the agency that Alderman tries to take away from her, and she allows Matt to be the agent, not object, of castration this time. He performs the cut, and institutes his own masculinity, so he is no longer transcribed by those failing fathers outside of him: Sean, Christian, Alderman. This castration is complete and enables Matt and Cherry to kill Alderman beside the makeshift grave intended for Cherry. At the precise moment that Matt disobeys Alderman, the Older Man, Cherry acts by first hitting him with a shovel and then shooting him. The murder of Alderman literalizes the murder of the father from the primal horde, and Matt and Cherry find themselves in a new fraternity after killing him. Matt and Cherry are no longer boys burning with the sins of the father; they have transcended their inscription in the masculine order and created their own. This scene presents viewers with the modern-day equivalent of Freud’s myth: ‘One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually’ (Totem and Taboo, p. 141). This new fraternity revises Freud’s primal horde by de-emphasizing shame and guilt and extending membership



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to those who would otherwise be excluded from patriarchal structures: females, transsexuals, and their sympathizers. Ultimately though, Matt’s choice of sexual partners and inability to establish a coherent professional identity prove that he cannot get past Freud’s ‘bedrock of castration’ as a son, but he will get to experience the inverse of the relationship as a father to Jenna. Not only does he complete the original Oedipal myth at the end of Season Four by marrying Kimber, who has been involved with both of his fathers, but he also literally commits incest by sleeping with Emmy, his half-sister, in ‘August Walden’ (5.13). In addition to the enactment of the Oedipal prophecy and its punishment, Matt also attempts to bring the law into existence through his forays into drug use and criminality. Since neither Sean, nor Christian for that matter, has successfully instituted the solid Law-of-the-Father synonymous with castration, Matt constantly participates in transgressive behaviours in an effort to bring this law out himself. In other words, his actions, whether illegal or merely unconventional, often demand the intrusion of an outside force to lay down the law, or to enunciate the ‘No!’ that would make castration complete. This demand for a law that would enact punishment is clearly exemplified by Matt’s robberies as ‘The Mime Bandit’ through the first half of Season Six. Though Sean and Christian’s participation in Matt’s arrest may give viewers the idea that finally Matt’s law has been established (‘Abigail Sullivan’ (6.5)), his father’s subsequent cooperation in his release once again undercuts Matt’s attempt to regulate his psychic space by having an outside force impose appropriate boundaries (‘Alexis Stone II’ (6.7)). Nip/Tuck ends with Matt reuniting with Ava and offering Jenna to her as a ‘perfect daughter’. Although the strange triangle of Matt, Ava and Jenna may be, in Matt’s words, ‘as good as it gets’, viewers have to wonder about the status of Jenna’s future subjectivity and the role of desire within it (‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19)). Will she be as likely to burn with the sins of the father (and mother) as Matt and Adrian?

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Julia's Matricide Matt’s separation focuses on masculine identification, while Julia wrestles with feminine identification. Separation is especially difficult for girls because, following an Oedipal dynamic that presupposes two heterosexual parents, a girl first desires her mother, but then must come to identify with her as a rival for the affections of her father. Julia Kristeva theorizes in Black Sun that, regardless of gender, for successful completion of this complex ‘the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous’ (p. 27). To enact successful separation, the girl must commit matricide: not a literal killing of course, but a psychic distancing that results in the daughter’s autonomy. Julia, and her mother Erica, display this fraught relationship of mother and daughter. While the anger and hostility on the outside make it seem as if Julia and Erica lack connection, just the reverse is true. They are too close and depend too much on the other for a sense of identity. Their love/hate relationship reflects Kristeva’s notion that often the daughter hates the mother not for leaving, but for not leaving, thereby forestalling constitutive lack. Not only does Julia love her mother, but she also hates Erica because she will not allow her to separate. In this dyad, Erica defines herself by how she is different from Julia, while Julia explains her life by blaming it on Erica. Ava gets it right when she explains their relationship to Julia by saying, ‘She’s a vampire; you’re her blood supply’ (‘Manya Mabika’ (2.3)). But Ava fails to emphasize that it goes both ways, although Julia would deny her own vampirism. Theirs is what we would call an engulfing relationship; each can only preserve her identity by annihilating the other. This engulfment is often described as a ‘melancholy cannibalism’, where the daughter holds the mother in her mouth so that she ‘can destroy, so as to better possess it alive. Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested … than lost’ (Kristeva, p. 12). Julia and Erica cannibalize each other metaphorically through their verbal slaughters, but in so doing introject one another to avoid the loss that is necessary for separation. Though painful on the conscious level, this introjection satisfies an unconscious desire to stay connected. This engulfment reaches its first collapse during Julia’s tenure at De La Mer when she leaves Sean, develops a burgeoning career, and



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rents her own apartment. She creates a female space both through the spa and also through her relationships with Gina and Liz, and yet Erica still rejects it and her. In language that literally describes their psychic state, Julia says, ‘It’s unbelievable. You’ve managed to turn annihilating me into an art form’ (‘Sal Perri’ (3.12)). And, later, Erica responds with, ‘There are specialists who deal with separation and individuation issues.’ Logically, both women realize that their relationship is one of ‘annihilation’ in desperate need of ‘separation’, but neither knows how to enact it. As a child psychologist herself, it is especially important to note that Erica fails to practise what she preaches. Shortly after these venomous words, Julia kicks Erica out of her spa and demands she take an earlier plane, which subsequently crashes. When Julia arrives at the ramshackle triage centre, the place is in mayhem. It is amidst this chaos and tragedy that Julia is able to act out the matricide that she had been unable to complete since childhood. She finds herself armed with strength garnered from the triage doctor who calls her ‘Med School’, and is dismayed at the fact she does not practise, and from the dying mother who expresses the warmth and comfort Erica never did. Julia, physically and emotionally exhausted, sits next to the dead body of a badly burned woman who she believes to be Erica and unleashes brutal honesty. After recalling a particularly happy memory from childhood, Julia says, ‘I forgive you for not loving me. It’s okay. I didn’t love you either. I just craved your approval. It was impossible to get’ (‘Sal Perri’ (3.12)). Continuing to explain how she had saved two lives involved in the plane crash, she ends with, ‘I don’t need you to tell me who I am anymore.’ After a faint kiss on the forehead, the lifeless body starts gasping and, without hesitation, Julia reaches for a nearby pillow and holds it over her face. There is shaking at first, and then nothing. At this moment, Julia enacts what would otherwise remain an unconscious process when she smothers the woman she believes to be her mother. For Julia, psychic matricide can only be performed via the physical matricide. Now that Erica is not just psychically distant but literally dead, Julia should be autonomous and, as she tells Sean outside, ‘free’. This newfound freedom is short-lived, for when she returns to her apartment she finds a very alive Erica on her couch. ‘I couldn’t leave the way things are between us,’ her mother says. The fact that Erica does not, in fact,

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die illustrates that matricide is never complete, and Julia, like most daughters, including Annie, will continue to struggle with her relationship to her mother. Julia does, in fact, repeatedly attempt matricide, and the severity of her attempts increases in opposition to Erica’s ploys to strip away Julia’s independence. In Season Six, for instance, Erica returns with Renaldo, a young European husband, in tow. Fresh on the heels of Sean’s presumed suicide attempt, Erica and Renaldo announce their plans to sue Julia for full custody of Annie and Conor. This threat, combined with Erica’s jailhouse manipulation of Matt, which requires him to testify against both of his parents, aims to cripple Julia by taking away the children who are uniquely hers. At the end of the ‘Alexis Stone’ episode (6.6), Julia again attempts matricide by planting cocaine in her mother’s airport paraphernalia, despite the fact that Erica abandons her legal power play. Though this act of fierce independence allows Julia to reassert herself and her own autonomy, viewers are reminded of the repetition embedded in this act and others like it throughout the series. Erica may be temporarily removed, but she will return and demand another expulsion at the hands of her daughter. The Death Drive Once McNamara–Troy moves to Los Angeles, the show takes a decidedly darker turn; increasingly, there are more deaths, more deviant sexual desires, and more physical and psychological injury. In the interrelationship among death, sexuality and injury, this darkness also represents another aspect of the literal unconscious for viewers: the death drive as it is theorized by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this seminal, though messy, text, Freud begins by speaking speculatively on the nature of pleasure and ends up theorizing on the existence of what lies beyond pleasure: the death drive. As Freud muses on the complicated nature of pleasure, he immediately notes a series of contradictions. First, he recognizes that what registers as conscious unpleasure may actually be unconscious pleasure. Second, he also notes the curious role of repetition in relation to pleasure, both for soldiers who continue to repeat their



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traumatic experiences, and for his grandson, who repetitively enacts the painful separation from his mother in the Fort-Da game. Third, he wonders about the contradictory role of tension as it relates to sexuality: pleasure increases when tension decreases, yet sexual pleasure aligns itself with an increase of tension, felt as excitation, before the pleasure of discharge and then stillness. Using Freud’s model, pleasure, defined as the lessening of tension, becomes the elimination of pleasure, rather than the pleasure itself. Using these three categories of contradiction to propel his thought, Freud drastically revolutionizes notions of sexuality, masochism and aggression. Though he first attempts to define the death drive as that which is beyond pleasure, a self-destructive constant urge that opposes the life drive or Eros, he ultimately cannot argue for a separate death drive, or Thanatos, that opposes the drive to live. If pain and pleasure are actually inseparable from each other and the death drive never achieves its aim (by allowing people to die), then it becomes impossible for us to have a drive for homeostasis that plummets us towards physical death. For Freud, this highlights that the specific death at stake is psychic, not biological, and that the death drive is not in opposition to the pleasure principle, but rather alters our conception of pleasure. Whereas before, Freud had placed the pleasure-of-sex instinct on the side of life in stark contrast to the pain-of-death instinct, he finally concludes, ‘The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts’ (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 626). The final three seasons of Nip/Tuck give us many literal examples of this psychic experience: the temporary eclipse of the conscious ego in extreme jouissance is the masochistic element of sexuality that represents the repeated failure of the death drive. After the temporary ego-death achieved through the extreme painful pleasure of sex, violence or proximity to death, an individual emerges more linked to life, more present in his/her conscious self. Spoken through the lips of the Incan man who Sean and Teddy visit in the desert on their search for drugs, the following line summarizes Freud’s new notion of drive: ‘You will want to die, but you must have strong courage and discipline … And if you are lucky, you may experience what is known as the murdering of the ego’ (‘Budi Sabri’ (5.20)). This masochistic ‘murdering of the ego’ – in this case through drugs –

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reattaches the participant to the flow of life; fleeting psychic homeostasis allows for more persistent individual truth. Joel Seabrook’s failed suicide attempt in the episode of the same name exposes Freud’s failed death drive from the physical side, when he says, ‘I didn’t jump to my death; I jumped to my life’ (6.13). While Joel reattaches to life after surviving his self-directed plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge, there are many other examples of the death drive that include the sexual component to which Freud refers. In the same episode, for instance, Christian experiments with auto-erotic asphyxiation after choking Kimber during sex. Taking the ego-death of orgasm one step further, this form of asphyxiation joins psychic death with the temporary physical death brought on by cutting the blood and oxygen supply to oneself or one’s partner during intense sexual stimulation. While this act does, indeed, break the repetition between Kimber and Christian and reattaches them to life, each finds a new revelation upon coming to. While Christian’s ‘moment of clarity’ allows him to say to Kimber, ‘I don’t want a slave’, after which he tells her to leave, Kimber’s ‘moment of clarity’ pushes her to the successful completion of her own death drive in suicide. The ‘Joel Seabrook’ episode certainly stands at the epicentre of Nip/Tuck’s literal representation of the psychic death drive, but there are countless other examples of the close proximity between pleasure and unpleasure, sex and violence, and life and death in the latter seasons of the show. (And these are in addition to Sean’s aborted suicide and Christian’s breast cancer.) During Christian’s time as a paid gigolo, for instance, he works for a woman who requests he induce her into mild hypothermia before sexual thrusting brings her back to conscious existence (‘Dawn Budge II’ (5.4)). During the same episode, a nun who wants her breasts reduced (to Christian’s surprise) questions, ‘Is that what it takes to make you feel alive, Doctor, bagging a nun?’ There is also the episode where Gina returns to be a receptionist at Sean’s behest, and she falls to her death off Christian’s balcony when,standing up, they violently make love. ‘Sex’, she says, ‘is the only way that we can feel we’re not alone in this world’ (‘Magda and Jeff’ (5.10)). And, of course, there is Sean’s shortlived tryst with a self-mutilator drug addict who visits emergency rooms to experience sexual gratification by observing the injuries of others as well as her own (‘Enigma’ (6.2)). While the preceding



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examples show an increasing escalation in darkness, they similarly expose a parallel pleasure that is at once contradictory and complementary. As Freud notes, ‘We have all experienced how the greatest pleasure attainable by us, that of the sexual act, is associated with a momentary extinction of a highly intensified excitation’ (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 625). While Gina really does die, in the other examples psychic death prevails, and the subsequent rebirth into conscious life attempts to jolt the participant out of repetition and into new experiences. This is the goal, but Nip/Tuck shows that even the psychic death drive may not be powerful enough to institute a new pattern of behaviours. After all, it may be argued that the repeated plastic surgeries on the show exist as a middle ground between the physical and psychic death discussed by Freud. Viewers see patient after patient endure their own temporary physical death while under anaesthesia and then watch the after-effects of their intended rebirth into consciousness. Their literal self-effacements and reconstructions mirror the psychic ego deaths pursued by the death drive, but they are often ineffective in changing the patients’ painful, repetitive behaviours. The intention is to push the subject back into life, but, as Nip/Tuck shows, the force of symptomatic repetitions often escalates these experiences of the failed death drive – whether through sexuality, violence, or plastic surgery – to absurd limits. Like Christian, who states, ‘I can’t do anything to change myself’, and literally smashes his car into a concrete barrier, we are all looking for that experience of ego-death that temporarily arrests our conscious symptoms and allows a rebirth into the world (‘Willow Banks’ (6.12)). Sometimes a mild car accident achieves this purpose, but at other times the psychic jarring must be more severe and dark. Ego Ideal: The Christian–Sean Ventriloquism One reason that there are so many examples of the darkness of the Freudian death drive in the latter seasons of the show may be due to the dissolution of what may be called the Christian–Sean ventriloquism. While other characters, like Julia and Erica, derive

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their identities from an interdependence on one another that refuses autonomy, Christian and Sean also share an interdependence but theirs is based on idealization. Each man has what the other lacks, at least superficially, in terms of lifestyle, personality, stability and surgery skill. Their relationship is so close that when the two men are together, they are like two halves; they fit into each other’s missing pieces. In the thematic episode with the physically conjoined Rosenberg twins, Christian and Sean are similar to the twins in their emotional interdependence. ‘We’re symbiotic,’ Christian says, in an effort to explain how they, like the twins, need the other to survive (‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9)). This symbiosis is very different from the symbiosis of Julia and Erica; for Christian and Sean, they are two separate halves who make a new whole together, and for Julia and Erica, they are one whole that was never broken into separate and distinct halves. The addition is felt positively, not negatively. ‘I’m a better doctor with you,’ says Sean. Until their move to California, Christian and Sean find fullness in each other because their relationship is based on the idealization of the other’s supposed perfection. On the screen, viewers see the unconscious ego ideal represented in each man’s likeness. In psychoanalytic terms, the ego ideal is the image of perfection that our ego, or consciousness, should strive to emulate. As explained by Freud in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921), ‘We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism’ (p. 56). When Christian says of Sean, ‘He was my mirror. I’d look at him and see who I was’, he means that Sean reflected back to him a better version of himself; an image of perfection that Christian (and, to reverse, Sean) would like to attain (‘Ben White’ (3.7)). Unfortunately, this image of perfection is ultimately out of reach. The super-ego, the voice of conscience, measures the proximity between the ego and the ego ideal. As our internal judge, the super-ego urges us to strive for the perfection of the ego ideal at the same time as it tells us we will never measure up. In this way, the ego ideal and the super-ego are closely linked: two sides of the same coin, really. We see this with Christian and Sean; as they idealize one another, they simultaneously demean the other’s capability to become what each covets.



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For another image of this tension, think about Willy Ward, who wants surgery to look like his ventriloquist doll, Ralphie (‘Willy Ward’ (4.14)). The doll is simultaneously what Willy wants to become and the agent that belittles him, preventing him from becoming it; Willy is both voices, both personas. He literally personifies the battle between the ego ideal and the super-ego that rages in everyone. In a very brief instant, Christian takes the place of Ralphie, complete with the hinged mouth and silly smile, representing the function he serves for Sean. Each man ventriloquizes idealization and self-deprecation for the other. Willy, and even Christian and Sean, realize this is the case. ‘It’s pure projection,’ Willy says; ‘I realize that.’ Like Willy, Sean expresses how Christian is a physical projection of his own unconscious. ‘I don’t know who I am without you,’ says Sean before leaving for California on his own. In this move, Sean tries to interject absence into his dynamic with Christian, as he has tried and failed before. If each man physically represents the unconscious of the other, then, as long as they are together, the system is closed and bound to repeat itself through the above simultaneous idealization and deprecation. By attempting to separate himself from Christian at the end of Season Four, Sean tries to inculcate necessary lack into his life, similar to how Matt and Julia try to enact their own separations. This move recalls the ‘Ben White’ episode (3.7), which centres on a man who has Body Integrity Identity Disorder and desires the removal of his healthy leg, so that his physical appearance coincides with his internal vision of himself without the limb. While this desire appears absurd, it gives a powerful representation of how absence can lead to a higher form of wholeness. Using a framed picture of one of his architectural pieces bathed in whiteness to explain this paradox to Christian, Ben muses, ‘The power of negative space – the beauty of what’s missing.’ The unconscious is the negative space that structures the image, powerful and beautiful at once. For Sean and Christian, who see their unconscious literally represented in one another, there is not enough negative space. Like Christian’s earlier attempt to sacrifice his own hand to the Carver in place of Sean’s, Sean tries to sever himself by moving cross-country. Unlike Sean’s earlier removals and returns, this time he really does leave, but it is Christian who follows, unwilling to let the negative

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grow, and it is this role reversal that dominates the final three seasons of the show. Though both men appear equalized in front of the Hollywood sign, a small shift, imperceptible at first, has occurred for the plastic surgeons: Sean now tries to exert his own unique subjectivity, as he thrashes to separate from Christian. In particular, this time in California is marked by Sean’s difference from Christian: his individual experience of fame, display of transgressive behaviours, and blatant annoyance with the repetition that characterizes their unique ventriloquism. In ‘Willow Banks’ (6.12), Sean even vehemently states, ‘I’m done being a substitute for your conscience.’ Late in Season Six, this discord comes to the forefront in ‘Dr Griffin’ (6.16), the episode where Sean and Christian visit a Freudlook-alike psychotherapist in an effort to work on their relationship. Like the couple who visit Dr Griffin in the appointment slot immediately before them, Sean and Christian have had their own twenty-year marriage of sorts, though at this stage their intentions have sharply diverged. Christian wants to save their relationship and their plastic surgery practice and return to an earlier stage of symbiosis with Sean, while Sean wants to end their relationship and turn his medical skill towards more philanthropic purposes. After this seminal appointment, it is Liz who answers Dr Griffin’s question to Sean, ‘Why do you stay together?’ with ‘You don’t believe you exist without Christian.’ And up until this point, the Christian–Sean ventriloquism was proof of this interdependency. Now, however, it is Christian who begins repeating, holding on to the past, and refusing to work-through his own problems, whereas earlier these were Sean’s hang-ups, as he tried desperately to keep his family unit together. At this penultimate stage of the series, it is Christian who explains that his adherence to his own dark personality, his attachment to Sean, and his refusal to give up his profession represent his own attempt at self-therapy. Even after the dream in which Sean writes Christian’s negative qualities on him as he had done to others before, and in which his former female patients cannibalize his body and his father suggests he will never be rid of his inner pain, Christian maintains that repeating his current behaviours over and over is what keeps him safely alone (‘Christian Troy II’ (6.17)). By remaining in his repetition, he prevents the forward movement illustrative of real observable change.



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However, this is not how Nip/Tuck ends; the series concludes with Christian instituting that psychological amputation that runs contrary to his real desire for sameness with Sean. Through this sacrifice, Christian puts himself second to Sean for once. And in so doing, he becomes the real-world psychoanalyst Sean needs to fully pursue his own desires. By rejecting his own desire to keep Sean with him, Christian actually catapults his best friend and partner into exploring the life he wants but has a hard time instituting by himself. Through his own self-sacrifice, Christian proves his words true: ‘Sean doesn’t leave me because I’m different than everyone else in his life. I love him’ (‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19)). For both Freud and Lacan, love and analysis are synonymous with one another, and it is Christian’s temporary enactment of the therapist role that allows Sean to complete the separation he began by moving to California three seasons earlier. Fearing that Kimber’s pronouncement of ‘I had to kill myself to get away from you’ might be true of Sean as well, Christian literally turns Sean into a patient, with him not as plastic surgeon, but as analyst (6.19). Just as Freud suggests will happen when the relationship between patient and analyst has reached its logical end, Christian calmly announces to Sean, ‘I’m dissolving our partnership’ (6.19). Through this dissolution, Christian makes the point that he knows Sean can change when he experiences the lack of Christian in his daily life; and at the same time, Christian shows that he is not, in fact, ready for a similar psychic change himself. While their psychic amputation propels Sean to Bucharest with a one-way plane ticket, it causes Christian to fall back into a repetition of the ‘You’re a doctor?’ routine from Season One. Ironically, it is only through Christian’s self-sacrifice that Sean is able to make an attempt at psychic cure. Just as Nip/Tuck has done with many of the other unconscious processes enumerated here, the series concludes with the representation of Christian’s unconscious as shown through Sean’s behaviour. By leaving his unconscious open, Christian allows Sean to experience transformative lack.

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Notes 1 Other than dreams that result from the day’s residue, the basis of Freud’s theory of dream interpretation centres on wish fulfilment. To address dreams that blatantly contradict this concept by inducing fear and anxiety, he explains that even those that are uncomfortable on the level of the ego produce unconscious pleasure; these ‘punishment-dreams’, as he calls them, satisfy the desire of the same name (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 596). His final revision brings both types of wish fulfilment dreams together, as he reduces all dreams to ‘the wish to sleep’ (p. 268). This description means that all dreams satisfy the conscious ego’s desire to be at rest and away from conscious life, where dealing with the unconscious message is necessary. 2 Extending Freud’s theory to encompass his concept of the traumatic Real, Lacan, in Seminar XI, presents the idea that the dream represents an encounter with this register. Since we never have direct access to it, the Real is always represented through a gap or a failure; the father’s moment of realization is always too late. Staying in the dream entails full confrontation with the Real, whereas reality allows the father to deal with only the residue. Lacan stresses that leaving the dream and going into consciousness is not an awakening at all, but a flight from the horror of the Real. Although the father makes his flight from the Real to reality, he is no closer to being truly awakened. For Lacan, consciousness is a defence against this horrifying Real and nowhere near as tragic. In comparison, reality is nothing; it can be survived, even if a son dies. 3 While Nip/Tuck focuses on Matt’s penis throughout this storyline, psychic castration relates to the phallus: not the physical penis, but the signifier of desire, power and authority. Lacan writes, ‘It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent there to the (logical) copula’ (‘Signification of the Phallus’, p. 287). Matt’s penis symbolizes the phallus, which is itself a symbol of power. 4 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958), for a more detailed description of castration and its relation to the phallus, desire and subjectivity. 5 This reading takes the word ‘real’ at face value, but the distinctions between the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic registers and their respective fathers should not be ignored.



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Works Cited Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ed. and trans. James Strachey, New York: Avon Books, 1965. ——— Totem and Taboo (1913), trans. James Strachey, New York: Norton, 1950. ——— ‘Repression’ (1915), in General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff, trans. James Strachey, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1963, pp. 104–15. ——— Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, New York: Norton, 1989, pp. 594–626. ——— Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921), ed. and trans. James Strachey, New York: Norton, 1959. Kristeva, Julia, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958), in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977, pp. 281–91. ——— Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1981. ——— Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York: Norton, 1992.

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horrible women: abjection, gender and ageing in nip/tuck Alison Peirse

These aren’t the tits of a fifty-ish year old woman. Am I right? (Colleen Rose drunkenly exposes her breasts to Sean in ‘Magda and Jeff’ (5.10)) If you’re over forty, female, and in Nip/Tuck, it’s very likely that you are abject.1 The series delights in depicting older women in a series of repellent spectacles, most often when their bodies are cut up during plastic surgery carried out by the show’s two protagonists, surgeons Sean McNamara and Christian Troy.2 This chapter suggests that Nip/Tuck draws upon tropes of surgical reality television to justify ripping open female bodies, and how, in later seasons, it utilizes tropes of the horror film to depict a certain kind of women (usually of a certain age) in a vindictive and unflattering manner. It considers what abjection means in the context of a US television series that is marketed as a fictional makeover drama, rather than as either a generic horror programme or a reality show. It argues further that the series explores issues of disability and celebrity in a rounded and thoughtful manner but is unable to extend this to the depiction of many of the women that move through the lives and workplaces of Christian and Sean.



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Disco Divas I admire the Collins. They want to stay attractive to each other as they age. Why shouldn’t they look as young and vital as they feel? (Sean defends the Collins’s his ’n’ her face-lifts to Liz and Christian in ‘Cindy Plumb’ (4.1)) The most prominent use of the abject in Nip/Tuck relates to its scenes of surgery, for the inside of the body shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents.3 While the detailed display of surgery has always been an important set piece in the series, the length of time and detail dedicated to surgery has increased as the series has progressed. In Seasons One and Two, the operations were secondary to Christian’s spectacular sex scenes, but in later seasons, the mise en scène becomes increasingly lurid and detailed. The opening episode of Nip/Tuck Season Four, ‘Cindy Plumb’, features a joint face-lift on elderly couple Mr and Mrs Collins. It can be read as a celebration and coming-of-age of Nip/ Tuck’s abject aesthetic: cosmetic surgery and music are welded together to present a spectacular show of abjection that critiques the desire to look young and beautiful. The Collins’s surgery begins with seven quick shots of Sean and Christian being dressed for surgery. The in-house surgical speaker system pumps out ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’ by 1970s disco group A Taste of Honey, and an overhead shot reveals the Collins’s, laid next to each other on separate operating tables, like corpses on mortuary slabs. Their greying skin contrasts with the pale blue sheets enveloping their bodies, and the shining blue floor that reflects the light. Even the tray containing the surgical instruments is covered by deep blue cloth. The only whiteness in the room is the pile of surgical swabs on the gurney, waiting to sponge down the inevitable blood that will

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follow. The colours make sharp distinctions between the inner and outer body: the blue hues signal the calmness of a sterile environment as well as cold, steel instruments, while the ensuing blood is an abject eruption into the surgical world. Using time-lapse photography, the surgeons are shown at work; however, only the surgeon’s heads are displayed, while the elderly and unconscious bodies are laid out full length for the spectator’s morbid gaze. In gruesome detail, and accompanied by the diegetic musical soundtrack signalled by occasional shots of the theatre’s Boese speaker system, Sean and Christian cut into the Collins’s bodies. In a series of nine shots, each lasting three seconds or less, the patients’ bodies are displayed in close-up. A scalpel is revealed, wielded by a hand moving in from off-screen space. A disembodied hand cuts down the side of Mr Collins’s ear. His pink blotchy face contrasts with the bright red blood and the cold blue tones of the mise en scène. An unsettling atmosphere is created: the disembodied hand moving from the exterior of the frame cuts into the face that fills the entire screen. Mrs Collins’s face is then cut into, and her eyes twitch in an appalling manner as her face is opened up and her skin is pulled from side to side. Big close-ups of the bodily interior are edited to the rhythm of the song, the cutting of the faces marrying with the timing of the vocals. After the sustained close-ups of bodily abjection, the McNamara– Troy surgical team of Liz, Christian and Sean have a discussion over the motivations of the Collins’s for joint face-lifts. As soon as the dialogue begins, the music levels drop dramatically and the three characters become the focus of attention. Notably, the rhythm of the music is no longer matched by the editing pattern. While the three principal characters talk, the Collins’s cannot be seen. They exist outside the bottom of the frame, temporarily forgotten. The power of the frame to delineate importance is made apparent when the Collins’s are subtly shifted out of shot by an adjustment in camera angle. The music is respectfully turned down, and the bodies shifted out of sight, as Liz, Sean and Christian speak. The subtle manipulation of the image that shifts the visual and aural emphasis of the scene signals the power and importance of Nip/Tuck’s central characters. As the above analysis suggests, Nip/Tuck is expressly concerned with a music video style that connects age, gender and abjection.



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Writing on the music in Ally McBeal (1997–2002), Julie Brown notes that of course, music video style is not new to television drama. Miami Vice was reputedly conceived as ‘MTV cops’ and used current chart hits both to explore in mainstream television some of the televisual possibilities thrown up by music video and, of course, to exploit its commercial potential.4 While Sean and Christian’s Boese sound system creates a diegetic soundtrack, the music speaks beyond the operating theatre to provide an extra-diegetic commentary on the characters involved, the episodic narrative trajectory, and the programme’s explicit portrayal of the body, gender and ageing. Examining music in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), S. Renee Dechert identifies three main usages of popular music in the television programme: ‘First, popular music contributes to the mood of various scenes, providing a thematic backdrop. Second, music is used to establish the identities of characters as well as to chart their growth.’5 Dechert suggests these two usages are common to many television shows, whereas the third category is specific to Buffy: ‘music works to reinforce the communal identity between the programme, Buffy, and its fans, all of whom exist on the fringe of mainstream network television’.6 Nip/Tuck follows Dechert’s first two categorizations, particularly in the way popular music is used to establish the identities of characters. The choice of musical soundtrack during surgery offers a simplistic critique of the character’s motivations for opting for bodily transformation. In ‘Kurt Dempsey’ (1.5), a Caucasian man wants to alter his eyes to appear East Asian in order to ‘pass’ with his Japanese girlfriend’s traditional family. During the surgery, ‘Lovefool’ by The Cardigans is played. Specific songs are also used to reinforce broad episodic themes. In ‘Trudy Nye’ (2.14) the patient opts for rhinoplasty, as her nose was broken by the man she is about to be reunited with. Her surgery is accompanied by ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’ by Neil Sedaka. This kind of musical commentary is standard in many television programmes, as noted by Matthew Mills in relation to Angel, where ‘musicality becomes a means of characterisation, and takes on a metaphorical significance’.7

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Significantly though, Nip/Tuck also has its own third and distinct musical category, evidenced in the description of the Collins’s surgery. By presenting popular music, generally rock, disco and pop, high in the auditory mix, and constructing surgery in the style of a music video with fast cuts, close-ups and bright colours, Nip/Tuck appropriates ageing (and predominantly female) bodies as a spectacular show of abjection.8 Focusing on characters that desire surgery in order to look younger or more beautiful, surgical scenes are transformed into revolting music videos that elucidate an abject aesthetic.9 This scene demonstrates three interrelated methods of generating television abjection: the intrusion of blood into the diegetic space, the breakdown of the bodily borders resulting in the aforementioned blood, and the utilization of an editing style that mimics a music video, cutting together scenes of bodily abjection and disco music. The latter mode of abjection is particularly revolting and compelling, made disturbing by the flashy editing pattern, short, rapid shots, hyper-real colours and upbeat music. The scenes of surgery in the series initially appear to chime with Jason Jacobs’s analysis of the bodies of patients in hospital dramas. In Body Trauma TV: The New Hospital Dramas, Jacobs claims that programmes such as ER present ‘a “morbid gaze” ’ – the visualization of the horrible but routine body trauma – within a context of procedural and ethical rules, and the professional language of science and medicine’.10 However, he then argues that the ‘transformation, slicing, invasion and exploration of the body cavity’ in ER and Chicago Hope is ‘directed to positive healing rather than violent destruction. One could say this aspect of the horror genre has found a mainstream audience because the meaning is framed in such a fashion.’11 Rejecting the positive healing paradigm of ER, Nip/Tuck celebrates spectacular grotesquery, taking time to show the patients being cut into in unflinching close-up. Medical/Dramas You know what I kept reading about in all the Hearts and Scalpels chatrooms? Surgery. They love the surgery. Everybody thought it brought a heightened sense of realism and drama to



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the show … this is what the fans want to see. (Aidan Stone enthuses to Sean about the show’s rating boost in ‘Carly Summers’ (5.1)) In order to reflect on how Nip/Tuck appropriates horrific imagery in order to critique the female body, we must first acknowledge its debt to medical dramas and surgical reality shows, which often depict gruesome operations and accidents in a far more visceral and abject manner than much ‘horror’-orientated television drama. Jacobs suggests that UK and US medical dramas, including ER and Cardiac Arrest (1994–1996), ‘borrowed and modified visual styles from reality television and action and horror film genres in order to present a distinctive mise en scène of interior-based action (interior in the sense of inside the building and inside the body)’.12 This can be extended to Nip/Tuck, which comments directly on the dismembering of boundaries between reality and fiction in contemporary television. In Season Five, Sean and Christian relocate their practice from Miami to Los Angeles. In order to increase their profile in the cutthroat market of Los Angeles plastic surgery, they agree to work as medical consultants, producers and bit-part actors on the fictional hospital soap opera Hearts and Scalpels. In ‘Carly Summers’ (5.1) Aidan Stone, Hearts and Scalpels ‘heartthrob’ lead actor, is won over by Sean’s insistence on verisimilitude in scenes of surgery. While Hearts and Scalpels offers a relatively restrained depiction of gore in its surgical procedures (functioning as it does within a soap opera aesthetic), Nip/Tuck draws excessively on scenes of bloody procedures. As such, Aidan’s speech quoted above functions as a metatextual mouthpiece for Nip/Tuck itself, the show’s creative team overtly acknowledging the centrality of the scenes of surgery in Nip/Tuck’s popularity. The debt to reality television is further emphasized in ‘Damien Sands’ (5.6) when Christian instigates the making of Plastic Fantastic, an ill-fated reality television pilot about the practice, which bombs with focus groups. However, clear distinctions should be made between cosmetic surgery narratives in fictional and factual television programming. In ‘Television and the Domestication of Cosmetic Surgery’, Sue Tait suggests that Extreme Makeover domesticates cosmetic surgery, indulging in a reparation process, where the unruly exterior body is

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made to fit with the beautiful person hidden within, whereas Nip/ Tuck offers a dystopian view of surgical procedures.13 Likewise, writing on Extreme Makeover and The Swan, Cressida J. Heyes points out that the show’s participants attempt to align their ‘essential moral inner to the developmental physical outer …’ and that they compete ‘allegedly on the basis of their “work ethic, growth and achievements” ’.14 As such, it can be argued that factual cosmetic surgery makeover programmes attempt to disassemble from their surgical underpinnings. These shows are framed as helping the participant attune their virtuous interior with their unruly exterior appearance, and follow the participant’s journey on their quest, featuring interviews with their friends and family. In accordance with this philosophy, actual scenes of surgery are brief: ‘the carnality of surgery is elided: incursions into the body are concealed as camera and editing coyly avoid shots of instruments or hands entering flesh, the presence of blood, or the opened body’.15 In contrast, Nip/Tuck dissuades spectatorial investment in the majority of McNamara–Troy’s day-to-day patients. Character arcs are granted to the central protagonists, or to characters that have a direct impact on Sean and Christian’s lives beyond the operating theatre, including porn star Kimber Henry-McNamara, who sleeps with Sean, is engaged to Christian, and then marries and has a child by Matt before leaving him in Season Five for Ram, a fellow porn actor. Patients receive a limited amount of time early in the episode when they first come to see Christian and Sean at the practice. The power hierarchy in the series is made explicit in the opening moments of the consultation scene: Sean and/or Christian are framed in close-up, saying ‘Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.’ Only after the two protagonists have been established on screen, does the scene reveal the new patient. Post-consultation, patients reappear on the operating table, silenced by anaesthetic and carved open. They are rarely shown in post-operative recovery, unless something has gone wrong or if their inclusion furthers a plot-line for a more prominent character.16 The post-surgery absence of most of the patients rejects the traditional ‘before and after’ makeover trope typically attended to in the narratives of makeover programmes and outlined by Rachel Moseley in ‘Makeover Takeover in British Television’.17 The lack of



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‘reveal’ reinforces the lack of character agency: bereft of identity, the characters exist to provide a visceral display for the television viewer. In reality television, the emphasis is on the participant/victim’s story arc. In Nip/Tuck, spectatorial investment is with the surgeons themselves. The series draws upon distinct elements of the reality television format to increase verisimilitude (such as the explicit scenes of cosmetic surgery) but the characters undertaking surgery are usually patients as opposed to participants; the linguistic distinction signals their peripheral status in relation to storylines and character arcs. Nip/Tuck is abject in its explicit scenes of cosmetic surgery, but where it differs from factual programmes is in its treatment of female characters. They become colourful displays of meat designed to sicken and fascinate; their faces tightened, lips injected, and stomachs pumped free of fat, creating an aesthetic explosion designed to lure the spectatorial eye and distinct from any narrative arc.18 Sculpting Mrs Grubman We know each other very well. (Mrs Grubman sings to Christian as he peels back the face of her corpse in ‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8)) When thinking about the abject representation of the female body, there remains a single, very important, exception. This takes place in ‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8) when Christian operates on Mrs Grubman’s corpse. A recurrent character from Seasons One and Two, plastic surgery addict Mrs Grubman returns in Season Four to announce she is dying from lung cancer and wants surgery when she has passed on. Mrs Grubman dies in Christian’s office, and later her corpse is laid out on the operating table. Christian walks into the operating theatre, sweeping in through the glass doors, and hip-hop booms out, suggesting that Nip/Tuck’s usual abject musical aesthetic is to be performed. However, Christian then requests that the music is changed. ‘This Guy’s in Love With You’ by Burt Bacharach begins to play. Christian looks across the room to where Bacharach, playing himself, sits at a

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white piano. Bacharach introduces Mrs Grubman, who is perched on the edge of the piano. Wearing a deep red sparkling show gown matched with red glossy lipstick, Mrs Grubman sings the song, altering the lyrics to ‘This Girl’s …’ and directing heartfelt emotion directly to Christian. She becomes uncannily doubled, both as a corpse on the operating table and as the professional singer she always wanted to be. As Mrs Grubman sings, a series of crosscuts take place that contrast the vocal performance with the pale white corpse whose bodily sanctity is being gradually invaded by Christian’s scalpel. Her skin’s waxy white pallor and the deep red ooze of her transgressed body create a strong visual parallel with the singer’s pale makeup and red dress, intimately connecting the two female bodies through life and death. Throughout the scene, there are regular moments when Mrs Grubman and Christian are brought together through dissolves, wipes and superimposition. Despite never looking directly at each other, for in reality Mrs Grubman and Burt Bacharach are present only in Christian’s imagination, eyeline matching is used effectively to create romance. Mrs Grubman is framed in long shot and sings out to the right of the frame, while Christian, framed in close-up, is superimposed over the right of the frame looking left. An old-fashioned Hollywood trick for bringing together star-crossed lovers on screen, it suggests a deep closeness and love between the pair, a connection that death itself cannot suppress. Mrs Grubman is granted a voice, unlike so many of the patients, and gains additional authority by creating her own musical accompaniment. She returns from the dead and articulates her love for Christian while living out her desire to be a professional singer. Mrs Grubman’s swansong, accompanied by Burt Bacharach, signals an awareness of the series’ preoccupation with age, beauty and violence. The clear change in the formal construction of the scene of surgery and of musical style makes apparent the show’s awareness of its abject aesthetic. In this episode, Nip/Tuck overturns its usual textual practice and provides a transcendental viewing experience that defies spectatorial expectations by conferring dignity upon the ageing female body.



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Horrible Women Sorry about the mess I made in here cookie. So what else is new? (Colleen Rose apologies to Sean as he lies bleeding to death in ‘Ronnie Chase’ (5.15)) In Seasons Five and Six, Nip/Tuck continues to define supporting female characters in two main ways. On one hand, they are surgeryobsessed ageing women, such as competing Marilyn Monroe impersonators, (‘Joyce and Sharon Monroe’ (5.2)); a manic depressive high-society woman who wants to look like a cat (‘Lulu Grandiron’ (5.12)); and a narcissistic bit-part television actress who has had disastrous surgery abroad (‘Candy Richards’ (5.14)). As comparison, the text also presents young female characters defined by their dysfunctional sexual obsessions, transferring the nymphomaniac mantle from Kimber (now a mother in her late twenties) and thirtysomething Gina Russo (who is thrust to her death by Christian after they have sex on top of a building in ‘Magda and Jeff’ (5.10)), to Eden Lord, the predatory teenage daughter of Julia’s lover Olivia. However, Seasons Five and Six are distinctive for introducing a third category of woman, represented by Sean’s fifty-something ‘talent agent’ Colleen Rose and anaesthetist Teddy Rowe. These women serve a different function to the ageing or sexualized supporting characters, but this is not a positive shift. Colleen is a homicidal maniac obsessed with teddy bears (in ‘Kyle Ainge’ (5.11) she murders a rival talent agent, stuffs him with cotton filling and gives him buttons for eyes), while serial killer Teddy makes her money marrying wealthy men, becoming the beneficiary on their life insurance policies, and then killing them and their families. Intriguingly, Nip/Tuck utilizes many tropes of horror film in creating their personalities, presenting the opportunity to identify them as Horrible Women, as female characters that give television abjection a new and terrifying dimension. A key moment for the Horrible Woman is in Season Five when Colleen stabs Sean. The stabbing reoccurs as viscous repetitioncompulsion, shown a total of three times over two concurrent episodes: in ‘real time’ in (5.14), in ‘Previously on …’, and then

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repeated at extended length in (5.15). In the final five minutes of ‘Candy Richards’, the mid-season finale, Sean is alone in surgery as he operates on Annie. Without warning, Colleen steps out of the blind space and stabs him ferociously and repeatedly in the back. This is depicted in a juddering montage, mirroring the bird attack on Melanie Daniels in the Brenner’s attic in The Birds (1963). An overhead shot depicts grim tableaux: Annie unconscious on the operating table, Sean bleeding to death on the floor, and Colleen standing over him, dressed in black, holding the knife, and looking confused. Blood pools underneath Sean’s body, and his blue eyes open wide with terror as David Bowie’s ‘Fame’ plays, damning his desire for a celebrity lifestyle that led to the appointment of Colleen as his talent agent. After the mid-season break, Nip/Tuck returned with ‘Ronnie Chase’ (5.15). This begins with an extended two-and-a-half-minute ‘Previously on Nip/Tuck …’ in which the first half of the season’s central events are recounted: Eden shooting Julia, Julia having no memory and Christian discovering he has a daughter. However, the majority of the flashback montage is dedicated to telling Colleen’s story. It begins positively as she introduces herself to Sean on set, becomes his agent and negotiates his lead role in Hearts and Scalpels. However, the descent into madness is swift: Colleen drunkenly exposes her breasts to Sean, stalks him on set, is outed as not a talent agent but the owner of a teddy-bear stall, and then literally stabs him in the back. However, in this sequence Colleen’s actions alone do not make her horrific. Rather, the extradiegetic music condemns her. As soon as the ‘Previously on …’ recounts Colleen’s exploits, a reworked version of the theme music for John Carpenter’s horror film Halloween (1978) begins, the sparse synthesizers creating an atmosphere of dread while drawing parallels between Colleen’s predilection for butcher’s knives and her cinematic counterpart, the stab-happy Michael Myers. After the title credits have rolled, the first scene of (5.15) then depicts the murder attempt for a third time. This time, narrative events are fleshed out. Colleen is shown entering the reception area of the business. Her face is completely bandaged to help her avoid identification at the security desk. However, beyond the swathes of fabric, Colleen’s horrible nature is compounded through sartorial



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style. Her disguise is more than reminiscent of the cinematic giallo killer, popularized in the 1960s and 70s Italian films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. This is a particularly appropriate extra-textual reference, as the gory and violent genre is obsessed with ‘sick’ women, especially those who cannot resist serial murder.19 Dressed in black, Colleen accessorizes with a wide-brimmed hat and black glasses to disguise her features. She wears leather gloves, a classic element of the giallo iconography ideal for strangling or wielding murder weapons without leaving prints. A raincoat completes the outfit. Gary Needham argues that the raincoat ‘associated with the giallo killer stems from continental fashion trends in the 1960s and has since shifted its meaning over the decades to become the couture choice of the assassin by default in addition to serving as one of the giallo’s most identifiable visual tropes’.20 In appropriating the dress of giallo, Colleen embodies the bad mother Martha, the killer in Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) (1975), which concludes with Martha stabbing protagonist Marcus Daly with a butcher’s knife. As such, Colleen’s outfit functions as a precursor to the likely bloody attack that will follow, her assault upon Sean homaging Italian horror cinema’s obsession with gory violence and sexualized pathology. Colleen goes upstairs, removes her giallo outerwear and reveals her usual power-dressing clothing, which, with her blonde hair, 1980s style and psychotic-suicidal-homicidal-stabbing tendencies, is a cipher for Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987). ‘Backstabbers’ by The O’Jays plays, an additional indicator of the forthcoming attack, and Colleen stabs Sean for the third time. This time temporality is extended to show what happens next: as Liz and Christian attend to a dying Annie, Colleen locks Sean and herself into a storage room, and apologizes for getting his blood all over the floor (as quoted at the top of the section). She looks at him with disorientated tenderness, whispering ‘I’m not going to let them hurt you Sean’, evoking the psychotic compassion symptomatic of women killers in psychological horror, embodied by Jane Hudson in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), via Fatal Attraction and onwards to Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990).21 As she leans in to Sean and croons ‘we’ll grow old together’, he stabs her to death with her own knife. Colleen is made abject, not only because she opens up Sean’s bodily boundaries, but because she wants to love and yet cannot help

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but to kill. The above sequence, played three times to emphasize the horror, reveals Colleen to be uncontrollable, outside of the law, and dangerous. The analysis also demonstrates how Nip/Tuck draws upon a wide and disparate range of horror film motifs to construct her as a horrible woman. These are appropriated from subgenres such as the psycho-thriller and the slasher, and different national cinemas, where John Carpenter’s American suburbia rubs shoulders with schlocky Italian Euro-horror. These motifs are explored through a number of different facets of televisual language, drawing upon diegetic and extra-diegetic music, editing and framing, and costume. The second Horrible Woman in Nip/Tuck is Teddy Rowe, whose character arc is brought to a swift and bloody conclusion in Season Six. The analysis below concentrates on one specific sequence taken from ‘Briggitte Reinhart’ (6.3), when Mrs Reinhart recognizes Teddy from one of her previous false identities as Nurse Dixie, working in Las Vegas, and Teddy realizes that the unfortunate woman will have to be disposed of. The study demonstrates a different method for generating television abjection to the one utilized with Colleen. In an unnerving sequence lasting two minutes and composed of 51 separate shots, Georges Le Franju’s seminal French horror film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face) (1960) is recreated. Mrs Reinhart is alone and asleep in the recovery suite when Teddy enters and begins to work. Silence is broken only by the regular beat of the heart monitor. An extreme close-up on the patient’s face reveals sweat, wrinkles and open pores, and two large leeches positioned above her eyes like a second set of eyebrows. A close-up of a glass jar, filled with water and containing wriggling leeches follows. Tweezers reach into the frame and select a specimen. Teddy’s blue-gowned torso, dressed as a nurse, bends down into the frame and over the patient, pressing another leech onto her face. Mrs Reinhart begins to wake, and realizes she is strapped down in the bed against her will. The leech jar is shown repeatedly and each time the number of leeches has diminished. Teddy is silent and the heart monitor beeps. Mrs Reinhart lifts her head to look at her persecutor and shrinks back in horror. Teddy’s face is shown for the first time in medium close-up. A pale white mask envelops and transforms her visage; its smoothness is grotesque and unsettling. Attention is



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drawn to the ill-fitting lips, accompanied by a rough slit for the mouth and two ragged holes for the eyes. Her disguise is completed with a black, bobbed wig, with a blunt fringe. In a calm, singsong voice, Teddy murmurs ‘I need you to stay still Mrs Reinhart.’ She leans over the patient again. ‘You need to let the suckers do their work.’ As Mrs Reinhart screams for help, Teddy injects a sedative into her drip and continues to work, with the quiet regular beep of the heart monitor as accompaniment. The leech jar shot continues to reappear as Teddy keeps placing the creatures on the patient’s face and neck. In her last moments Mrs Reinhold mirrors her persecutor as her face too becomes a mask of horror; terror is etched over her features as she realizes her life is about to end, soundlessly and painfully, as leeches drain the life out of her. There are three ways that this sequence homages Les yeux sans visage: the mask, the aesthetics of the procedure, and the unsettling atmosphere.22 The most prominent reference is the incorporation of Teddy’s mask and the wig, creating an identical appearance to Christiane, the daughter of plastic surgeon Doctor Génessier. Christiane’s face has been disfigured in a car accident, and to cover over her horrors she wears a pale, smooth mask with identical mouth and eye slits, with her hair cut in a dark fringed bob framing the edges of the mask. Second, Nip/Tuck appropriates Les yeux’s infamous operation scene, in which Génessier slices the face off a kidnapped girl in order to transplant it onto Christiane’s. The bloody intensity of the scene is enhanced as the film remains devoid of gore or on-screen violence for the rest of its running time. As such, it is extremely disturbing when Génessier calmly takes a scalpel and cuts off the girl’s face in almost-silent close-up. Génessier is echoed in Nip/Tuck through Teddy’s calm manner and the comparative silence that accompanies her actions. Finally, the atmosphere of the film is brought into the recovery room at McNamara–Troy. The film’s general tone is dreamy, surreal and playful, and, as noted above, almost totally devoid of on-screen gore and graphic violence. Christiane is a somnambulistic passive creature, drifting from room to room like a ghost. Teddy mirrors this, never raising her voice or panicking; indeed, her controlled demeanour is more frightening. As the murder progresses, an increasing disjunction between image and sound takes place. When Teddy is in shot and talking to her

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victim, her lips barely move beneath the slit of the mask. Her gentle insistences on ‘the little suckers are so beautiful’ and ‘you’re bleeding out’ are trailed over images of the heart monitor and extreme close-ups of Reinhart’s bulging, terrified eyes. Voice is removed from source, becoming a disjointed and surreal commentary on events designed to end in death, creating an uncomfortably nightmarish atmosphere. This sequence plays with abjection in multiple and metatextual ways that relate to gender and horror. As Mrs Reinhart has earlier demanded leeches as part of her recovery, against the wishes of Sean and Christian, the scene underscores the ageing woman as deluded. The very texture of her face is presented as revolting, as the unremitting close-ups reveal skin pitted and wrinkled with large open pores, increasingly marked by abject fluids as she sweats and cries. Her aggressor is a deadly but controlled woman, created through a European art-horror framework. The two analyses of Horrible Women demonstrate that Seasons Five and Six build upon the earlier configuration of the abject women present in Nip/Tuck. As supporting female characters, Colleen and Teddy are given room to develop, moving in spaces beyond the role of patients in the consultation room and the operating theatre. However, they remain Horrible Women, visually adhered to the horror genre through auditory, narrative and visual cues, and by damning them with violent deaths – Colleen is stabbed to death by Sean, while Teddy is eviscerated by a serial killer after trying to kill Sean and his kids – Nip/Tuck suggests that they must be contained, that the restitution of patriarchal structures, focused on controlling the older woman, is paramount. The abject can only be elided with their deaths. Evil Ladies/Older Ladies: A Conclusion Animals don’t kill their young. You’re a bug. Insect. Spider. (Serial killer Jerry admonishes Teddy for trying to kill Sean’s children before smothering her to death in ‘Abigail Sullivan’ (6.5)) Few articles to date have made a connection between television and abjection. Lucy Kay analyses the representation of the female



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pathologist/anthropologist in television and popular fiction, comparing the character of Dr Sam Ryan in Silent Witness (1996–) with Dr Temperance Brennan in Kathy Reich’s novel Déjà Dead (1998). While Kay’s careful analyses of Ryan and Brennan as sources of abjection cannot be denied, her conclusions are rather obvious: the two women ‘are on the border of life and death, they face abjection and are themselves constructed as spectres of abjection; they hold the power to delay the return of the soul-less bodies to their womb-like graves’.23 More recently, Patrick West offered a political reading of CSI Miami (2002–) proposing that abjection can be utilized ‘as the instrument of a transgressive political activism that bridges the gap between the discrete (political) body and multi-constituent (political) society: the body politic’.24 West’s dense article utilizes CSI Miami as a text through which to work his theoretical thinking, whereas, more usefully, in their study of abjection Matt Hills and Rebecca Williams closely analyse Angel (1999–2004) to argue that the kind of revolting imagery associated with the horror film (such as the display of menstrual blood in Carrie (1976)) is less commonplace on television as it is an inherently domestic medium.25 As this chapter’s opening analysis of ‘Cindy Plumb’ demonstrates, Nip/Tuck is distinctive as fictional television drama that visualizes abjection on a regular and lurid basis through its scenes of surgery. The depictions of bodily violence and gore are far more extensive than mainstream horror television would allow, True Blood (2008–) currently being the only possible exception. This apparent freedom to represent the hideous relates to the point raised earlier about medical dramas, and how the show utilizes reality television tropes (including surgical narratives) as a form of legitimation for such spectacle. Indeed, it can be argued that Nip/Tuck is explicitly allowed to ‘show’ more because of its structural origins in reality television, which broadcasts everyday horrors as entertainment. Some of the injuries sustained by people on You’ve Been Framed (1990–), broadcast in a family-friendly Saturday evening slot, are brutal but acceptable due to their ‘real’ and ‘unplanned’ origins. As such, the reality television format with its penchant for ‘ordinary horror’ allows Nip/Tuck the space to present explicitly Kristevan forms of abjection in a visual medium that Helen Wheatley has argued is more usually attuned to the Freudian uncanny.26

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However, it is simply not enough to argue that Nip/Tuck possesses an abject aesthetic due to its scenes of surgery – a casual viewer who bears witness to the weekly episodes of music-led bodily butchery can confirm that this is the case. Rather, it is the multitude of ways that the series locates the abject in relation to the ageing woman that makes it unusual. As demonstrated in the Collins’s surgery, Mrs Grubman’s post-mortem makeover and Mrs Reinholt’s leech death, the series has created a rhetoric of horror around the body of the ageing woman. The latter half of this chapter has argued that, in later seasons, the series explicitly builds upon this abject aesthetic to incorporate horror film tropes and create female monsters. As well as drawing on the visual, narrative and auditory language of horror, the text also reverts to psychoanalytic origins to create two Lacanian mothers: all-encompassing, devouring and terrifying creatures unable to relinquish their power over their children.27 This is made apparent in Colleen through her desire for and babying of Sean (including creating his Sean bear), resulting in her attempt to kill him when it is clear they are to be separated. Teddy’s final actions, as illuminated in the quote above, are abject as she attempts to figuratively consume her stepchildren by gassing them. Her repulsive nature is paralleled with insects and bugs to emphasize this fact. That this condemnation is uttered by a serial killer who only preys on women – clearly a man of a far higher moral standing than Teddy – reveals much about Nip/Tuck’s contradictory and inconsistent representation of both woman and motherhood. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe argue that Nip/Tuck assimilates the cultural ideal of beauty, represented by Kimber (pronounced the perfect ‘10’ by Christian at the end of the first episode), while at the same time making the surgeries an uncanny spectacle that reminds us of the ideological pact we have become complicit in.28 This chapter reveals the flipside of the cultural assimilation diagnosed by Akass and McCabe. Kimber’s beauty is reversed to show the dark and sordid, the sour and aged (and at times homicidal) women who do not correspond to perfect visions of beauty, who are too old, too fat, deluded and murderous. They are made grotesque not simply by being opened up on screen, but through their unlawful actions and demands upon a society that no longer looks at them with pleasure. These excessive women with their undisciplined bodies and identities



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do not belong to Nip/Tuck’s shiny and beautiful world, set, most appropriately for its final two seasons, in ‘La La Land’. Colleen, Teddy and their ilk represent what lies beneath the fragile carapace of fetishized television beauty, damned by the show for possessing hysterical, uncontrollable and (for a brief, flickering moment) powerful female bodies. Notes 1 This chapter draws on an understanding of that abject as proposed by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), in which she studies psychoanalysis, religion and literature in order to examine the multiple ways in which abjection is figured in culture and society. 2 Liz Cruz could be considered a notable exception to this ideological framework. However, she does not escape completely unscathed. As the series progresses, she ends up dating and briefly married to Christian, forsaking her usual unadorned appearance and homosexual proclivities. Liz is punished for this by Christian’s constant cheating, and leaves the practice. So, even the sensible female anaesthetist with a penchant for her own sex and a healthy disregard for beauty accoutrements comes under fire eventually. 3 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 53. 4 Julie Brown, ‘Ally McBeal’s Postmodern Soundtrack’, Journal of the Royal Music Association 126 (2) (2001): 285. 5 Renee S. Dechert, ‘“My Boyfriend’s in the Band!”: Buffy and the Rhetoric of Music’, in Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery (eds), Fighting the Forces: What’s At Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, p. 219. 6 Dechert, ‘“My Boyfriend’s in the Band!”’, p. 219. 7 Matthew Mills, ‘Ubi Caritas? Music as Narrative Agent in Angel’, in Stacey Abbott (ed.), Reading Angel: The TV Spin-Off with a Soul, London: I.B.Tauris, 2005, p. 39. 8 This chapter is not suggesting that only women undergo this abject surgical aesthetic, and as Mr Collins’s inclusion in the scene suggests, men do not escape the damning humiliation of Sean and Christian’s scalpels. However, the number of dissected or dying women on screen overwhelms the comparative representation of men. 9 The bodies of disabled characters are represented differently, where classical music is used to reinforce the sensation of healing and respect. In ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9) Christian and Sean operate on conjoined twins to

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the ‘Flower Duet’ from the Lakmé opera by Léo Delibes. Debussy’s tranquil ‘Clair de Lune’ is played when Sean’s lover, Megan O’Hara, undergoes surgery for breast reconstruction in ‘Cara Fitzgerald’ (1.8) and when Abigail Sullivan has her parasitic internal twin removed (6.5). Other ‘corrective’ surgical procedures include operating on Sean’s son Conor, who suffers from the congenital deformity ectrodactyly (lobster claw syndrome) in ‘Connor McNamara’ (4.8), and on Tommy, a Down’s Syndrome boy who in ‘Tommy Bolton’ (3.8), requests surgery so that he appears more like the rest of his family. Lacking the pop-culture aesthetic of procedures on women and the ageing, disability is treated in Nip/Tuck with kid gloves. 10 Jason Jacobs, Body Trauma TV: The New Hospital Dramas, London: B.F.I., 2003, p. 1. 11 Jacobs, Body Trauma TV, p. 69. 12 Jacobs, Body Trauma TV, p. 147. 13 Sue Tait, ‘Television and the Domestication of Cosmetic Surgery’, Feminist Media Studies 7 (2) (2007): 120. 14 Cressida J. Heyes, ‘Cosmetic Surgery and the Televisual Makeover’, Feminist Media Studies 7 (1) (2007): 26. 15 Tait, ‘Television and the Domestication of Cosmetic Surgery’, p. 127. 16 Celebrity considerably complicates the presentation of the abject, where the aesthetic operations featuring real-life celebrities create an alternative presentation of the older female body. In ‘Dawn Budge’ (4.5), ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ by The Flying Lizards is piped into surgery as white trash millionaire Budge (Rosie O’Donnell) is sucked free of fat. The celebrity status of O’Donnell grants the character a voice and a power that the client does not usually have. O’Donnell speaks before the surgery, and her actual surgical procedure lacks bloodiness. The camera concentrates on O’Donnell’s gurning facial expressions for laughs, rather than offering any serious exploration of the body. Star status means that celebrity bodies cannot simply be cut up and discarded to suit Sean and Christian. This is also the case in ‘Joan Rivers’ (2.16), which features a computer simulation of how the comedienne Joan Rivers would have looked without surgery. The Rivers episode is also analysed by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, ‘A Perfect Lie: Visual (Dis)Pleasures and Policing Femininity in Nip/Tuck’, in Dana Heller (ed.), Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled, London: I.B.Tauris, 2007, pp. 119–32. 17 Rachel Moseley, ‘Makeover Takeover on British Television’, Screen 41 (3) (2000): 299–314. 18 Interestingly, the sanctity of the operating theatre is essential for the abject aesthetic to be properly played out, as the conurbation of violence and the ageing and/or female body often has different results when conducted



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outside the McNamara–Troy practice. For example, in the pilot episode Christian is called to perform at a Botox party at a plush penthouse apartment party. Christian injects Botox into the party organizer Ceila. Blood trickles onto her face, and Christian assures her, ‘… don’t worry. You’ll be one hot bitch.’ He then rams the needle into the bridge between her eyes and she gasps in masochistic pain. The penetrative connotations are unsubtle and spectatorial pleasure is taken in the sadistic viewing of the ‘vain’ women demanding unnecessary cosmetic alteration. However, a narrative twist follows. When the women have completed their injections, the drug lord Escobar Gallardo enters the room and tortures Christian for unwittingly doing facial alteration surgery on one of Gallardo’s employees who raped Gallardo’s six-year-old daughter. Christian’s violence is reversed: Gallardo becomes the surgeon, and Christian’s body is penetrated repeatedly with the needle. The medical environment is the only place where the musicvideo-orchestrated violence upon the female body is allowed free rein. For a reading of this scene in terms of the Gothic, see James Lyons, ‘Miami Slice: Surgical Shockings in Nip/Tuck’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 35 (1) (2007): 2–11. 19 For an overview of giallo, see Mikel J. Koven, La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. 20 Gary Needham, ‘Playing with Genre: An Introduction to the Italian Giallo’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), The Cult Film Reader, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008, p. 296. 21 In representing the dreadful ageing woman, Nip/Tuck utilizes a strand common to the thriller and horror genres. As Vivian Sobchack writes of Jane Hudson, she engenders humiliation and its ancillary horrors. Objectively viewed, she is ludicrous, grotesque. Subjectively felt, she is an excess woman— desperately afraid of invisibility, uselessness, lovelessness, sexual and social isolation and abandonment, but also deeply furious at both the double standard of aging in a patriarchal culture and her acquiescence to male heterosexist values and the self-contempt they engender. Sobchack, ‘The Leech Woman’s Revenge: On the Dread of Ageing in a Low-Budget Horror Film’, Scary Women Symposium, UCLA Film and Television Archive Research and Study Centre, January 1994. Available from: http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/women/sobchack/default.html (accessed 28 September 2005). See also, Vivian Sobchack, ‘Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery and Special Effects’, in Kathleen M. Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 200–11.

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22 For a detailed analysis of the film, see Joan Hawkins, ‘The Scalpel’s Edge: Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage’, in her Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 65–86. 23 Lucy Kay, ‘Frills and Thrills – Pleasurable Dissections and Responses to the Abject: Female Pathology and Anthropology in Déjà Dead and Silent Witness’, Mortality 7 (2) (2002): 158. 24 Patrick West, ‘Abject Jurisdictions: CSI Miami, Globalisation and the Body Politic’, Critical Studies in Television 3 (1) (2008), p. 61, author emphasis. 25 Matt Hills and Rebecca Williams, ‘Angel’s Monstrous Mothers and Vampires with Souls: Investigating the Abject in “Television Horror”’, in Stacey Abbott (ed.), Reading Angel: The TV Spin-off with a Soul, London: I.B.Tauris, 2005, pp. 203–20. 26 The quoted phrase is taken from Cynthia Freeland, ‘Ordinary Horror on Reality TV’, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 244–46. Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, pp. 6–8. 27 See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 13, 39; for a study of the maternal figure as abject in relation to the horror film, see Barbara Creed, The MonstrousFeminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 11–13. 28 Akass and McCabe, ‘A Perfect Lie’, pp. 120–21.

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'A Keene Sense of Direction': an interview with nip/tuck director Elodie Keene Mark W. Bundy

As one of Nip/Tuck’s most respected and television-savvy returning directors (from a roster featuring many powerhouse names), Elodie Keene is an inspirational force of nature – an acclaimed A-list director like no other, as well as a woman of fierce intelligence, graciousness and warmth. Before putting her stylish mark on hit after hit television series as a director, Keene started out as an editor in the first few seasons of LA Law (which garnered the first of her three Emmy Awards). Just a few credits in her remarkably prolific and stellar career as a director of episodic drama include: LA Law, NYPD Blue, ER, The Practice, The Wire, Ally McBeal, Boston Public, Law & Order: SVU, Judging Amy, Medium, House, Dirt, Saving Grace, The Closer, Glee and, of course, Nip/Tuck. I recently had the great fortune, privilege and delight of meeting with Keene, and I learned much more about her impressive accomplishments, her views on female directors in Hollywood, and the inner-workings of putting together the unprecedented creation that is Nip/Tuck.

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Mark Bundy: In your personal experience, have you found it to be more difficult for women to work in Hollywood? If so, on what levels – and how did you overcome any gender obstacles in the film and television industry? Elodie Keene: Well, I think there are certain things that are denied you as a woman. A comfort zone is extremely important in this town and this business. When it’s a group of men just hanging out together, not being self-conscious of their appearance or what they talk about, an enormous part of it is their willingness to spend time with you – and what it really amounts to, when they’re going down the list to see who is to be hired, is whether or not they’re going to enjoy spending time working with you (and also, obviously, they want the shows to be good, so the comfort and trust must be there in the end). MB: Have you seen any significant shift, for better or worse, in the gender politics or power plays in Hollywood? EK: About the time from when I began directing and now, there has been a whole collection of students (especially female) coming out of film school who thought the gender barrier was down, and would be forever down. They assumed that they would just be able to do what they wanted, whenever they wanted, and at that point it was a bit stunning for me to see such an attitude, because I had spent the better part of my life ramming my head through a brick wall of resistance based on my gender – and really, when I started out in television there was ONE female director doing shows in all of Hollywood whom I encountered. One! And that was Gabrielle Beaumont. The generation that I come from seems to have produced the women who really broke this barrier. After I had been directing for about five or six years, I noticed that there were many young female assistant directors who were empowered to direct the shows on which they were working; they would get two or three episodes in as a director and then the show would get cancelled. Those women could not get another job after that to save their lives. It wiped an entire generation of directors out – women who are approximately five to ten years younger than I am. There’s one or two who have survived that period, largely because they had a chance to



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direct a few more episodes (more than three) than their peers before the show would get cancelled. By contrast, though, a man who only had two or three episodes under his belt before cancellation usually could parlay that into another job directing, could get another show, could get representation. So when I saw that group of women emerging with the attitude that all obstacles were clear, I used to say things like, ‘If you think that they’re not going to close that door as soon as they can, think again. You’re going to have to work harder and be better at all of it in order to sustain a career.’ Now, this is all just regarding directing, which is what I can truly speak about with any measure of authority – I think that in other professional jobs, though, there has been a huge shift in thinking, in acceptance and in access to power, regardless of gender, to the benefit of women. MB: Even though Nip/Tuck is one of the few shows that dares to ‘cross lines in the sand’ and continually draws new ones, was there ever a specific moment when you thought or said, ‘We just cannot do this?’ EK: The only time that I was ultimately really bothered was with the episode where we created a clitoris out of a woman’s toe. The reason that it bothered me is because such an operation does not exist (as of yet); there is no repair for the devastating mutilation caused by clitoridectomy. We fabricated a procedure where the doctors took a piece of her baby toe and transferred it to the mutilated area to create a new, functional clitoris – and it bothered me so much just because it was not real. Every other operation that I’ve shot has an established basis in reality. Sometimes the surgeries are so fantastic that I’ve asked them to prove them to me – but except for that one, all the other operations on the episodes that I’ve directed have come from actual procedures. MB: Approximately how long does it take to set up and shoot one of the given surgical scenes, as many of them, though they often flash by fairly quickly, appear so unsettlingly real? EK: The important thing is to know enough in advance that we’re going to be doing an OR/surgery scene, especially for the actors

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involved. A few examples that come to mind for me are Vanessa Redgrave and Rosie O’Donnell, who (along with Courteney Cox) are just some of the greatest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with and know. As for shooting one of the surgical scenes, usually what happens is that the actors will go to the Burman’s – the geniuses of the show – to have a prosthetic mould made of their bust, head, or body part that is to undergo ‘surgery’. Vanessa Redgrave’s prosthetic bust was so lifelike that she couldn’t look at it and the rest of us were completely freaked out by it. They got everything, down to the skin-tones, perfectly; it was so unnerving. On the shoot of another episode, I was looking at the prosthetic – which had an eye with all the musculature built underneath it, so that they could actually cut the ‘skin’ and, with a set of tweezers, go in there and pull out the ligature/ musculature beneath the eye – and even knowing we were on the set filming a prosthetic (squirting fake blood in the eye socket and all of that good, gory stuff), my eyes would drift from the plastic head to the monitor and I would just practically lose it, because they never fail to get it to look so real. It was truly awesome. There is an ongoing debate about how these things should be shot, because they are so laborious to set up, and, naturally, we want it to look as true to reality as possible; so, we have a wonderful advising nurse-practitioner and medical consultant, Linda Klein [‘Nurse Linda’ on the show] – she also works on Grey’s Anatomy – on the set, and both Dylan [Walsh] and Julian [McMahon] are quite brilliant at looking like they know how to perform surgery. MB: How is directing Nip/Tuck different from other shows you’ve done, or is it different at all on any level? EK: Well, the subject matter is unique and the places that it pushes me to are different, and the fact that we all know each other as well as we do permits me a bit of latitude in my degree of outspokenness, for which I am very grateful. They know and appreciate my editorial skill and rely on it, which validates all of the work that I have done over the years. I try not to book my time too tightly, so that I can spend time doing some editorial work – that’s the icing on the cake for me; it’s where most of the ‘magic’ can really occur when you get to edit and play, creating all the danger, excitement and various moods of the



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show. I have a wonderful working relationship with the producers and Ryan Murphy, which I value so much. They know and trust that when I give them an episode, it will be something worthwhile. That kind of relationship is perhaps what makes my work on Nip/Tuck a bit more distinct from other shows I’ve done. MB: Describe a ‘typical’ first day’s shooting atmosphere on the set of a new Nip/Tuck episode, if you would? EK: Well, what you have to know is that the cast and crew come to work every day, whether it’s a new or old episode; every single day we’re shooting all day long until the season is over. There is no ‘break’. There really is no time for the cast and crew to reflect for very long on what was just shot – the actors are continually reading their scripts in between shots while the crew is prepping a new scene, perhaps. It’s really all ongoing, which is just the nature of doing episodic work for a series. Hopefully, as a director, you get to walk in on a shoot in the morning and be with everyone for the duration of the day, but sometimes you have to take over a set in the middle of the afternoon, after another director has been shooting retakes or added scenes all morning. Occasionally, I have had to take over an entire set at 7:00 in the evening on a Friday and try not to make it a complete misery for everyone who still has to be there! So, you as a director are ultimately responsible for refocusing everyone’s energy for a new episode. You’re in the business of explaining what the given scene is about, to get some great energy out of people who have been there already when you’ve just walked in, and how to get from here to there successfully. MB: Tell me some of the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of directing the episode with the ‘Rosenberg Twins’ (played by Lori and Reba Schappell). EK: That was an unbelievable, profound working experience. The girls themselves prompted me to re-evaluate what it means to be generous of spirit. They, however eccentric they are, are amazing. Conjoined at the head, one of them has spina bifida, so the other works as the locomotor (Lori does the moving for both herself and Reba). They were in an institution in Pennsylvania until they were 21 years of age; they

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have been the subject of a documentary, which I watched before meeting and working with them in order to learn a bit more about their history. When I went to meet them for the first time, they were in Wardrobe – they very clearly showed that they were trying to decide whether I was ‘OK’ or not based on my energy and attitude, and I fortunately passed their test. They had a kind of constant inner dialogue, as well as constantly speaking back and forth to each other, but what I found remarkable was that they each spent half of their life intentionally ‘disappearing’, so that the other could have an individual and private experience of life. They didn’t view this as an act of generosity, as it was just how they had always lived; discovering all of this was simply overwhelming for me. The other thing that was completely fascinating was that, because the surgery in the episode was about separating them, there was a prosthetic created that allowed me to see the physiology of how they were actually attached physically. At one point when they were being interviewed by a bunch of doctors, I asked them questions that were not scripted (things like ‘What do you do for showers/bathing?’ and ‘If one of you gets drunk, does the other also feel the effects?’), some of which ended up in the show. Everything about the experience was just mind-boggling, and I only wish we could have spent more time and gone even further with these remarkable young women. MB: If you will, tell me which member of the Nip/Tuck cast either continually astonishes you or makes you (and the entire cast and crew) laugh? Is there a ‘class clown’ on set? EK: Yes! Julian – definitely Julian. There’s no question about him being the clown. He’s just so great. But, I have to say that there’s not one person in that cast that I don’t love – I admire all of their work, energy and commitment so much; it may sound kind of dumb, but it’s kind of like having children and they do something that just surprises and delights you – something that’s so far beyond what they thought they were willing to risk (probably because they love and trust me as the director, but also because of their sheer dedication) – and it just fills you with a pride that’s hard to articulate. They’ve all done this, both with me and for me, throughout the whole show. Dylan is astonishing; he is not inherently an exhibitionist, and the fact that he’s



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been willing to put himself out there in some very compromising positions just shows again how much he and everyone just wants the show to be good, which never ceases to amaze me. Julian is out there, which I love about him – it seems as though he does not have to risk as much as Dylan. Roma [Maffia] is just so absolutely wonderful on many levels, and I appreciate having had the chance to work with her. John Hensley has had to do things that are just unimaginable! I shot the episode where he shaved his head, and he and I talked about it for about an hour and a half before we went in to shoot it – to make sure he was ready and committed to doing it, because it was done on one piece of film; so, if he was going to do it, he had to just push through and get the scene in that one take. Once he started shaving his head, he got this total look of power about him – he was utterly outside of his body doing this thing, and it was beyond riveting to watch. Again, every cast member has had to do something for the show that they never anticipated they would do, which is perhaps part of the show’s lure – women being with women, men with men, intriguing avenues leading to multiple issues of sexuality, gender, and selfhood, really intense birthing sessions – you name it and they’ve done it! I also love Joely [Richardson] to death, of course; she is someone that constantly surprises me, and she is just so brilliant and an inspiration to work with, for the rest of the show and myself. And Kelly [Carlson] is equally great – her acting chops have progressed in an astounding fashion. So it is a lot like having kids that take you by surprise with their ability, progress and love for what they’re doing. MB: Do you plan on directing further episodes of Nip/Tuck? EK: Yes – as long as the show is on and they ask me to do it, I will. MB: What has been your fondest memory of directing the show so far, even if it did not make it to screen? EK: [Laughter] … the only thing that did not make it to screen that I loved was a scene in which Julian was getting a blowjob. I just love the way I shot it, and to this day I’m still not sure why it got cut; sometimes it’s best if you don’t ask too deeply about decisions like that, but I just loved the scene!

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MB: Was it a regular cast member partaking of Julian’s lap? EK: No, it was a scene where he had just picked up some random woman in a bar. It was just a great shot. I really expected it to be included and was a bit disappointed when it was not. MB: I’m disappointed, too – it probably would have been a memorable, popular image! Anything else that you regret not making it into the show? EK: Not really. With the exception of a couple of music choices I made and a few other things that I wanted and did not see in the final cut, the essence of everything I’ve shot has pretty much made it to the screen. MB: What about any favourite moments that did make it? EK: One of my most favourite moments is when Jenny O’ Hara turned off the life support machine in the conjoined twins story. And, again, the scene when John shaved his head, because he completely trusted me, is another favourite. Dylan so consistently does great work that I’m at a loss to choose only one favourite moment or scene with him. Rosie O’Donnell – meeting her and working with her is truly one of my best moments. There’s just so many, it’s difficult to narrow it down. MB: Are there any worst moments/biggest headaches, either off screen or on screen? EK: Well, my biggest headache is that the show shoots very slowly; I’d like it to go much quicker. And then there’s the animatronic gorilla, which we put so much time and work into (after debating forever about whether to use a real gorilla or the animatronic version) and most of the footage didn’t make the cut, so it was frustrating. Not that this was a worst moment at all, but probably the funniest thing I ever shot for the show was the sex tape that Dr Troy made and it ended up on the internet, embarrassing him – this was for the Mario Lopez episode – and Julian made me laugh so hard I actually threw my back out!



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MB: If you could direct your life as adroitly as you direct a hit show, where would you be ‘shooting’ ten years from now? EK: I think it would be appropriate for me to be retired ten years from now, although in the frustrating moments when directing has not been as much fun to do, I’ve tried to figure out or imagine what else it is that I might do, what would interest me and allow me to use as many faculties as I do, and I just cannot imagine what that would be. The business is changing a lot, too, so I just hope that I will get to keep doing what I do for ten years more, at least – but then I get to thinking that it might be really nice to be in the south of France somewhere, relaxing, enjoying life and having escapades with food and wine! Interview conducted on 26 February 2007. Special thanks to Janet and Phillip Keene and Rick and Heather Neault. Very special thanks to Elodie Keene. For John, as ever.

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to live and die in front of a mirror: from dandyism to aesthetic surgery Isabel Clúa Ginés

When Nip/Tuck was first released in 2003, it was presented as ‘a disturbingly perfect new drama’ and defined as a ‘deeply superficial series’. The paradox between the deepness and superficiality of the series was obviously referring to its main subject, that is plastic surgery, but was, at the same time, a serious warning to the audience. Anyone expecting a trivial and pleasant approach to the topic would be wrong. From the very first episode, it was clear that Nip/Tuck was not interested in such a point of view. On the contrary, plastic surgery was the starting point for a wider and deeper reflection about identity and how it is socially and individually constructed. In this sense, the topic turned out to be a perfect leitmotif, since it has to do with personal choice as well as with socially defined ideals. Although plastic surgery has more than a hundred years of history (Gilman 1999), we usually think of it as a contemporary phenomenon. Certainly, the popularity of plastic surgery has increased spectacularly in the last two decades, so the ideal of transforming the self has become not only a philosophic issue but an economic question. Plastic surgery allows people to reach for an ideal image, but our times are not mythical and there is no magical metamorphosis; on



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the contrary, transformation has a cost. In consequence, plastic surgery has become big business and the perfect body a commodity. Anyway, the commodification of the body has further implications: it reminds us of the networks of power and domination in which we are placed. According to Foucault, body is bound up to its economic uses, so changing the body implies changing its docility, utility and submission. Nip/Tuck seems to be aware of the crossing of economy, body and identity. For instance, the contract with a porn magnate achieved by Christian in the first season (‘Sophia Lopez’ (1.4)) shows clearly the collision between body, moral and economic values. The surgeons have to perform some procedures on the porn-actresses. As Sean sees the whole business as an immoral way of earning easy money, Christian shows how they are improving the productive force of the girls and sharply highlights the resemblance between porn industry and plastic surgery, insofar as both activities commodify the body and are ‘selling fantasy’, that is, creating unreal models that are perceived as real ones. The question that arises is, finally, whether plastic surgery is producing docile, useful and submissive bodies. Feminist approaches to plastic surgery have led to different conclusions about it (Negrin 2002). Some feminist criticism has seen it as a form of oppression and has interpreted its users as victims who surrender to the hegemonic models of beauty. Other voices claim that plastic surgery breaks the fictions about body and nature and provides a degree of agency to its users. As Anne Balsamo points out, bodily modification shows how beauty is a constructed idea and erases the concept of a natural body (Balsamo 1996). Although Balsamo and other specialists assume the risks of banalization related to this medical practice, they note that plastic surgery not only erodes the idea of natural body/subject but can be displayed in subversive ways. As Judith Butler claims, the disruptions of bodily limits, supposedly fixed and stable, become a central piece in order to undermine generic and identitary constructions (Butler 1990, 1993). In brief, plastic surgery reveals that body and identity are susceptible to being manipulated; subjectivity, then, is built through categories that, far from being natural, are discursive plots culturally produced. Nip/Tuck exemplifies perfectly these notions provided by feminist criticism; the series deals with body and subjectivity and can be

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considered a sharp revision of the classical idea of the Cartesian subject as well as a display of the contradictions and complexity of postmodern identity. The narrative of the TV series breaks away from the concept of a dual being whose eternal and essential soul is entrapped in a material, supplementary body. On the contrary, Nip/ Tuck shows how the body is a semiotic surface whose meaning can be modified by means of artificial and technological practices, and how these changes involve identity changes, too. The body is the place where identity is constructed; and identity cannot be thought out outside the body; body provides an identity whose materiality surpasses any other consideration, as Escobar Gallardo experiences with his transformations. The facial reconstruction that he suffers in the fourth season (‘Merrill Bobolit’ (4.10)) supposes to recover his own face, that is, his own identity as a drug baron, which finally provides him with a different, better, status in prison. However, his threatening identity – blurred by the first procedure (‘Escobar Gallardo’ (1.13)) – cannot be thought without other bodily marks, such as his spectacular tattoos. We have to note, then, that the semiotic character of the body is not only referring to flesh but also to all the marks, visible or unvisible but definitely material, that form the identities of the individuals. Tattoos, piercings, clothes, etc. are signs that the individuals use to define themselves: Faith Wolper’s tattoo works as an obvious sign that reveals her disease as well as her desires (Season Four); the neo-Nazi paraphernalia that Ariel wears becomes the clear expression of her political ideology (Season Three); Walter Krieger’s tattoo is a symbolic mark that allows him to identify himself (and also to be identified) as a victim, as a Jew, as a survivor of the Holocaust – although he is none of these things – (Season Seven); etc. In every case, the cultural inscriptions over their bodies become meaningful and reveal how identity is anything but natural. Artificial Me: From Dandyism to Plastic Surgery Although the semiotic character of the body seems a postmodern concept, the ideal of a body/identity designed or manipulated according to one’s own desire is related to old topics of the Western



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tradition, such as nineteenth-century dandyism. The main contributions to dandyism theory provided a dense background to the phenomenon, so, in fin-de-siècle culture, dandyism became a modern cultural practice focused on the artificialization of life, and characterized by the use of technology and performance in order to build an original individual. It was a phenomenon that questioned the normative discourses, presented the subject as an unnatural being and showed some categories – especially gender – as conventional ideas. But, on the other hand, to live and die in front of a mirror – as Baudelaire defined the dandystic attitude – was often understood as a sterile exercise of snobbery and a narcissistic way of life. Dandyism was viewed, then, as an ambiguous practice, just as plastic surgery is today. In spite of the different period and context in which dandyism and plastic surgery are placed, both practices share many characteristics. First, they share an irreverent approach to identity and body, understood without any transcendent or existential implications; on the contrary, identity and body are fields of exploration, experimentation and hedonistic satisfaction. More important is to note that this experimentation is always presented as an acte gratuit, the final aim of which is beauty. The aesthetization of life involved in dandyism was opposed to any utility or purpose (remember Wilde’s aphorism in the preface of The Portrait of Dorian Gray, 1890: ‘All art is quite useless’); on the other hand, plastic surgery is frequently related to such adjectives as ‘elective’ or ‘unnecessary’. Moreover, the gratuity is often read, in both cases, as an expression of vanity. Nevertheless, we can consider this lack of purpose as a decided use of the technologies of the self that – in Foucault’s words – ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Foucault 1988, p. 18). In this sense, the goal of dandyism and aesthetic surgery is clear: happiness as a product of self-development and autonomy of the individual. Probably the character who shows most sharply the hedonistic pleasures of transforming the body is Mrs Grubman. She is the pure embodiment of the ideal patient of plastic surgery: a wealthy,

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frivolous and eccentric female obsessed with youth and beauty; even we can see her as a plastic surgery addict. This topical characterization acquires another dimension in Season Four, when she asks Christian to perform more plastic surgery after her death (‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8)). This request is the final tribute that Mrs Grubman pays to beauty, the uselessness of which is now clear; with this gesture Mrs Grubman fulfils the ideal of beauty without finality that characterizes the dandy. Second, for dandyism and plastic surgery, body and identity are no longer an organic wholeness but an ensemble of multiple parts, all of them potentially alterable and modifiable. The dandy’s focus on his attire or the patients’ obsession for certain parts of their bodies are obvious signs of our capacity of thinking ourselves as fragmented objects. The idea of the fragmented and objectified body constitutes the centre of their ambiguity. Fragmentation and objectification of the body is often perceived as an image of abjection, as a disturbing and humbling expression that denies the human qualities possessed by individuals (Kristeva 1982). 1 But, on the other hand, the fragmented and objectified condition of the subject provides a wide frame of agency: the modification of the parts implies the whole transformation of the self, so the superficial, the epidermal, the external, the supplementary becomes meaningful. The usual comment of the doctors at the start of the episodes – ‘Tell me what you don’t like about yourself’ – shows, precisely, this aspect: the lack of satisfaction suffered by the patients can be located in a part of the body; in consequence, the modification of the part implies the transformation of the wholessness. As a result, both practices explore surfaces in order to produce symbols, that is, strong meanings related to the self: if Brummell’s neckties and cravats became his presentation card, the sculpted bodies and faces of the users of aesthetic surgery work similarly. In this sense, the meticulous treatment of every part of the body and its supplements2 evokes the work of the artist: in this case, the work of art is the self. This boundary is specifically emphasized in the dandyist manifestos. Wilde proclaimed in one of his well-known aphorisms: ‘One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art’ (Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, 1894). Curiously, the fourth season promo of Nip/Tuck points in the same direction,



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and Dave LaChapelle’s image of Drs Troy and McNamara as sculptors creating a piece of art cannot be more explicit about the close relationship between aesthetic surgery, creativity and artistic procedures. Garments and Scalpels: Creating the Self The connection between dandyism and aesthetic surgery is an interesting tool with which to explore one of the most challenging characters of Nip/Tuck: Dr Christian Troy. From the first episode the character is presented in a contradictory way: a handsome and self-confident man, his ambition and his (apparent) lack of morality turn Christian into a disturbing character, who is equally loved and hated by the audience. In my opinion, the passionate responses of the audience to Christian have to do with the extreme performance of the self that he develops. It may be difficult to understand Judith Butler’s boundaries about the self as a ‘copy without original’, but the construction of identity by means of acts that reveal nothing about an inner essence becomes clear if we think about him. Christian is his own image, and the series emphasizes the performative nature of it: the radical revision of his apartment’s furniture, for instance, shows how his personality is deeply bound to the material elements that surround him; in this sense, changing decoration implies changing himself (‘Cindy Plumb’ (4.1)). Equally, when he sees the video – uploaded to the internet – in which he is having sex, he is confronted with his real image, with a devastating result: it does not fit with his own ideal, so Christian starts a transformation programme that starts with body-building and finishes with a liposuction procedure (‘Monica Wilder’ (4.3)). Although on that occasion Sean reminds him that he does not need a procedure because he is a model of physical perfection, Christian reaffirms his body as an object capable of improvement throughout the series: he gets hair implants in order to look perfect on TV (‘Carly Summers’ (5.1)), has a face-lift (‘Christian Troy II’ (6.17)) and undergoes a surgical reconstruction of his breast after it is removed because of cancer (‘Ronnie Chase’ (5.15)). The impact of the disease affects, of course, his physical appearance – the removal of the breast breaks

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the ideal symmetry of the body – but, above all, cancer is significant because it supposes the only moment in which Christian loses control of his body and his looks: not only does his body develop a hidden and unsuspected disease, but its treatment implies devastating secondary effects which make Christian vulnerable and ruin his perfect appearance (‘Gene Shelley’ (5.16)). Besides of his perfect image Christian is usually presented as a vacuum: while Sean is defined as a gifted surgeon, Christian’s skills are related to social performance and public relations; Sean is presented as a family man, strongly attached to moral values, but we cannot say anything about the rules followed by Christian, or about his origins or family beyond his close relationship with the McNamaras.3 In this sense, Christian often holds a parasitic position: his son is Sean’s son, his true love is Sean’s love (that is, Julia) – at least, during Seasons One to Three – and even his own identity is sometimes presented as the counterpart of Sean’s. In brief, Christian occupies an ambiguous position as his identity always has to do with a chameleonic performance; we see his acts but we cannot say absolutely anything about his ‘real’ form of being. Even Christian is unable to say anything about himself: he usually acts intuitively. Some of his actions are passionate responses without reflection and, above all, he is surprised, many times, by the reactions and perceptions of other people about him. Even appreciations of his psychologist about his close – and apparently ambiguous – relationship with Sean are received with astonishment by Christian (‘Cindy Plumb’ (4.1)). So, what do we really know about Christian? He is pure materiality, a man without a soul (as he defines himself in ‘Granville Trapp’ (3.5) in a surprising confession that shows how his way of life makes him feeling guilty and miserable). The most evident feature of the character is his predilection for exquisite commodities: he wears Gucci suits and shirts, Prada shoes and Rolex watches, and likes to drive luxurious cars. His obsession with image and appearance is often unbearable, as Gina Russo frequently claims. His attitude, therefore, can be described as an extreme example of narcissistic behaviour. But Dr Troy is much more than an ‘asshole’ (as Gina usually refers to him) exclusively worried about himself; his extreme imposture makes visible the imposture involved in identity issues. In



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this sense, the couple McNamara–Troy works perfectly because we can see the disturbing similarities between them: maybe Christian wastes time, money and energy trying to offer a perfect image of himself as a charming, sophisticated and irresistible man, but Sean wastes much more time trying to preserve the fantasy of a perfect husband and father as well as a responsible and socially engaged surgeon. The difference lies in the conventions involved in the construction of the self: as Dr McNamara evokes a normative ideal (heterosexual and monogamist, nuclear family, respectable job), Dr Troy builds himself by playing with the conventions, accepting and rejecting them according to his interests. For instance, when Wilbur appears in his life (Season Two), he plays the socially accepted role of a beloved father; the issue here is that his performance is more than a caprice: it works as an act of de-naturalization of the conventions that rule the paternal and familiar relationships. The fatherhood issue is even sharper when we look at Matt McNamara: the nuclear family represented by Sean, Julia and Matt with which the show opens vanishes and we are harshly confronted with a landscape where the limits between natural functions and social behaviours are blurred. From this point of view, Dr Troy’s role in the series is to deface the conventions and destabilize the norms that form our selves. I am suggesting, too, that Christian embodies – in a renewed way – the classical ideals of the dandy: in the first place, he develops a calculated use of the conventions in order to challenge the normative discourse, creating unexpected effects that characterize him as a whimsical and eccentric individual. He accomplishes, then, the dandy ideal expressed by Baudelaire: ‘the pleasure of causing surprise in others, and the proud satisfaction of never showing any oneself’ (The Painter of Modern Life). The dandy side of Christian Troy is emphasized by little details that reinforce his flamboyant characterization: he is charming, chameleonic and witty (proven, for instance, by the ironical name of his boat: The Boat-ox); he is even a master of aphorism and paradox: ‘Faces change, Sean. And asses and thighs, but people? … We are who we are’ (‘Kurt Dempsey’ (1.5)). ‘The line that divides the porn industry and the plastic surgery is a thin one. We’re both selling fantasy, aren’t we?’ (‘Sophia Lopez’ (1.4)).

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Second, the immensurable attention he pays to his image and appearance allows searching for the classical topics of dandyism, that is, the continuity between essential and complementary, authenticity and lie, surface and depth. Dr Troy uses a series of technologies and disciplines (from body-building to aesthetic surgery), complementary and prosthetic elements (the series of commodities by which he is surrounded) to build an original individual, himself. In this sense, his aim is similar to that of the decadent dandy who ‘aspires to the status of nonreproductible, irreplaceable object, fixed in a perpetual “now” outside of time, in the manner of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, who battles time by appropriating the characteristics of an ageless art object, his portrait’ (Garelick 1998, p. 5). In fact, Dorian Gray presents interesting parallels to Dr Troy: the obsession about youth and beauty is shared by both characters but the novelty is that Dr Troy possesses new tools. Art is replaced by science (or at least, combined)4: while Dorian looks at his reflection on the portrait, Christian can reach his ideal image by becoming the object of his own skills as an aesthetic surgeon. In this sense, the metaphorical transformation of Dorian becomes a physical transformation in the case of Christian: he turns to rhinoplasty (‘Christian Troy’ (2.2)) and liposuction (‘Monica Wilder’ (4.3)) in order to attain the ideal image of himself. Dr Troy, then, not only ‘wears’ works of art, intended as luxurious complements, but ‘becomes’ a work of art, intended as a perfect surgical work. The blurring of the limits between subject and object is, probably, the most important characteristic of dandyism; in this sense, the series takes advantage of the professional profile of Dr Troy: his work as a ‘sculptor’ of other bodies and identities confers credibility to his double role as agent and patient of transformation. Symmetry is Perfection: Creating the Other Notwithstanding the above, the main resemblance between Dorian and Christian lies in the narcissistic contemplation of their own image that drives them into an isolated circle: their thirst for perfection is usually deceptive, as absolute control of all aspects of life is impossible. Depictions of the dandy point to the sterile,



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unproductive and deceiving aura that always surrounds him: the dandy is able to sustain an ascetic way of life (subjecting his body, life and identity to discipline), but he is condemned to loneliness.5 All these aspects are particularly obvious when they refer to the erotic experiences of the dandy, each doomed to ruin. Baudelaire defined the dandy as the opposite of woman, relating women to nature and dandies to artificiality. Although this affirmation should be clarified, it clearly presents one of the most usual conflicts associated with dandyism: the impossibility of a normal (and normative) relationship with women. If women are equivalent to nature – in fin-de-siècle culture – and dandies reject nature, their relationship with women has to be an artificial one. As Hustved expresses it: The decadents divorce the female from the feminine and create two distinct ideas. The female, the actual female body, is abhorrent because it is natural. The feminine, however, may be admired because it is duplicitous, mysterious, and finds its ultimate realization in artifice … The trappings of femininity, its artifice – makeup, jewelry, clothing – become weapons in decadent fictions to combat nature. The decadent strategy attempts to empty the female body of its natural content and transform it into a feminine image that is perfectly artificial and completely external. (Hustvedt 1998, p. 20) In addition, it is common to find plots referring to the construction of a perfect lover, who can fill the dandy’s expectations about perfection, and women work as ‘a tabula rasa upon which the dandy spectator projects his own creative musings’ (Garelick 1998, p. 5). The same observation can be applied to the most significant partner of Christian, Kimber, who is defined by him as ‘my best work’ (‘Blu Mondae’ (4.2)), but the ability of the surgeon in moulding bodies and identities is emphasized in another passage of the series: in the same episode, Christian tries to create a new (heterosexual) identity for his patient, Mitchell, whose condition, in turn, has been moulded by the desire of his patron and lover Arthur. Another meaningful example is that of Mrs Grubman; her statement ‘My body is your canvas’ stresses the idea of the body as the place in which the creative skills

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of Christian can be developed, in this case, with the complicity of the patient. Similarly, Kimber accepts that Christian never loved her, but only his creation. However, the girl is more than a passive surface where Christian’s desire is projected. The first meeting with Kimber is a simple flirt until she discovers that Christian is a plastic surgeon. Curiously enough, his professional skills are presented as an infringement of Kimber’s privacy and intimacy: she presents herself as a 21-year-old model, but Christian ‘reads’ her body and concludes that she is 26, placing her in the conventional beauty scale, 8 out of 10. Kimber’s feminine body is read and immediately considered as perfectable material; finally, under the motto ‘symmetry is perfection’, Christian literally inscribes in Kimber’s body his own desire (‘Pilot’ (1.1)) The situation has strong links with dandyistic narratives, where it is usual to find the motif of female creation; in fact the topic is characteristic of fin-de-siècle culture, and such a representative phenomenon as the invention of hysteria expresses the patriarchal fantasy of moulding feminine bodies and souls. Even the techniques used by Christian and other plastic surgeons, that is, ‘writing’ on the body in order to draw the perfect figure, is really similar to techniques such as dermatography applied by psychologists in their experiments with hysterical women.6 The projection of male desire onto the feminine body, considered as a manipulable material, is clear. More interesting is the response of Kimber to this attitude: instead of feeling insulted or humiliated, her reaction shows true enthusiasm. The reason is that Christian offers her the possibility of becoming a ‘10’, that is, the possibility of attaining her own idea of perfection. In fact, the obsessive search for the perfect image is the true connection between the two characters: ‘When you stop striving for perfection, you might as well be dead’ (‘Pilot’ (1.1)). Kimber’s emotional instability can drive us to understand her as a victim of the patriarchal system, as a hysterical being or as a woman dependent on male acceptance. And there are aspects of all these elements in the character. We can think of Kimber as the material that Christian moulds and sculpts in order to create his perfect female partner, and of the procedures he performs on Kimber as the materialization of his desires for perfection.



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Anyway, all the fantasies about feminine creations – more beautiful, more docile, in short, better than real women – have their reverse, and it is not strange to find narratives where the perfect creature rebels against her master. From this point of view, Kimber’s success as a porn star can be read as an ironic response to the objectification of her body: considered as a mere sexual object by all the men she meets, her flourishing business in the porn industry represents the subversion of the situation, so Kimber obtains benefits from her sexual appeal, turning the situation of vulnerability and victimization in which she is placed to a position of economic power and personal autonomy. Moreover, the commercialization of ‘her’ doll creates a parabasic effect: Kimber becomes literally a doll, but this act provides her with an agency (in many levels) that she never possessed until this very moment. The agency acquired by Kimber through the second season may lead us to think that the marriage proposal by Dr Troy in the third is a simple display of masculine desire linked to possession of the feminine body. This interpretation is not incompatible with the idea that Christian is trying to recover his originality as well as to turn Kimber into a unique and exclusive piece of his universe: from a dandystic point of view, nothing is so execrable as mass-produced products; Kimber’s success in the porn business has turned her into a mass-media product, a commodity available to everybody, as Christian realizes when he meets Mrs Eubanks (‘Hannah Tedesco’ (3.9)), a woman whose ideal in life is to become a perfect copy of Kimber. When Christian forces Kimber to finish her porn star career, he is not as worried about promiscuity (in fact, during their engagement, they share their bed with Kit and Quentin) as about exclusiveness. In other words, he has created a ‘work of art’ (Kimber’s body) that has been commercialized, reproduced and consumed; romantic love and, finally, marriage is only a functional excuse to achieve his objectives. The use of marriage as a functional excuse occurs again in Season Six, when Christian asks Kimber to marry him in response to her romantic relationship with Dr Mike Hamoui (‘Alexis Stone’ (6.6)).7 As Kimber points out, the reason for this proposal has nothing to do with love but concerns Christian’s ego; even knowing that, she will break the relationship with Mike and return to Christian, a fact that will lead her to a catastrophic end.

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The last stage of the relationship between Kimber and Christian (Seasons Six and Seven) shows subtly a growing dependency between the two characters, returning to classical fantasies about feminine creations and their final inability to fulfil the desire of their creator. In this sense, the near-death experience suffered by Christian provides a clarity that will lead him to respond to Kimber’s submission (‘I’ll do whatever you want, I will be your slave if you want’) with a strong statement: ‘You’ll never make me happy. I’ll never love you enough’ (‘Joel Seabrook’ (6.13)). Rejected by her own creator and with no chance to mend the broken ties with Mike, Kimber commits suicide. On the other hand, although Christian is affected by the death of Kimber and she appears frequently in his dreams and hallucinations, the finale of the series is, literally, a return to the starting point: thus, the final scene is a reflection of the first meeting with Kimber (‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19)). The conclusion seems clear: the machinery of desire works again and it does not matter which is the object of desire, because is the subject of desire who shapes the object at his will. The importance of Kimber derives from the fact of her being the embodiment of Christian’s desire, to the point of becoming a female version of him, as Sean notes (‘You are the male and female version of the same person’ (6.3)); otherwise, she is replaceable. Although Kimber is a central character in the general plot, her relationship with Christian is always eclipsed by Christian’s true companion, that is, Sean. For instance, in the same episode in which Christian has to declare publicly and officially his love for Kimber, we attend to a spectacular declaration of love, friendship and faithfulness between Christian and Sean. After many episodes marked by the complications of their relationship, the splitting of their business and the decadence of their friendship, both surgeons meet in front of the altar and reconcile with each other. The staging of their friendship in front of the altar shows how friendly ties between them are placed above everything else. In this sense, we can say that Sean is, literally, the ‘significant other’ of Christian, as the cake baker assumes when she meets with them as they choose the cake for the wedding; the closeness and complicity between Sean and Christian leads her to affirm that they are ‘the most elegant couple’ she has ever dealt with (‘Madison Berg’ (3.10)). Both scenes have, of



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course, a strong meaning insofar as the relationship between Sean and Troy is a key question of the series. Sean is presented, at the same time, as the opposite, the complement and the idealized reflection of Christian. Their close relationship surpasses the limits of conventions – they share the son, and in a certain way, the wife – evoking again the dandy universe, in which female characters always occupy a second position, displaced by the male characters who act as confidant, counterpart and duplicate of the dandy. Finally, as Baudelaire pointed out, ‘the dandy does not consider love as a special aim in life’ (The Painter of Modern Life), but, on the other hand, as Max Beerbohm observes: ‘the aesthetic vision of a dandy should be bounded by his own mirror’ (Dandies and Dandies, 1898). There is no doubt that Sean is Christian’s mirror, and their relationship is based on symmetry: each part of the couple is simultaneously identical and opposed, just as a person who looks in a mirror is identical and opposed to their reflection. This is perfectly staged in the episode ‘Willy Ward’ (4.14), when Sean sees himself and Christian in Willy Ward and Ralphie’s place. The motif of duplication is crossed here with Sean’s oppressive feelings, as he perceives Christian as a tyrannical extension of himself and, in consequence, decides – again – to split from McNamara–Troy. This perception of Christian and the threat of rupture is a constant throughout the series, and it is clearly related to the consideration of Christian as a parasite and, in parallel, the consideration of plastic surgery as a useless form of medicine. Sean expresses clearly this point of view when they are attending to couple therapy (‘Dr Griffin’ (6.16)) and insists on Christian’s emptiness and the lack of purpose of his life; unlike him – he says – Christian is searching for something that Sean already has, that is, a purpose in life: to help people, to be a doctor, to heal. Once again, Sean presents himself as a respectable doctor, as a man of principles, in total contrast to Christian’s vacuity and superficiality. But these features, which emphasize the dandystic condition of Christian, are crucial in the series finale; precisely this lack of purpose, this superficial form of being, explains Christian’s final decision to dissolve their partnership and allow – almost force – Sean to go on his way. Thus, Christian ends his trajectory in the series with a dandystical acte gratuit: ‘qui n’est pas accompli en vue de tel profit ou récompense, mais qui répond à une impulsion

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secrète, dans lequel ce que l’individu a de plus particulier se révèle, se trahit’ (Gide 1958. p. 1571). Ultimately, Christian’s secret impulse highlights the consistency of the character and reveals the fleeting beauty of this purposeless and generous act in deciding to dissolve the partnership. Conclusion As with all the notorious dandies, Christian’s strength lies in his ability to become an object of his own care and develop a chameleonic performance that usually has the power of destabilize normative discourse. Like all notorious dandies, too, his weakness lies in his relationships with other people, which are always deceptive, or at least problematic. The great contradiction of dandyism is its dependence on another person’s approval, the necessity of being the centre of attention; sometimes, then, the quest for applause drives the dandy to act as a snob. Christian shares with the snob his main feature: the desire to be included in the social class to which he aspires; therefore, his subversive potential vanishes and is replaced by the conventional desire of belonging to an elite, which, in turn, excludes him systematically. This dynamic is evident when Troy and McNamara arrive in California and face a highly corporate environment where they have to initiate a commercial strategy in order to be accepted as plastic surgeons. While Sean accepts with reluctance collaboration with the TV series Hearts and Scalpels, Christian seems desperate for attention and, in consequence, Sean’s success as a TV star disturbs him and leads him into humiliating situations, such as posing nude for a magazine (‘Joyce and Sharon Monroe’ (5.2)) or selling his body to Lulu Grandiron and her friends (‘Lulu Grandiron’ (5.12)). This kind of reaction cannot be seen as a concrete response to the new situation; on the contrary, such narcissistic behaviour is part of who Christian is, as we can see in the revealing dream that shows us all the fears of the surgeon. In this nightmarish ground, Christian will face Sean, who will define him as ‘someone who is so desperate to succeed and recognition’ and doomed to die alone (‘Dr Griffin’ (6.16)). So, Christian perfectly embodies the contradictions of dandyism, as well as of plastic



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surgery and other forms of artificialization of the self, which can be transgressive and provide a frame for the development of agency and individuality and, at the same time, be a dangerous and circular place where individuals are entrapped. The analysis developed about Christian and his connections with the figure of the dandy does not exclude, of course, any other hermeneutic possibilities of the character, but allows me to illuminate some aspects that are basic in understanding him: his care of the self and use of supplementary elements in order to build his own individuality. His interested use of conventions and the conflictive interaction with women have a different appeal if we consider the combination of all of these elements as an imaginative renewal of dandy topics.8 More important is to note that the ideology underlying these topics is present in the whole series: the blurring between public and private issues, truth and lie, surfaces and depths, nature and culture is, in my opinion, the authentic core of Nip/Tuck. In my view, the best aspect of the series is its sharp approach to those subjects focusing on contemporary practices and new technologies – such as plastic surgery – but evoking at the same time old paradigms and images – such as dandyism – that question the idea of a fixed, perennial and immobile self. Notes 1 This point is obvious in the confrontation between the surgeons and the corpse that appears in ‘Frankenlaura’ (3.6): fragmentation, objectification and unknown identity are the main features of a body whose monstruous condition is emphasized by the title of the episode. 2 I am using the concept of supplement established by Derrida, intended as an accretion and substitution (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1997). 3 This relationship can be seen as a way of compensating for his tortured past: we know that Christian was rejected and abandoned by his mother, as well as abused when he was a child. 4 The dandystic ideal of self-transformation is often mixed, in the narratives of the nineteenth century, with narratives of construction of artificial beings; then, the artistic values are often combined with technological and scientific plots, as occurs in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve. On the other hand, as Gilman points out, the ideals of classical beauty hold an important

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function in aesthetic surgery, and it is usual to find documents that emphasize the parallelism between surgeon and artist (preferably sculptor). Part of this identification is based on the obsession about symmetry and proportions: note that Dr Troy expresses the same obsession many times, when he affirms that symmetry is perfection (see ‘Pilot’ (1.1)). This feature is shared by other dandystic characters in the series. In the funeral eulogy to Mrs Grubman, Christian points out how her cult of beauty drove her to a life of isolation (‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8)) Another example of isolation is Dr Barrington Moore, who was abandoned by his ‘work of art’, Ava Moore, and decided to work with orchideas because they are precious and don’t go away (‘Joan Rivers’ (2.16)). In the case of Dr Moore, the dandystic characterization is emphasized by many iconographic elements (the yellow handkerchief and the attire of the character, or the garden full of statues that reminds us of the resemblance between art, sculpture and plastic surgery, as I noted above). See Beizer 1994 and Didi-Huberman 2004. In fact, marriage is already used for convenience by Christian at the end of Season Five, when he marries Liz believing that he will die of cancer shortly after. The performed version of love and affection developed by Christian in the preceeding chapters vanishes the moment he knows he is healthy, and he immediately gets divorced from Liz. The problems with women are perfectly shown in the episode ‘Diana Lubey’ (4.12), when Christian sees ‘the ghosts’ of his lovers before he leaves his apartment. The girls express their doubts about the future of the relationship between Michelle and Christian, citing, among other reasons, his fear of intimacy and engagement and his unfaithfulness.

Works Cited Balsamo, Anne, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, Duke University Press, 1996. Beizer, Janet, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth Century France, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge, 1990. ——— Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Didi-Huberman, George, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.



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Foucault, Michel, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: University of Massachussets Press, 1988. Garelick, Rhonda K., Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin-de-Siècle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Gide, André, Romans Récits et Soties Œuvres Lyriques, Paris: Gallimard, 1958. Hustvedt, Asti, ‘Science Fictions: The Future Eves of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Jean Martin Charcot’, in A. Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader, New York: Zone Books, 1998. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, 1982. Negrin, Llewellyn, ‘Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity’, Body and Society 8 (4) (2002): 21–42. Showalter, E., Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, Frome and London: Bloomsbury, 1991.

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quality exploitation: nip/tuck and the politics of provocation in FX dramas Concepción Cascajosa Virino

We live in the new golden age of television. There is no doubt about it. Quality television is all around, especially in terms of drama: on network television, on basic cable and on premium cable. Hundreds of thousands of viewers flood the internet with websites and long posts hailing the virtues of their favourite series. Critics admit that they do not have time enough to watch every episode of every worthy programme. And the voters in all kind of annual awards face such a difficult task (choosing the best out of the very good) that uproar when possible nominees are ignored is now a well-established tradition. The face of drama has changed dramatically over the last few years, at a fast and furious pace that has had a dizzying effect on small-screen writers. What were exceptions or heroic efforts in the past – the use of large ensemble casts, serial narrative structures, complex multilayered storylines, flashbacks, morally ambiguous characterizations, elaborate references to high and popular culture and sophisticated themes – are now not just commonplace, but almost the rule of thumb. At the same time, we are witnessing exploitative elements of television that challenge taboos and transcend the limits of decency,



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proper manners and even good taste: explicit sex, gross violence and filthy language. For many, these are an expression of audacity, freedom and creativity, the rich display of the personal worlds of their creators, who dare to show the complexities of contemporary life. But for many others, they are a sign of the times, examples of moral bankruptcy that must be prosecuted and defeated. For them, the quality television vindicated by critics is a misnomer and we are living in a vast wasteland. And this time it is the real thing. Along with the War on Terror, conservative groups are fighting the War on Indecency. To accomplish their mission, members of the Parents Television Council have developed what they call the Entertainment Tracking System, a database of 100,000 hours of programming that has been scrutinized for sexual content, violence and profanities. For L. Brent Bozell, leader of the PTC, the wake-up call was the debut of NYPD Blue (ABC: 1993–2005): ‘Suddenly it became artistic to see Dennis Franz’s rear end.’1 While, for many, quality television is associated with complex texts with relevant aesthetic values, others believe that it is limited to family entertainment with moral values. Nip/Tuck is one of the most extreme cases of a problematic that cannot be ignored by television scholars. This television series, labelled ‘a disturbingly perfect drama’ by its promoters, is a quality adult drama about long-term relationships and the obsession with beauty in advanced societies, especially in America. Heralded by the critics during its first couple of seasons and a commercial success since the première episode, Nip/Tuck won the Golden Globe for the best television drama and has been frequently nominated for many other industry accolades. But Nip/Tuck employs every resort available in terms of exploitative content, including dozens of explicit plastic surgeries, sexual violence and even a serial killer. Ryan Murphy and his fellow Nip/Tuck producers dare to tread every territory, using surgery as a metaphor for sexual perversions, psychological traumas and social inequalities. Talking about the fourth season première, Matt Roush, TV Guide’s most ardent defender of the show, said: ‘There are moments when FX’s Nip/Tuck is so graphically and proudly filthy, I feel like washing my eyes and ears out with soap.’2 The result is a high-concept and low-brow text that is always on the verge of schizophrenia.

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The Brand Identity of FX drama On 14 September 2002, in the traditional Primetime Emmy Awards, everything was happening as expected, with the triumph in the main categories of the most relevant programmes of the past season, including The West Wing (NBC: 1999–2006), Six Feet Under (HBO: 2001–2005) and 24 (Fox: 2001–). But when the turn came for the Best Actor in a Drama Series award, against all odds, a thespian who was probably unfamiliar to most of the attendees took to the stage and collected the coveted trophy. His name was Michael Chiklis and he was being recognized for his work on The Shield (FX: 2002–), which also earned nominations for Best Drama Writing and Best Drama Direction. The day marked the legitimation of a programming plan that was producing great results sooner than expected. Created in 1994 as a subsidiary of the News Corporation conglomerate, owned by the magnate Rupert Murdoch, FX had strong corporate ties with the Fox network and the famed 20th Century Fox studio. The then-fx failed to attract viewers with its experiments with interactivity, and in 1997 the channel, now led by former marketing executive Peter Liguori, was renamed and relaunched as FX. The new plan was to reach a very precise demographic, men aged 18–49, but a programming schedule full of Fox-produced series did not develop a strong brand identity until the channel made a strong investment in original fiction. In a 2003 interview, Liguori explained what he was trying to accomplish: ‘Original programming on a basic cable network has two functions: deliver eyeballs and audience for advertisers and raise the profile of the network for cable affiliates and subscribers. It’s incumbent on us in cable to really push the creative envelope to create a breakthrough show.’3 Liguori, who left FX in 2005 after being hired as programming chief of the Fox network, greenlighted a dozen series, primarily dramas, with the goal of distinguishing FX from the more-than-fivehundred existing cable channels. The model was HBO, the premium cable channel that was revolutionizing the television panorama by courting established television writers, the treatment of taboo topics and genre hybridism. But it was not an easy task. The basic cable channel, like the premium channel, is free from the Decency Codes of the Federal Communication



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Commission, but violence, sex and profanities must be limited so as not to scare off prospective advertisers. And FX has a smaller budget than HBO, making it difficult to attract first-class talent. So the channel has offered chances to lesser-known writers and producers that are willing to break the rules. The idea that FX is the poor man’s HBO is so clear that it was acknowledged by Shawn Ryan, the creator of The Shield: They [Peter Liguori and then FX executive Kevin Reilly] felt that there was a place for programming aimed at intelligent adults that went farther in content than the networks did, but didn’t go full blown, anything goes, the way HBO and Showtime did. There are people who have basic cable, but didn’t want to pay the extra for HBO but still wanted to see HBO quality material.4 FX earned critical and ratings success with its three first dramas (the triumvirate formed by The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me), but has also suffered its fair share of failures since then: Lucky (2003), Over There (2005), Thief (2006), Dirt (2007) … Talent and opportunity aside, the key to the early success was developing series that belonged to popular genres. The Shield is a cop show, Nip/Tuck a medical drama and Rescue Me more or less a cop show featuring firemen as the main characters. All three seek the demystification of professions associated with responsibility and dedication to the public. In the final moments of the pilot of The Shield, its protagonist Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) kills in cold blood a fellow officer who was going to expose him, making a 180-degree turn in what to that point was almost a reprise of Serpico (1973, Sidney Lumet). In the second season, Vic Mackey burns the face of a paedophile on a stove, and in the fourth an interrogation goes terribly wrong when a Russian henchman is blown up. Tommy Gavin, the central character in Rescue Me, is no angel either. A chronically depressed alcoholic, Gavin rapes his ex-wife in the third season, not long after being an accomplice in the murder of the drunk driver who killed his son. Thanks to these storylines, FX is the bête noire of the American Family Association, which has called for boycotts on almost every one of its programmes, even comedies like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But although the AFA announced via its

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official website that 15 companies have withdrawn their ads from the channel, FX is a firm believer that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Nip/Tuck and the Quality Television Canon In his influential book Television’s Second Golden Age, Robert J. Thompson analysed the dramas that exemplified the renaissance of the genre in the 1980s. The study of such shows as Hill Street Blues (NBC: 1981–1987), St. Elsewhere (NBC: 1982–1988), Moonlighting (ABC: 1985–1989) and thirtysomething (ABC: 1987–1991) served Thompson to compose a list of 12 criteria that define quality television: it is not regular TV, it has aesthetic pedigree, it attracts demographically blue-chip audiences, it struggles against unappreciative audiences and network executives, it tends to have large ensemble casts and multiple plot-lines, it has memory, it creates new genres by mixing old ones, it is literary and writer-based, it is self-conscious, it tends towards the controversial, it aspires to realism and its outcome is critical acclaim.5 This list was probably not created as a canon, but it achieved scholarly celebrity and became just that. But we cannot overlook the fact that contemporary television is very different from the way it was in the 1980s: the industry and the audience have changed. Maybe back then, quality was equal to realism, but fantasy or sci-fi programmes like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (WB: 1997–2001, UPN: 2001–2003), Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel: 2003–) and Lost (ABC: 2004–) are proof that this is no longer valid. We can also question the audience criteria in Thompson’s list. Niche programmes produced by cable channels do not aspire to be Nielsen juggernauts and are successful in their own terms. For basic cable channels like FX or Sci-Fi the key is modest budgets and realistic expectations, while for HBO and Showtime, premium outlets, the success of a series is equivalent to its prestige. DVD sales and international rights guarantee the profits for the production companies. Thompson’s canonical list was never meant to be the Twelve Commandments for Quality, so we cannot resort to forced interpretations to counteract its dated elements. But it is still a highly



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useful guide for defining what makes a certain kind of television fascinating for the average viewer and challenging for academic scholars. Nip/Tuck is quality television and at least four criteria from the list help us explain why: it has aesthetic pedigree, has memory, creates new genres by mixing old ones and tends towards the controversial. We will devote a longer analysis to the final criterion because the shocking methods the producers use to make social commentary are the most characteristic feature of the series. Nip/Tuck has aesthetic pedigree, but in a particular way. Ryan Murphy was not considered a television auteur before he created the series, although one previous effort, the high school dramedy Popular (WB: 1999–2001), was well regarded by the critics and a modest commercial success during the first of its two seasons. But Murphy’s prestige has grown exponentially over the last few years and he is now a sought-after talent by the cinema industry. In 2006, he directed his first film, Running with Scissors, which earned its main star Annette Bening a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. Murphy’s interest in pursuing a career in feature films cast a shadow on the future of the series but the FX executives, believing that Murphy is one of Nip/Tuck’s prize assets, signed a lucrative agreement with him for 15 million dollars, which includes a commitment for Murphy to continue on the series for three more seasons and develop new projects for the Fox network.6 Assuming that Nip/Tuck is a modest production without big names in the cast (Julian McMahon was the only one with a previous cult following thanks to the recurring role of the demon Cole in Charmed (WB: 1998–2006)), Ryan Murphy enhanced Nip/Tuck’s pedigree by pursuing celebrities to make guest-star appearances. Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave was the first to join the series in the recurring role of the mother of her real-life daughter Joely Richardson. Famke Janssen, Anne Heche, Brooke Shields, Rosie O’Donnell, Jacqueline Bissett, Alanis Morrisette, Larry Hagman and Sharon Gless were later hired in recurring roles, while Joan Rivers, Richard Chamberlain, Catherine Deneuve, Lauren Hutton and Marlee Matlin visited the McNamara–Troy office in different episodes. This way, Nip/Tuck has achieved sufficient pedigree to attract even bigger names: Sandra Bullock and Madonna were at one point expected to make guest stints in the fifth season of the series. The

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appearances of these celebrities were not mere stunt casting to raise the profile of the series in the mainstream media, but were also a sardonic reference to the futility of beauty. Richard Chamberlain plays a decadent gay playboy who forces his much younger companion to have plastic surgery he does not need in ‘Blu Mondae’ (4.2), while Catherine Deneuve is a woman trying to get a plastic surgeon to implant her married lover’s ashes in her breasts in ‘Diana Lubey’ (4.12). Both are former sex-symbols who have seen better times in their careers and their roles inspire more pity than anything else, but their glamour is not entirely over. Sean is attracted by Deneuve’s character (a woman desperately in love) enough to perform an unethical operation, while Chamberlain’s presence is an ironic echo of the young and idealistic doctor he played in Dr Kildare (NBC: 1961–1966). Nip/Tuck, as has been the case with most contemporary dramas, has mixed the episodic structure (the week’s surgery) with serial storylines involving the failed marriage between Sean and Julian, Sean and Christian’s uneven friendship and the menacing serial killer the Carver. Some of the best plots so far have slowly built memory into the narrative: the idea that Christian was Matt’s father was planted in the first season, only to be developed in the second. But the use of memory in Nip/Tuck has been more effective with every passing season through the surprise and sometimes clever return of recurring characters. Christian’s unstable ex-lover Gina, introduced in ‘Kurt Dempsey’ (1.5), is a recurring character during the first two seasons of the series and her pregnancy is used by Christian to seek the path to redemption, even after discovering during childbirth that the baby is not his. Gina’s character arc seems over when she find out she is HIV positive and falls sick in ‘Sean McNamara’ (2.15), but, in a twist, she makes an impressive comeback in ‘Frankenlaura’ (3.6) alive, healthy and on the way to becoming a career woman. She arrives just in time to see McNamara–Troy on the verge of bankruptcy after the Carver fallout: life’s highs and lows. She retains this competence when working with Julia at the spa, facilitating through her compulsive sexuality rather as much as she causes problems. The old, hysterical Gina returns in ‘Willy Ward’ (4.14) reclaiming the custody of Wilbur, her son, after learning that, following the death of his biological father, he is living with Christian and his new



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bride Michelle. In a plot straight from a TV-movie, Gina kidnaps Wilbur, but quickly realizes that motherhood is not her thing. The coincidence that allows Wilbur to re-enter the narrative is timely to help Christian settle as a family man, something as surprising and unexpected as the rest of references to family values in the series. When she joins the practice as receptionist (‘Rachel Ben Natan’ (5.9)), she is competent except when settling old scores with Julia; Christian has her fired and she falls to her death having sex with him for old times’ sake. Her funeral (‘Kyle Ainge’ (5.11)) is full of other sex-addicts talking of her caring and competence; our last impression of her are her dying words ‘This is Love’, which echo in Christian’s mind as he looks down at her broken corpse. But the best example of the use of memory in Nip/Tuck is the role of Escobar Gallardo, the drug dealer who tortures Christian in the pilot episode while looking for the paedophile Silvio. After being arrested in the final episode of the debut season, Escobar returns three years later. First, he haunts a daydreaming Sean McNamara, telling him to kill the nanny he slept with while Julia was still pregnant. But when Sean regains emotional stability, the real-life Escobar re-enters the narrative, awfully disfigured by a fire during a failed assassination attempt. The drug dealer escapes after reconstructive surgery, but Escobar’s plan to add charges to his criminal records is foiled by his own wife, who uses Liz’s gun to exact revenge in ‘Gala Gallardo’ (4.15). The ironic sequence that follows is a tribute to loyal viewers’ memory: Sean, Christian and Liz buy fresh meat, offer the local crocodiles a feast in the form of Escobar’s body and clean the car. Sean and Christian did the same thing with Silvio’s body four years earlier, even with the same clothes (Sean’s white t-shirt and Christian’s red shirt). The idea of repetition that characterizes the episodic narrative (the same characters doing the same thing in the same place) is used here to build a serial narrative that goes full-circle. It provides a fitting tribute to where it all started, just before McNamara–Troy moves to Hollywood in the last minutes of the fourth season finale. Hybridism of genres is also a main feature of Nip/Tuck, which can be defined as a medical drama, a serial opera, a makeover show, and a thriller. The setting for the series is a medical clinic and its main characters are a pair of surgeons, so it is easy to place Nip/Tuck

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among the doctor dramas that are always so popular on American television. But the plastic surgery setting is a clear sign that Sean McNamara and Christian Troy are not your average good doctors in the vein of what Horace Newcomb had to say about ‘counselor and confessor’ professionals like Marcus Welby: ‘Their compassion and wisdom extend into all areas of society, to all age groups, and to all types of individuals.’7 Ask Christian Troy about the wisdom of sleeping with past, present and prospective clients and he will probably still be pondering whether he enjoyed the sex more with the twin sisters (‘Mandi/Randi’ (1.2)) or the mother and daughter (‘Cindy Plumb’ (4.1)). As a soap opera Nip/Tuck is often highly effective, as in the suicide of Sean’s lover Megan O’Hara to prevent the slow agony of cancer in ‘Adelle Coffin’ (1.10). But it can also be over the top and deceitful. In ‘Sal Perri’ (3.12) Julia McNamara suffocates a burned victim of a plane crash believing she is her mother, only to find that many years of mental torment lie ahead because Erica waited for another flight. Ryan Murphy has acknowledged that Nip/Tuck is a reaction to makeover shows: Those shows are very disturbing to me. There’s usually a one-minute interlude where the patients question, ‘Did I do the right thing?’ but they’re groggy and on painkillers. Then the bandages come off, and they’re transformed. That’s not the truth … All I want to do is explore the reasons you would dislike yourself so much that you would have plastic dress shields shoved up your butt.8 But with its explicit surgeries and troubled patients, Nip/Tuck is another makeover show, just more sophisticated. With the introduction of the Carver, a serial rapist who mutilates the face of his victims, Nip/Tuck became a psycho-sexual thriller, a disjointed and unsuccessful one. Another genre was added to the mix when in ‘Quentin Costa’ (3.15) the identity of the Carver is revealed to be a criminal duo (Quentin the penisless brother and Kit the cop sister) along the lines of ‘Bonnie & Clyde meet the Marquis de Sade’. Their backstory, involving a Catholic orphanage, congenital deformities and incest, was perfect for a Gothic novel. Mixing genres so radically



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different is an efficient way to challenge viewer’s expectations, but also an excuse to free the narrative from its conventions: a doctor serial killer like Quentin is a clever joke on the medical profession. The generic construction of Nip/Tuck is often as provocative as its content. 'Quality TV is Liberal TV': The Shocking Social Commentary of Nip/Tuck In the Nip/Tuck episode ‘Shari Noble’ (4.4), a woman needs reconstructive surgery after having a nipple bitten off by her dog. She wants to be perfect for when her husband returns from a tour in Iraq. Shari is so unhappy in her life as a military wife that she has had an affair, which it is not unusual. The surprise is that her lover is the dog. Nip/Tuck takes advantage of the freedom of cable television to embody what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White thought about the politics of transgression: It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central (like long hair in the 1960s). The low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture.9 The subject matter of Nip/Tuck, as quality television, tends towards the controversial, but with the inspiration that can only be truly efficient if it is also performed in a controversial way. Using bestiality to discuss the domestic consequences of the war in Iraq is the perfect example of what Nip/Tuck’s producers have been doing since the première episode of the series: shocking the viewer to reveal, without institutionalized restriction or compromise, the deep ties between psychological problems and social malaises. At first glance, the graphic nature of the show is only related to the criticism of plastic surgery in general and of makeover shows in particular. In a New York Times interview, Ryan Murphy explained what inspired the gory details of Nip/Tuck: When I was researching the show, one plastic surgeon told me

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that getting your face done is basically the equivalent of going through a car window at 70 miles an hour and surviving. [This is referenced in dialogue in the course of ‘Christian Troy II’ (6.17).] I wanted to do a show that really shows you: if you really want to have this done, there’s a price to be paid on every single level. Surgeries are brutal … I think the public thinks that this is delicate surgery, and these surgeons treat the face as if it were porcelain. And in fact they treat it like it was sirloin.10 These graphic images can be distasteful and even disgusting, but never gratuitous, especially when we observe how their symbolic effectiveness spreads through the fictional universe of the series. One of the most shocking scenes shows Sean having oral, anal and vaginal sex with a sex doll resembling Kimber Henry, one of Christian’s former lovers and a model turned porn star (‘Kimber Henry’ (2.10)). The exploitative nature of the pornography industry is exposed graphically through the idea of womanhood reduced to an object of relief. The scene also tells us a lot about the depression that Sean is suffering due to his separation from his wife Julia, a pain hidden behind the façade of his masculinity. But instead of being accommodating to Sean’s weaknesses, the representation of the selfish nature of his sexual desire inspires sadness and repugnance. Two episodes later, in ‘Julia McNamara’ (2:12), the tragedy of divorce and emotional estrangement is again examined, this time from Julia’s side. After walking into a glass door in the seedy apartment she lives in following the separation, Julia’s cover-girl face is disfigured with cuts and bruises. Only upon seeing the horrific nature of her wounds do Sean and the viewers realize the emotional anguish she is suffering. As part of its progressive ideology, Nip/Tuck shows sympathy for those that society has marginalized. Sometimes the reason for this rejection is the class conflict that is so obvious in the American Way of Life. In ‘Oona Wentworth’ (2.13) a group of Mexican maids seize the opportunity while their wealthy lady boss is out of town to throw a party and hire a cheap plastic surgeon to give them Botox injections. The adverse reaction to the fake Botox is predictable and a particularly scarred woman seeks the help of Sean McNamara, who tries to calm his conscience by doing pro bono work. The Mexican maids only



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aspired to a little piece of the luxury, pleasure and beauty that they are so close to without ever being allowed to enjoy. Social inequalities and the failure to overcome them is also the central theme in ‘Reefer’ (4.13), which is the typical Christmas episode until the last few minutes. The title character is a homeless man who befriends Sean after a couple of verbal arguments about money: why Sean has it and Reefer does not. But beyond the class conflict that keeps them apart, Sean and Reefer have a lot in common: both are alone because their families left them behind and both find comfort in drinking. This unlikely friendship develops when Sean allows Reefer to stay in the recovery room for the night, enjoying a clean bed for the first time in many years. But we are denied the happy ending we are anticipating. The other occupant of the recovery room is James, who is blackmailing Christian’s girlfriend Michelle into making her use her medical training to extract organs for the black market. Reefer’s fate is ironic: an alcoholic, he is going to die to provide two fresh kidneys. The explicit image of his missing chest skin, his body cut open, his empty torso, is eloquent. Robbed of his dignity for years, now the time has come for what was left. Since the first season, the mutilation of the body has been used as a mechanism for domination and control. In ‘Antonia Ramos’ (1.12), Sean and Christian are forced by Escobar Gallardo to operate on a female drug courier whose breast implants are used to carry heroin and who will later develop a serious infection. And in ‘Kiki’ (3.2) it is the turn of a rehabilitated ex-gangster whose tattoos are removed using laser technology and later reinstalled using a knife when his former gang mates find him. The most extreme case of shocking social commentary can be found in the final episode of the third season, ‘Quentin Costa’ (3.15). While the main plot is devoted to revealing the identity of the Carver, Matt McNamara is kidnapped by his ex-girlfriend’s father and forced to amputate the phallus of a transsexual waiting for a sex-change operation. The horrific scene is the convergence of two plots involving Matt. The first is his relationship with Ariel Alderman, a neo-Nazi high school student who burns her face with a skin-bleaching cream trying to hide her black ancestry. The self-inflicted wound is a symbol of Ariel’s inability to come to terms with her ethnic identity, the same challenge affecting Matt regarding his sexual identity. In

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the second plot, after finding out that his lover Ava was a transsexual, the disturbed Matt loses control and beats a transsexual woman, Cherry, in a sexual encounter when he discovers that she still has a penis. But finally Matt makes amends to Cherry, whose face has been repaired by Sean, and even goes to a mall with her to buy some makeup, realizing that his sexual identity is not threatened any more. Matt chooses Cherry over Ariel, self-acceptance over self-denial, but a happy ending would be a mere fallacy. He is haunted by his violent past the same way he is haunted by Ariel’s father. The sexual mutilation is later followed in the episode by another primal fear when Matt partially buries Cherry alive, although finally an empowered Cherry rises from the grave and shoots her neo-Nazi attacker. We cannot find the politics of Nip/Tuck in elaborate speeches or clever reference to real-world events, but this does not mean that it is not a political show. In Season Five, to offer another revealing example from the series in later seasons, Nip/Tuck offer a sharp commentary on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict when Rachel (Maggie Siff), Matt’s counsellor, finds out that she has inside her body small pieces of the teeth and some bone fragments of the suicide bomber who horrifically scarred her. She sends the remains to the parents of the suicide bomber, a metaphor of the generosity and forgiveness needed to achieve peace in the Middle East (‘Rachel Ben Natan’ (5.9)). Jane Feuer, in her sharp examination of the MTM style, claims that quality television is liberal television, a daring statement she supports by suggesting that programmes like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS: 1970–1977) and Hill Street Blues offer an alternative to the nuclear family within such oppressive institutional contexts as a TV station and police precinct.11 Nip/Tuck is a medical drama about two doctors with more than enough lust, greed, pride and wrath. We cannot expect moral lessons from them, but with every new patient it is possible to learn about the pain inflicted on others and ourselves. Since its première episode, the politics of provocation of Nip/Tuck have been challenging the codes and conventions of television, but not because of the sex scenes or the filthy language. Willing to make an elaborate comment on the miseries of the contemporary world, Ryan Murphy chose to nip and tuck the reality without anaesthesia.



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The result is often over the top, but also full of emotional authenticity. Wishful thinking is an expression of indulgence and conformity. The shocks provided by Nip/Tuck are testimony of a time when we cannot take anything for granted. So its exploitative style is the necessary accessory for stimulating social commentary. In the series, the viewer often sees Julian McMahon’s rear end during the sexual exploits of his character Christian Troy. But we can rest assured that Nip/Tuck is artistic for a lot of other reasons. Notes 1 James Poniewozik, ‘The Decency Police’, Time, 20 March 2005, at http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1039672,00.html. 2 Matt Roush, ‘Shock Docs’, TVGuide, 30 August 2006, at http://tvguide.com/ News-Views/Columnists/Roush-Review/default.aspx?posting={B815EC33AD7D-43EE-9500-22B0E36E1DD0}. 3 Jay Sherman, ‘Cable Debates Originals vs. Off-Net’, Television Week, 22.35 (2003), at http://www.tvweek.com/article.cms?articleId=20418. 4 Wayne Walley, ‘Interview with Shawn Ryan’, World Screen, April 2003, at http://www.worldscreen.com/interviewsarchive.php?filename=0403ryan.txt. 5 Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age, New York: Continuum, 1996, pp. 13–15. 6 Michael Schneider and Michael Fleming, ‘Fox, F/X Tuck in Murphy’, Variety, 15 February, at http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117959568. html. 7 Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, New York: Anchor Books, 1974, p. 116. 8 James Poniewozik, ‘Trading Faces’, Time, 30 June 2003, at http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,461869-2,00.html. 9 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, pp. 5–6. 10 Mim Udovitch, ‘The Cutting Edge of Television: A Bloody Scalpel’, The New York Times, 3 August 2003, Arts and Leisure Desk, p. 22. 11 Jane Feuer, ‘The MTM Style’, in Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr and Tise Vahimagi (eds), MTM: Quality Television, London: British Film Institute, 1984, pp. 56–58.

8 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

a double concerto: Sean and Christian as single-bodied conjoined twins Susan Santha Kerns

‘Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.’ This statement opens almost every episode of Nip/Tuck, yet in ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9) it becomes absurd. Instead of sitting across their desk from someone who wants breast implants or a tummy tuck, Sean and Christian find themselves face to face with craniopagus conjoined twins – twins joined at the head. What don’t these twins like about themselves? The answer seems too obvious for a single-bodied person, or singleton1: asking would be an insult. What they must not like about themselves is living as adult women who lack the freedom to experience life individually. Yet this is not what they don’t like about themselves: Rose’s cancer is. Their twinness is simply the reason for McNamara–Troy’s visit to them. What follows is an examination of ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’: a moment in the series Nip/Tuck that disrupts the established narrative structure of the show to emphasize the emotional relationship between the two main protagonists. Most episodes involve minor crises that are rationalized, and then resolved, through thematic links to the surgeries performed that week. In this



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episode, the clean cause-and-effect structure is set aside to foreground tensions in Sean and Christian’s relationship with one another through an elaborate exploration of the ‘twinness’ of their existence, which includes their plastic surgery practice, their love for Julia, and, as recently learned, their joint relationship as Matt’s father. In ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’, the conjoined twins’ bodies act as a substitute identity for Sean and Christian, thus the episode really is not about the visible physicality of conjoined twins or potential separation complications. Instead, it explores the bonds that unite Sean and Christian, and each man’s inability to function without his counterpart. Rose and Raven provide an example of pleasant, lifelong collaboration for Sean and Christian, and, as such, Rose and Raven’s twinned bodies become the norm against which the men’s single bodies are defined. However, Rose and Raven are also women upon whom the men project their anxieties about being codependent upon, if not subsumed by, one another. Sean and Christian are the conjoined twins here, and Matt is their bonding tissue. In ‘Agatha Ripp’ (2.8), Sean learns that Christian is Matt’s biological father. Sean is the last to know, as Julia, Christian and Matt all discovered this secret earlier in the season. Sean and Julia are fighting with Matt about his ongoing relationship with Ava, and Liz recently aborted her baby with Christian. All of these complications are put on hold here to examine Sean and Christian’s relationship as Sean considers disbanding the practice. This type of narrative break is an anomaly both for this show and in serial television more generally. To provide a quick definition, serials include multiple protagonists who allow for simultaneous storylines. Episodes begin in medias res; thus most characters’ long-term motivations are already clear, though new complications are introduced as older situations get resolved. Despite the fact that cause–effect situations in serials are disrupted more regularly than in self-contained television series (like sitcoms), serials still often include mini-climaxes, even several times per episode, as subplots are worked out. Some of these things still apply to this episode. Certainly the matter of the twins’ separation is settled, albeit through their deaths. And, at the end, Sean and Christian will continue working together. However, Julia’s, Matt’s, Liz’s, and even Christian’s other storylines reside in narrative purgatory until ‘Kimber Henry’ (2.10), at which time they resume forward progression.

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Most Nip/Tuck episodes follow the same structure: there are about 15 scenes, the first of which occurs in the McNamara–Troy offices, where patients describe their ailments. A surgery then takes place while either the doctors or outsiders discuss the larger implications of the surgery. Scenes of the main protagonists’ daily lives follow, balanced by those highlighting the surgeries and their accompanying themes, which apply to various subplot developments. Another surgery is performed to prove, disprove, or resolve the patient’s main complication or a minor patient’s problem. More scenes illustrate how the characters’ daily lives reflect the episode’s theme, often resulting in increased interpersonal complications and a new cliffhanger. The theme then achieves closure, and the patient is back in the world. However, in ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9), the narrative structure differs. While the same number of scenes is included, this episode opens in a lawyer’s office; the lawyer, in effect, asks Sean and Christian to tell her what they don’t like about themselves. This immediately upsets a viewer’s standard entry into the show, as the spectator reflects upon facets of Sean and Christian’s relationship rather than the conflicts in which the men are involved. Breaking up the practice is never really an option,2 and the men do not seek counselling to address how best to approach their joint fathering of Matt. The same icy blues and earthy browns of the McNamara–Troy office dominate this scene, as if to not disrupt the spectator’s expectations too much. In this scene, symmetrically composed shots show Sean and Christian balancing the frame, divided only by the lawyer. Such visual symmetry helps establish their twinness – and separation – as overshadowing all other concerns. Christian begins verbalizing this: CHRISTIAN: You’re my brother, Sean. SEAN: Brothers don’t sleep with each other’s wives. Christian suggests a couples’ counsellor for business partnerships on the rocks – and then a ‘cooling off’ period, which Sean also rejects. Christian retorts, saying, ‘Fine. But it won’t be a mole removal. You want out? It’s going to get invasive.’ This sentence establishes the similarities between the surgeons’ and the twins’ connected bodies.



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This episode further diverges from the standard structure of the show by spending nearly the entire time focusing on the main surgical operation, including its preparation, aftermath, and thematic relevance to the lives of the two main protagonists. Viewers see far less of the daily lives of supporting characters such as Julia, Matt, or Liz, and there is no grand impact of the surgery on the world at large. Usually, the show imparts some message about being careful what you wish for, being happy with your body, believing in science over mysticism, telling the truth, or accepting people. Here, the only message is that Sean and Christian are just like Rose and Raven: they cannot function without one another. Furthermore, the main surgery ends in disaster. One twin dies physically, and the other dies emotionally upon learning of her sister’s death. She too, then, physically dies, at which point Sean and Christian cosmetically reverse their work by reconnecting the sisters for burial. Sean and Christian do at times experience return visits from patients (good or bad), but rarely is their work completely undone. One way to understand the anomalous structure of this episode is by considering Kristin Thompson’s notion of ‘art television’. In her book Storytelling in Film and Television, she uses David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and David Bordwell’s definition of ‘art cinema’ to create a classification of ‘art television’ that distinguishes itself from both classical serial television and postmodern programming. In recapping Bordwell’s 1979 article ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Thompson summarizes ‘art cinema’ as including, ‘a loosening of causality, a greater emphasis on psychological or anecdotal realism, violations of the classical clarity of space and time, explicit authorial comment, and ambiguity’ (p. 110). 3 Thompson describes the ‘loosening of causality’ as moving between the ‘real’, the ‘imagined’, and ‘flashbacks’ (pp. 110–11), which to some extent are present in the episode. The show delves deeply into Sean’s psyche, thus providing a more in-depth focus on psychological realism. (A considerable amount is also learned about Christian.) Though breaks in classical space and time are limited, mostly seen through disjunctive4 sequences while Sean gets drunk on the plane and at a bar, the ambiguity of the episode leaves viewers with myriad questions, thus providing ‘an alternative approach to narrative’ (p. 112). Thompson says this narrative ambiguity is created in part by Twin Peaks’s structure: the

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goal of finding Laura Palmer’s killer continues to be drawn out without much concern for its resolution. The other characters and their odd lives become the show’s core. A similar situation occurs in this episode of Nip/Tuck, as Sean and Christian’s complicated bond dominates all other concerns normally present. The heart of ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9) lies in the need to probe Sean’s psychological state after he discovers the truth about Matt; he uses the Rosenberg twins to do so. Not only do Sean and Christian visit a lawyer to discuss dissolving their business contract, but they also travel to a university to perform surgery on conjoined sisters, hire a prostitute to ‘be’ Julia and have sex with both of them, and surgically reconnect the sisters before realizing the symbiotic nature of their own relationship – and their complete inability to split. Through this examination, the show illustrates how Sean does not, indeed cannot, experience the world on his own; Christian and he are bound together eternally – pleasurably or otherwise. This realization that Sean’s body is not his own, just as his son’s body is not his own, ultimately leads viewers to contemplate the ambiguous nature of ‘selfhood’ in the world. Elizabeth Grosz, in describing the ‘intolerable ambiguity’ of ‘freak’ bodies such as transgendered individuals or conjoined twins, writes (p. 65): Fascination with the monstrous is testimony to our tenuous hold on the image of perfection. The freak confirms the viewer as bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category. The viewer’s horror lies in the recognition that this monstrous being is at the heart of his or her own identity, for it is all that must be ejected or abjected from self-image to make the bounded, categoryobeying self possible. In other words, what is at stake in the subject’s dual reaction to the freakish or bizarre individual is its own narcissism, the pleasures and boundaries of its own identity, and the integrity of its received images of self. All of these things are up for grabs for Sean. His ‘perfect’ marriage is quickly disintegrating, his son no longer belongs to him in the same way, his best friend has betrayed him, and his professional situation is at a precipice. For Sean, gazing at the Rosenberg twins could represent any number of things – say the pinnacle of his pro



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bono work or the idea that although he has emotionally struggled, these women grapple with far more complex prejudices daily – but what they represent to him is a bounded and dual friendship, and the stakes of disconnecting that situation. Sean wants to be and think ‘singly’, but he cannot. However, the situation is never as horrific for Sean (and even less so for Christian) as Grosz implies, which speaks to the transgressive position this episode takes: conjoined twin bodies represent the norm by which singleton bodies are defined. From the beginning of the episode, everything sets up the viewer to see Christian and Sean as conjoined twins, as they are brothers, lovers, spouses and business partners. Brothers don’t sleep with each other’s wives? Technically, and depending on how one defines ‘sleep with’, conjoined brothers do. Conjoined twins are also, deliberately or not, spouses and business associates. Even though Lori and Reba Schappell (the conjoined twins who play Rose and Raven, respectively) have different professions, both attend work with one another. If we see Sean and Christian as conjoined twins living intertwined lives, this unsettles ideas that normative bodies need be singular. By acknowledging the suggestion that their two bodies are one, preparing to undergo a major, invasive surgical operation – a separation surgery – and then, by the end of the episode, rebuking the desirability of single lives, the show admonishes notions that independent, ‘free’ bodies are one step closer to perfection than are twinned, conjoined bodies. While most television shows – fiction or otherwise – promote the ideal of separation for conjoined twins and then explore how, why and to what effect separation occurs, Nip/Tuck takes a cue from Lori and Reba Schappell and instead celebrates the togetherness of two bodies living in harmony despite adversity. The lawyer in this first scene reiterates this point, stating: ‘Apart, you guys are nowhere near as strong as you are together – not at this phase in your lives.’ She is, of course, speaking financially, but Christian takes her literally. Sean, who needs more convincing, instead refers to Christian as ‘dead weight’. The staging of beds later in the episode also illustrates these bonds: Sean and Christian need to come together as one twinned body in one joined bed with one fantastically doubled woman before they fully recognize the conjoined nature of their relationship. Afterwards, their union will remain intact even

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with the beds pulled apart and despite the fact that they have not fully made up. With Rose and Raven, the opposite but same occurs; their beds are pulled apart temporarily during the separation surgery – and for the first time ever – only for them to discover that they cannot live singleton lives, indeed have no ‘soul’ left for it. Thus, their beds are pushed back together during the show’s resolution so that Sean and Christian can reconnect them. Most scholarship on conjoined twins in popular culture takes the singleton as the norm or means against which conjoined bodies are discussed and valued. Single bodies become idealized, if not fetishized. However, the inverse is true here, which unsettles the idea of the singleton as model body and therefore upsets well-established traditions of representing conjoined twins in films like Chained for Life (1951), Sisters (1973), Basket Case (1982), Stuck on You (2003), and even episode (3.10) of Grey’s Anatomy: ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ (2006). In each of these films or television shows, conjoined bodies are questioned for their ability to function ‘normally’ in romantic relationships and social situations – sometimes comically, and sometimes with murderous results. Perhaps most egregious in their fetishization of singletons are separation documentaries, which often relegate the humans in twinned bodies to a sum of parts to be parcelled out as if chunks of meat at a butcher’s shop. Not just a collection of too many parts (and sometimes, simultaneously not enough), conjoined twins are largely individual despite how television and films portray them or what singletons might want to believe. J. David Smith’s book Psychological Profiles of Conjoined Twins argues this point as a means of reconsidering how psychology is understood more broadly. He writes (p. xx): ‘The evidence concerning diversities in the lives of Siamese twins [sic] should cause us to reexamine some of the prevailing assumptions in psychological research. It should also provoke us to question the pervasive view that human characteristics may be reduced to some simple ratio of heredity and environment.’ Issues of both nature and nurture are up for debate, as conjoined twins – the vast majority of whom psychologically differ from one another despite being raised in very comparable, if not identical, situations – complicate how similar factors produce varying results. Lori and Reba Schappell provide an interesting, if extreme, example of this:



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[They] are so obviously different in personality and tastes that when I interviewed Lori I found myself wondering aloud whether she and Reba would be friends if they were not conjoined. Lori thought about it for a moment and answered that she thought they would, but they probably wouldn’t go shopping together. (Dreger, pp. 40–41) Clearly Lori and Reba possess drastically dissimilar personalities; simultaneously, their connectedness is what makes them stand out as noteworthy individuals, just as Sean and Christian’s collective approach to plastic surgery becomes their strength.5 At this point in Nip/Tuck, however, the men argue over the limits of that bond and question what it consists of. Is it Matt? Julia? Their practice? Their history? Ultimately, it is some combination of these things, though Matt causes them the most grief and distance despite truly being jointly theirs – one body shared in complicated ways. Furthermore, Matt’s centrality to their continued conjoined relationship is made clear at the show’s resolution: SEAN: Then there’s Matt – the best thing this partnership ever produced. CHRISTIAN: You raised him, Sean, not me. SEAN: I’ve tried to deny it, Christian, but we raised Matt together. Through good and bad, he’s always the best part of both of us. He still is, and that’s a connection I can’t let die. Julia, throughout this episode, is relegated to a vessel for male action in relation to Matt. When they argue halfway through the episode, Matt ends it by stating: ‘I know I came out of your body, but I don’t feel any connection to you anymore.’ While the women’s roles throughout this show, Julia’s included, might be considered temperately feminist, in this episode, women lose all power and voice to become merely bodies for division, reflection, consumption, or absorption by Sean and Christian. No woman in this episode exists as a single entity, even the usually influential Liz, who recently aborted her baby with Christian. Here she becomes somewhat of a child in her limited screen time. She physically divides Sean and Christian from one another during a

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routine liposuction – literally standing between them at the head of the operating table as each suctions a buttock. When asked to make a choice between the men, she says, ‘You’re not just dismantling a business. You’re dismantling a family.’ She appears torn between whom to choose, like a child considering which parent to live with after a divorce. Throughout this episode, all the women need to be removed or put at the mercy of Sean and Christian in order for the men to re-establish themselves as one – a joint one. In doing so, the singleton women are turned into dual but unhinged figures. Renee, the prostitute, becomes Julia, while Liz, the lawyer, and the woman on the plane are shot similarly (symmetrically dividing spaces otherwise solely occupied by Sean and Christian) until they serve their purpose, which is to highlight the conjoined nature of the men’s relationship, after which they disappear. With women present, Sean and Christian seemingly cannot fully self-actualize; they cannot heal, much less grow. The women further seem to exist solely as bodies onto which Sean and Christian can project fantasies about solitude, betrayal, sex and death. The women have no agency of their own accord. Sean and Christian, on the contrary, have the best of both worlds – singleness in a twinned relationship, the power to stay comfortably conjoined, the ability to penetrate the women of their fantasies, and the comfort of a shared history. What this episode forgoes in making these choices is the chance to add much to conversations about conjoined twins. Again, this is done because Rose and Raven, despite being the theme of the episode, are not the central focus. The doctors ask them preliminary questions about their lives and bodies, but no attempt is made to break new ground in understanding conjoined twins; they are merely spectacle. Even when the women speak for themselves, it is set up by their mother for a group of surgeons. The questions asked are standard for documentaries, fiction films, literature and news articles about conjoined twins: if one feels something, does the other? What happens when one of them wants to go to bed and the other is not tired? Do they date? During this question-and-answer session, the camera spends far more time on Rose, who is larger and whose face is more clearly visible. The viewer sees a couple of reverse shots of Raven, but her face is more obscured by their connecting tissue, and the camera only lingers on her once Christian speaks. Rose



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comments that Christian is ‘cute’, and Raven wants to see him. Rose swings Raven around to look. Raven’s hand gesture and ‘Mmm’ response suggest she has seen better. Some might argue that this represents a reversal of the gaze – all four eyes are on Christian. The gaze is not convincingly reversed or even played with here, though, because Christian derives so much power from women looking at him. More interesting is that Christian does not retain control of this situation. Instead, when Rose says to him, ‘We wanted to talk to you about what we’re going to look like after’, Sean replies and effectively silences Christian, whose question is now replaced with Sean and Rose’s discussion. Though lacking the agency to express himself feminizes Christian here, he does not occupy the same position as the women. When Rose says they want to look ‘as much alike as possible’, the mise-en-scène returns to the symmetry of the earlier shots in which women’s bodies separate Christian and Sean. Although Sean has silenced Christian, they still balance one another and are the bodies through which each maintains his equilibrium. Notably, the twins wear red pants – the same red as the woman who sits between the men on the plane. Christian seems warmer and more amiable, as he does through most of the series, while Sean looks cool and stoic, like a stone-cold doctor, which is also common for him. SEAN: Have you thought about what it’s going to be like to be separated? (Christian gives him a look.) SEAN: Any fantasies about being alone for the first time? RAVEN: No. ROSE: No. SEAN: You must have at least considered it – dreamed about it? The amazing sense of freedom and release? ROSE: I had a dream we were once separated. Then, I got scared and reached out for Raven, but she wasn’t there. CHRISTIAN: So if you had the choice, you’d stay together? ROSE: Of course. I hate my cancer. I feel so guilty. RAVEN: It’s not your fault, Rose. I’m the one who feels guilty because I’m not strong enough to handle your chemo. (They grab hands.) For you, being together is hard, but it’s all we know.

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This dialogue again illustrates how Sean projects his freedom fantasies onto the lives of happily connected women. During this sequence and a later shot in which Rose requests that Raven sing her a lullaby, portrayals of several sets of conjoined twins are subtly called upon, thus historically placing Rose and Raven alongside other sets of twins – including their real-life personas Lori and Reba. Rose’s dream reflects the film Chained for Life, starring Daisy and Violet Hilton, which contains just such a scene. Before their separation, Rose asks Raven to sing to her; in real life, Reba is a country singer. Some argue that this episode is based on the separation of Gracie and Rosie Attard, who were separated in 2000. Rosie did not survive the surgery; in fact, having the surgery at all meant killing her, as she could not survive without her shared organs.6 Connections also exist between this episode and the lives and deaths of Ladan and Laleh Bijani – Iranian conjoined twins who attempted to be separated later in life. The surgery resulted in their deaths. Like Sean and Christian (who see a lawyer instead of doctors), Ladan and Laleh were advised seriously to consider the repercussions of the separation because it was ‘high risk’ and ‘optional’. They were also the oldest conjoined twins to attempt separation surgery, as are Rose and Raven in this episode. Adding to this history of representations in this way, with the twinned bodies representing the norm, opens avenues for new discourses about ‘ambiguous’ bodies that move away from the binary understandings of normality that were solely available to the other sets of twins. Considering the outrageousness of many Nip/Tuck episodes, it is noteworthy that Rose and Raven, though fetishized in some ways, are never exploited. Perhaps the extraordinary nature of their bodies allows for more narrative restraint. One exception to this, however, is the way the show turns the separation surgery into a musical production number. In most episodes, Sean and Christian operate in their sterile office where drab blues, muted medical greens, and earthy browns dominate. Pop songs accompany, and comment on, their surgeries.7 Here, the surgery takes place in more of an operating theatre. The surgeon-actors sport a literal rainbow of scrubs: green, yellow and white. Sean and Christian wear bright red – the same red seen earlier on the women. Sean and Christian spend most of their screen time centred or in shallow focus as lines of surgeons behind



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them simultaneously adorn themselves with latex gloves and tie their gowns in time to ‘The Flower Duet’ from Lakmé. Each team faces away from the other. During the operation, a series of dissolves melds Sean and Christian cutting into the twins’ heads. Bright reds, including that of the blood, dominate this montage sequence, which involves several shots of a sterile, white clock until Sean and Christian finally switch sides when the twins are flipped. The surgeons melodically come together, move around one another, and glide apart, thus emphasizing the surgery’s choreography, and a slight break occurs in the music to heighten the tension as the women are separated. Sean and Christian still head each table, as the multicoloured surgeons move in rhythmic unison around the tables, rolling the beds away from one another. While not exploitative, the twins’ bodies here provide the means for obvious spectacle.8 After the separation, chaos intrudes upon the serenity of the procedure. The cinematography changes to incorporate more handheld camera shots, which are shakier and more erratic than the previous images. Throughout the show, handheld cameras are used to illustrate moments when the characters lose control.9 Raven starts bleeding profusely and the colour red again dominates, but this time it is beyond the doctor’s control. When Raven flatlines, Sean and Christian exchanges glances frequently, panicked, and Rose’s heartbeat fluctuates as Christian calls Raven’s death. The music stops as the medical procedure takes precedence over the surgery’s pageantry until Rose stabilizes, at which point ‘The Flower Duet’ resumes. Here again, the women’s bodies act as slates upon which the men project themselves, their emotions as excessive as the red colour that now overwhelms them. Sean states, ‘She’s not giving up. She can survive on her own. She can survive. She can survive on her own!’ before frenetically beginning CPR on Rose despite another doctor’s suggestion that Rose knows her sister is dead and is, therefore, allowing herself to die. Christian looks defeated when Sean succeeds in resuscitating Rose. These scenes call attention to the importance of the surgery as the episode’s climax and act as a counterpoint to the sex scenes featuring the men and Renee, the Julia stand-in. A bar scene of Sean meeting Renee precedes the sexual encounter between them and Christian. This scene opens with a series of

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disjunctive edits that echo those used while Sean gets drunk on the plane. Both times, the show’s creators use visual and aural jump cuts to emphasize Sean’s alcohol intake and loss of control. On the plane, these scenes are sped up and continue throughout Sean and Christian’s discussion about Christian’s feelings for Julia, while different lens focal lengths are used to create distance between the two men despite their literal proximity. These disjunctive edits, which are fairly infrequent in television shows (though definitely becoming more common), call attention to the formal techniques that characterize the show. They also externalize Sean’s inner self while he processes his separation from, and potential loss of, Christian, while illustrating how the double-bedding of ‘Julia’ stems from uncertainty or a lack of control. After this, the episode settles into an ambiguous investigation of Sean and Christian’s bodies and minds as singular and plural. During these scenes, time becomes uncertain as editing confuses the viewer into not knowing how much has passed and what is left out between the bits shown on screen. The scene rests somewhere between fantasy and reality. Sean’s bedroom prowess exists in the world of myth, as he is able to perform in bed despite drinking nearly a full bottle of Scotch and smoking a joint to boot. (Most men would be keeled over in the bathroom.) Three-ways also exist predominantly in heteronormative pornography or erotica. However, the reality lies in Sean and Christian’s inability to discuss matters any more. While they talk about their feelings fairly regularly, as is the norm in dramatic television serials, they come to a standstill in this episode: talking no longer gets them anywhere. Instead, they fuck (and operate) their way through their issues. This leads to a vague understanding of what has occurred, but much is left unanswered. Is this just a fantasy played out between two men and one anonymous woman? Have Sean and Christian made love to each other? Why do they communicate better through bodies than words? Does this feminize them? If a child comes out of this interaction, who is the ‘real’ father? Can love between two, three, or four people truly be equal? Who loves whom the most? Again, these scenes and their ensuing ambiguity play into Thompson’s notions that ‘art television’ breaks standard barriers to produce stranger, perhaps more thoughtful, understandings of characters or human psychology.



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So what does actually happen in this room? As seen earlier in the show, Sean and Christian’s dorm room looks a lot like their offices in that it, also, is drenched in medical greens. Furthermore, it is set up symmetrically – each bed takes up exactly the same amount of space on screen, each with its folded-over white sheet. When Sean enters with Renee, he and Christian argue about Christian’s sex life during college, whether or not Sean enjoyed hearing Christian’s sexual encounters, and Julia. During this argument, the men physically get closer, and the similarity of their muted greenishyellow button-down shirts facilitates the confusion of bodies that follows. When Renee re-enters, the shot of Sean and Christian with both the lawyer and the twins is re-established: Renee stands directly between them – separating them. When Christian says, ‘We’re not having a three-way’, Sean responds by asking, ‘Why not? Everything else has been.’ He then changes Renee’s name to Julia. Here the three-way echoes the separation surgery and foreshadows the reconnection surgery to come, but in reverse: the men push together, and then pull apart, their identical beds. Even the shot of Renee’s bare bottom with its double bumps takes on a duality in this moment. Everything is twinned: the medium shots of Sean and Christian shirtless, the close-ups of them smoking marijuana, the shots of them having sex with ‘Julia’, the narrative of their relationship, the reconnection of the surgical beds and twin’s bodies, the closing shot of Rose and Raven’s reconnected heads. During the three-way, two series of shots – one involving dissolves and the other using quick edits – make Sean and Christian’s faces indistinguishable from one another as they kiss ‘Julia’, who now appears as Julia, though she is still meant to be Renee. This scene ends with a re-establishing shot of the messy beds, which the men pull apart and get into, naked – as God intended them to be. Both turn away from one another when Renee leaves. In this scene, Sean and Christian turn into one indistinguishable, yet dual, person who functions symbiotically, to use Christian’s word, in the world like conjoined twins. Like Sean and Christian, Daisy and Violet Hilton ‘could not be governed by a husband because they were already physically fused to each other’ and were, therefore, ‘unable to enter a companionate marriage because they already were each other’s own symmetrical “companions”’ (Pingree,

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p. 178). Furthermore, the Hilton sisters ‘undermined the distinction between public and private by constantly witnessing each others’ lives, and by inverting their own intimate bond into economic advantage’ (p. 178).10 Sean and Christian begin with more social advantages than Daisy and Violet, being upper-class males, but just as each of these supposed complications leads to the Hilton sisters’ success, as argued by Allison Pingree, the same situation can be seen in single-bodied twins Sean and Christian. If one ‘might well understand conjoinment as an integral part of [twins’] individuality, paradoxical as that sounds’ (Dreger, p. 7), one also might attempt to see single-bodied humans as conjoined in numerous ways that lead to physical bodily connections. Film and television allow for this real-world fantasy to become reality through the use of dissolves and quick edits, which confuse viewers into an inability to distinguish one from his other. In ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9), Nip/Tuck takes a detour from its regular route to violate rules about serial programming and normative-bodied television episodes while examining the ambiguous relationships between people’s friends, lovers, coworkers and bodies. By taking conjoined twins as the standard by which these interactions are examined, the show overturns a long history of popular culture that does the reverse – one that judges conjoined bodies against a single ideal – thus challenging how viewers consider representations of conjoined twins and the Sean and Christian characters. Christian believes his bodily contribution to their relationship grows from his pants. He even tells Sean, ‘You have my ten-inch dick to thank.’ Sean says his brain and discipline allow them to excel: ‘You had all that free time to party while I carried us through prerequisites.’ Perhaps both are correct. After all, they concur that Matt is ‘the best thing [their] partnership ever produced’, and, more than anything, Matt personifies the connecting point between, and collaboration of, these two bodies by being the literal by-product of Sean’s brains and discipline and Christian’s dick. Notes 1 Alice Domurat Dreger defines singleton as ‘people born with no anatomical bond to anyone but their mothers’ (p. 7). 2 Even in Season Three, when Sean temporarily leaves McNamara–Troy,



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long-term employment elsewhere is not a serious possibility. Viewers understand this, as McNamara–Troy – its employees and their misadventures – is the heart of the series. 3 ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ does not fit all of these categories – perhaps especially the fourth: authorial comment. Authorship in television is tricky to define, as a show’s ‘creator’ often has little to do with episodes past the first couple of seasons. Ryan Murphy, Nip/Tuck’s creator, however, co-wrote ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ with Brad Falchuk, while Elodie Miller directed. Trying to weed authorial signatures out of this collaboration through some forty episodes would be futile, or at least beyond this discussion. 4 Disjunctive editing means that the edits become visible to the viewer and are often jarring. This differs from classical continuity editing, which generally goes unnoticed as it is meant to create seamless transitions between characters and scenes. 5 When Sean leaves the practice temporarily in Season Three, things work far less smoothly; a psychopathic serial killer who, notably, has issues with not having enough body parts, replaces Sean. 6 This situation led to a fascinating – and troubling – legal battle in which the twins’ parents lost control over the medical treatment of their children. 7 In this episode, only opera music is played during the surgeries. Classic rock songs are used, however, both to foreshadow Rose’s and Raven’s death and to comment on the sexual encounter in which Sean and Christian engage. ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, by Blue Oyster Cult, plays while Sean and Christian study for surgery, and ‘Can We Still be Friends’, by Todd Rundgren, accompanies the three-way. 8 This colour scheme does not reoccur during a surgery until ‘Sal Perri’ (3.12). In this episode, Sean and Julia enter a triage centre after a passenger flight crashes. The scene employs the same greens, yellows, blues, reds and whites, but here these colours illustrate the chaos of the situation rather than echoing the complementary grace and fluidity of Rose and Raven’s bodies – and Sean and Christian’s skills – as they do in the conjoined-twin episode. In ‘Sal Perri’, the colours also highlight Sean and Julia’s presence amid the mangled bodies: both wear black suits. 9 Other scenes in this episode in which a handheld camera is used include: the conversations between Matt and Sean or Matt and Julia at the McNamara home, Sean on the plane, and Sean getting drunk at the bar. 10 D aisy and Violet Hilton (1908–1969) were successful sideshow and vaudeville performers into the 1940s. However, the twins’ managers kept most of the duo’s earnings until Daisy and Violet won legal emancipation from them in 1931. Though both Hilton sisters briefly married, they had to file for marriage licences in some twenty states before these were granted.

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Works Cited Dreger, Alice Domurat, One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Thomson, pp. 55–66. Nip/Tuck, created by Ryan Murphy, performed by Dylan Walsh, Julian McMahon, Joely Richardson, Roma Maffia and John Hensley, FX, 2003–2010. Pingree, Allison, ‘“The Exceptions that Prove the Rule”: Daisy and Violet Hilton, the “New Woman,” and the Bonds of Marriage’, in Thomson, pp. 173–84. Smith, J. David, Psychological Profiles of Conjoined Twins: Heredity, Environment, and Identity, New York: Praeger, 1988. Thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in Film and Television, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press, 1996.

9 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

telling truth and selling lies: Ryan Murphy's game of Gothic consequences Roz KaVeney

Most accounts of Nip/Tuck take for granted that it deals in the outrageous and sensational, but it would not have achieved so much critical respect in spite of its major flaws did it not do this in interesting and structured ways. My purpose in this chapter is to argue that it is not only sensational but thoughtful, and not only outrageous but artful. It is a good example of what I have called elsewhere1 ‘a thick text’. To read Nip/Tuck critically is to bear in mind the entire context of creative choices that went into it, including its genre references, its relationship to practical considerations, its class analysis and so on. This chapter will consider the show’s generic self-positioning and its use of non-realist tropes in a supposedly realist setting. Specifically, like another art form that derives much of its effect from the sensational, the nineteenth-century novel, it draws heavily on the obsessive tropes of the Gothic, paradoxically since it is set amid the bright sun and neon lights of Miami and Los Angeles. Ryan Murphy presents us with a deeply pessimistic portrait of humanity and a moral universe in which everyone is a hypocrite – the

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show is full of actors and people in masks as well as those who have been altered surgically. He is fascinated by the revelation of secrets and the handing down of family curses; he loves paradoxes, particularly those that both inhabit and subvert the universe of traditional morality. Nip/Tuck is a gallery of grotesques, physical and spiritual, who are at once shocking and symbolic; it inhabits at once a version of the modern world of celebrity and acquisition that is bitingly satirical, an almost forensic sense of family life as a site of endless damage, and a poetic world of dreams, ghosts, lost love and endless transformations. Nip/Tuck has a deliberately unsettling credit-sequence, surgeon’s guide lines are drawn between and then under a mannequin’s breasts. A line is drawn between two mannequins, one of whose hands twitches; we see disassembled mannequins randomly scattered in boxes. A mannequin slowly opens her eyes and another looms over a Miami sky-scape. Finally, the lower part of a mannequin’s face gradually changes to flesh. Over this, a pulsing beat starts and is followed by a woman’s ethereal voice singing ‘Make me/ beautiful/ a perfect face/ a perfect soul/ a perfect lie.’ In the context of a show about plastic surgery, the relevance of a perfect face is obvious, but a perfect soul? If this is a show about how moral identity is built, then instantly we are moving into territory far less superficial than the dramatized makeover show Nip/Tuck is sometimes mistaken for. And a perfect lie? Is that merely a lie which is a consummate trick, one that produces in its victims what Rochester called ‘the perfect joy of being well-deceived’, or is it a lie that becomes in some sense the truth, a better truth for being one constructed from will and artifice rather than from what Christian refers to as ‘mere facts’ like DNA? I would argue that in its handling of the respective merit of truth and lies, Nip/Tuck is a show that puts both sides of the argument, occasionally allowing a compromise to result. Any attempt to read Nip/Tuck as a sort of simple polemic for one side or the other of the cultural debates about plastic surgery or sexual behaviour or the nature of the family is thus almost certainly misguided, in spite of Ryan Murphy’s occasional claims that it is just that. The show regularly wrong-foots such readings by placing some of its telling critiques of plastic surgery in the show’s moral centres such as Liz,



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but others in the mouths of the morally bankrupt. Ariel Alderman in ‘Madison Berg’ (3.10) announces herself as a ‘purist’ and denounces the destruction by plastic surgery of indicators of ethnic identity and gender. She does so, however, from the perspective of a racist who wants to be able to identify Jews and East Asians, and who hates transgendered people. If lies can be perfect, is truth always a good thing? At the start of the first season of the show, Sean’s life is built on the assumption that Matt is his son and that his relationship with his wife Julia is a picture-perfect marriage. Their gradual realization in the course of the first season that both of them feel trapped and that the relationship is stale only changes things for the better when she tells him of her discovery that Matt is the product of her one-night stand with Christian. Improvement comes in the long term, though; Christian’s immediate reaction is to throttle her and dent the refrigerator with her head. Similarly, Matt’s discovery that his lover Ava is transgendered and that she slept with his genetic father sends him into a moral tailspin from which he never entirely recovers. Ryan Murphy is an artist and not a moralist, though one who is far more serious about truth and lies and the consequences of both than would be the case were he only an entertainer. He grew up Catholic and has said so in many interviews.2 The use of religious imagery in some of the show’s key episodes, most notably ‘Agatha Ripp’ (2.8), is not mere sensationalism, but a correlative for passionate emotion and the complexity of the relationship between what is true and what is false, and which of the two is useful. In the ‘Agatha Ripp’ episode, Sean’s discovery of the false assumptions on which his married life has been built is paralleled by his discovery that Agatha, the reformed whore turned stigmatic, is a pious fraud. The mother superior who has encouraged this in order to keep her charitable work funded has specifically lost her faith in anything save good works; the Agatha of hagiographic legend was imprisoned by an evil woman, as Agatha in the show is both given refuge and exploited by the mother superior. In a show whose principals often laddishly toss breast prostheses around the surgery, Agatha is the saint iconographically represented by two severed breasts on a plate. Given that the episode is dominated by Sean’s loss of faith in the ideals about which he has built his life, it is ironic that

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its eponymous patient has a name which means ‘best’. If it seems fanciful to assume such references in a television show often condemned by Christian organizations for its moral frivolity, we should also note that the villain in the third season is the plastic surgeon Quentin Costa, and that St Quentin is the patron saint of surgeons. Like many Catholic artists, Murphy regards detailed acquaintance with the names and preoccupations of patron saints as a significant part of his palette. The complex moral ambivalence which is Nip/Tuck’s central mode of operations is also to be observed in one of Murphy’s other shows, the teen comedy drama Popular, where the notion of popularity is deconstructed as painstakingly as notions of beauty and perfection are in Nip/Tuck. A supposedly ‘out’ group of teenage girls – the journalist Sam, the activist Lily and the plump Carmen – believe that they are more radical and less popular than the cheerleaders Brooke, Nicole and Mary Cherry. This is, however, thrown into question by the existence in the same school of far less good-looking outsiders like the grotesque and disturbed Tuna sisters. Popular has a theme tune far less ambiguous in its pronunciations than that of Nip/Tuck: ‘Do you believe that beauty lies in what you see/ ’coz if you do baby, you’ve been deceived.’ Placed together, the shows demonstrate that Murphy is fascinated by notions of beauty and perfection, and of truth and falsehood, rather than that he has come to any final conclusion about them. Another aspect of Nip/Tuck’s credit sequence is the mannequins and their liminal status between the living and the unliving. All dolls are uncanny, and dolls that come to life are particularly uncanny, particularly when the doll-maker is also the living doll’s lover. In his relationship to Kimber, whom he endlessly remodels to make and maintain her as perfect, Christian plays Pygmalion, the classical version of the trope, to her Galatea. In his relationship to many of his other conquests and patients he is E. T. A. Hoffman’s Gothic treatment of the trope Doctor Coppelius who unleashes a mechanical Olympia on the world. Nip/Tuck is a modern gothic full of different kinds of uncanniness – its hyper-realism is constantly enhanced by fantastic tropes of which dolls, masks and shadows are only the most obvious. Equally if not even more uncanny are occasions when human beings are made, or make themselves, into dolls. Faced with exposure



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as a fraud by a real talent agent, Colleen Rose murders him with the machine she normally uses to stuff her custom-made teddy bears and stitches button eyes into his sockets (‘Kyle Ainge’ (5.11)); this makes her habit of giving friends personalized bears – the bear she gives Sean has ‘Tell me what you don’t like about yourself’ as its growl – particularly sinister and an indication that she sees everyone as inanimate objects to be loved and manipulated. In ‘Lola Wlodkowski’ (6.8), Tracey has her nipples removed in order to be more like the Barbie doll she resembles; she and her Ken-like husband have persuaded themselves that they are better off not having sexual organs. For a show that is notionally set in the real contemporary world, Nip/Tuck, like Popular and Six Feet Under, a show with which it is often compared, is entirely knowing about the tropes of sciencefiction and fantasy shows. Whereas such shows mostly use these tropes for entertainment, Murphy is usually trying to make a point. As with Buffy, each of its seasons is structured round a major antagonist, a ‘Big Bad’. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the various incarnations of Star Trek – but also like Popular and Six Feet Under – Nip/Tuck has given us alternate universe versions of itself – the world in which Julia married Christian and is his business partner, the world in which Christian and Sean are lovers – even if the rationales for both these universes are dreams. It has never had a musical episode, unlike Buffy or Xena Warrior Princess, but in ‘Gala Gallardo’ (4.15), the remaining principal characters – Julia has left by this stage – mouth in lip-synch along with The Submarines’s ‘Brighter Discontent’, ‘All these things/ Should make me happy’, expressing the fact that, at this point, they are all anything but. (This sequence is nonetheless effective in spite of being a gesture imitated from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.) In chapter 4 of this volume, Alison Peirse comments on the ways in which the songs played on the McNamara–Troy operating theatre Boese sound system are carefully selected to make moral or emotional parallels with the surgeries being performed. Nor does this only happen during the operations – Quentin’s attempted seduction of Julia in ‘Tommy Bolton’ (3.8) starts with a techno remix of ‘Whatever Lola Wants’ from Damn Yankees in the underscore (one damned soul seeks to damn another), and their subsequent date turns into an

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extended sequence of tango-dancing that continues long enough to involve a selection from both the traditional tango of Gardel and the ‘nueva tango’ of Piazzola. The production team of Nip/Tuck make musical choices that are entirely informed by taste and knowledge, not merely a matter of promoting what is current, which is particularly fascinating in the light of Murphy’s new show, the musical high school drama Glee. Music in the show is ostentatiously artful – a piece of alienation that subverts the show’s hyper-realism. Another piece of stylization in the show is its regular use of celebrity casting. Sometimes well-known actors appear in Nip/Tuck in long-term roles that nonetheless draw on their iconic status as well as their abilities. Casting Vanessa Redgrave as Erica, Julia’s mother, works for reasons that transcend either her considerable abilities or the simple fact that Julia is played by Joely Richardson, Redgrave’s actual daughter; she brings baggage with her that has to do with the Sixties and radicalism. Similarly, casting Larry Hagman as the ageing tycoon Burt Landau brings with it all the associations of his role as JR in Dallas. Some iconic stars appear in the show as one-off characters – Catherine Deneuve as ‘Diana Lubey’ (4.12) brings her middle-aged allure to the mistress who wants her lover’s ashes inserted into her breast implants. Richard Chamberlain in ‘Blu Mondae’ (4.2) plays an ageing queen with a young lover – Chamberlain was one of television’s most famous television doctors, Doctor Kildare, in the Sixties and also played the gay Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1970). Sometimes celebrities appear playing themselves. Joan Rivers, a comedian famous for her regular trips to the plastic surgeon, appears in an episode named after her – ‘Joan Rivers’ (2.16) – asking to have her face put back the way it would be if she had allowed herself to age naturally. She realizes that she does not want this at all, when Sean shows her a computerized reconstruction of how she would look – this is one of the points at which the show puts quite tellingly the positive case for such surgeries. Later, she appears again in ‘Ben White’ (3.7) as a guest at De La Mer who decides to endorse their face cream in spite of not knowing what its active ingredient is – this is a telling comment on celebrity culture, all in itself. One of the show’s most interesting and subtle uses of a celebrity comes in the very stylish sequence when Christian works on the



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corpse of the surgery-addicted Mrs Grubman (‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8)). Earlier she had mentioned that before making a wealthy marriage she had been a promising singer, potentially one who might have worked with Burt Bacharach until Dionne Warwick came along. As Christian works, he plays a disc of her demo tapes, and suddenly we see Mrs Grubman in apotheosis, singing ‘This Girl’s in Love With You’, in all her middle-aged glamour, with an uncredited Burt Bacharach accompanying her at the piano. The effect is in a sense hilarious, in a sense quite inexpressibly moving; we realize just how much we have come to care for a character who was in most respects ‘a pain in the ass’, as Christian calls her in his speech at her funeral. One can see this as a piece of fourth-wall-breaking Brechtian Verfremdung that reminds us that everything we see is artifice and a commodity; alternatively, one can see it as a wonderful piece of high camp. The aesthetic sensibility of Ryan Murphy’s work has always included both, has indeed united them; Nip/Tuck is far more moderate in its outbreaks of the outrageously camp than Popular with its elaborate references to everything from women’s prison movies to Eisenstein and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? His constant oscillation between realist subject matter and non-realist modes of narrative can usefully be seen as a dialectic between them, similar to, and reflecting, his constant to and fro as to the merits of truth and falsehood. Realism is also constantly subverted by the presence of tropes that cast Nip/Tuck’s plots into the realm of the uncanny. The apotheosis of Mrs Grubman is only one occasion on which the dead return to life – Sean, anxious about his dying mistress Megan, finds himself in an extended dialogue with the severed head on which he is operating as part of his re-registration test (‘Adelle Coffin’ (1.10)). Megan herself appears to him in a vision in ‘Shari Noble’ (4.4) and in Julia’s alternate world dream in ‘Julia McNamara’ (2.12) as the perfect helpmeet to a saintlier version of Sean. It is after her suicide in ‘Joel Seabrook’ (6.13) that Kimber becomes Christian’s conscience, his better angel, rather than his sexual punching bag; it is one of his visions of her that persuades Christian to send Sean out of his life to save him from further corruption (‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19)). At the start of Season Three (‘Momma Boone’ (3.1)), we are allowed to think that the Carver killed Christian at the end of the

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previous season – we attend his funeral and watch his friends’ grief, before discovering that this is a recurring dream. In a sense, Christian did die, because he has become largely impotent in response to his rape by the Carver; only his seduction by Kit – ironically one of the two individuals who make up the Carver, as we eventually learn – and their subsequent threesome with Kimber allows him to feel fully restored. ‘I’m back,’ he says to Kimber. The dead return to life: dolls acquire it. In which of its states is a doll that comes to life true and in which is it false? Nip/Tuck is full of Pygmalion figures, not all of them villains – Christian, one of the two surgeons who are the show’s protagonists, takes his lover Kimber and transforms her surgically from an ‘8’ to a ‘10’. She becomes a successful porn star who has a sex doll modelled after her and acquires acolytes who try to mirror not her appearance merely, but her sexual style. (At one point, a drunken Sean has intercourse with the doll and is found in a compromising position by Kimber, who promptly offers him the ‘real’ thing.) Is she better off after Quentin reverses each of her surgeries without anaesthetic and brainwashes her into rejecting Christian, or after her subsequent obsession with Scientology has filled her head with half-baked doctrines? The earlier version of herself that she hallucinates in ‘Willy Ward’ (4.14), along with Scientology’s demon figure Xenu, certainly does not think so. Which of the surgeons who transforms Kimber respects her autonomy more: Quentin or Christian? When they plan marriage, Christian at least negotiates with Kimber the terms of their future sex lives, whereas Quentin entirely takes away her free will. Quentin turns his equally monstrous and disfigured twin Kit into a beauty; the madame James turns her protégé Michelle into an urban sophisticate and then into her accomplice in multiple murders. The surgeon Barrett Moore creates Ava, the second season’s notional villainess; Christian’s complicated relationship with the older woman Mrs Grubman, on whom he constantly operates, is one of real affection that masquerades behind her obsessional attempt to defeat age and his occasional mockery of it. Significantly, of these, only Quentin has permanent possession of what he has created, and perhaps that is because both he and Kit are gleefully insane and murderous. This is a show in which identity is almost entirely a construction. Sean and Christian are ‘self-made men’ (‘Adelle Coffin’ (1.10)) who



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have become rich and famous by changing other people. Both men have reinvented themselves: Sean, who was mocked as a child for having a hare-lip, improves other people’s looks, while Christian, who was sexually abused by his foster-father, is obsessed with a self-image of himself as Don Juan. In the course of its third season, Sean’s estranged wife Julia reinvents herself successfully as an independent entrepreneur running the De La Mer spa and selling a face cream whose active ingredient is sperm, as does her business partner Gina, another of Christian’s discarded lovers. When, in ‘Joy Kringle’ (3.13), the blonde Ariel discovers that she has an AfricanAmerican ancestor, she burns herself in a completely redundant attempt to bleach her skin. In the same episode, she and Matt steal the Christmas nativity scene from their school and paint the dark-skinned figures white before a rainstorm reveals their original colouring. Nip/Tuck is a show about the American Dream and its underside, and even the Big Bads fit this pattern. Quentin and Kit have had endless surgeries, as has Ava, to become who they are; they are truly self-made men and women. Above all, the criminal mastermind Escobar sees himself as being as much the embodiment of the American quest for perfection as Sean. In his mind there is no distinction between plastic surgery and his trade – he offers his drug mules a chance to find a new country and his customers a comfortable numbness. As a killer, Escobar is also, of course, a ‘made man’ – he is also heavily tattooed. Identities are something people hide behind in this show. When we first meet Escobar, he is a gangster covered in tattoos, which Sean and Christian remove for him when he forces them to change his face. Later, after they have restored his original face, he walks around with stitches and scars for several episodes, transformed into a thing of patchwork like Frankenstein’s monster – sometimes cosmetic surgery arrives at a greater truth. Escobar is someone whom Sean has made and remade and who haunts Sean’s mind as well as his home and his office, advising him to dispose murderously of the baby-sitter Monica with whom Sean has slept and who has become inconvenient. At one point, Sean has got so used to talking to a hallucinated Escobar that he is genuinely surprised to find himself talking to the actual man; his visions of Escobar continue after the gangster’s death

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– in ‘Virginia Hayes’ (6.15), Escobar warns him that Christian is destroying him and makes Sean gut a dream alligator to find his own severed hand. Quentin’s secret identity as the serial mutilator, the Carver, is hidden behind a Pierrot mask; when he persuades Sean and Christian to carry out an experimental face transplant, the failed graft lies in a dish, a mask as black and rotten as Quentin’s ego. In the same episode, ‘Hannah Tedesco’ (3.9), Sean considers leaving for good with Nicole Moretti, a federal witness, whose face he has changed for her protection, only to discover that she killed her gangster husband in self-defence; she is not the innocent she allowed him to believe her. Sometimes the mask is a true identity – ‘Abby Mays’ (3.11) is a homely woman whom Christian humiliates by demanding that she wear a bag over her face during sex, and who finds sexual power and fulfilment in masochism, where Christian only finds grief in sadistic behaviour that is not, in the end, natural to him. The mannequin whose eyes open represents one of the most uncanny things about a mask, the unliving thing which suddenly reveals the living thing that lies beyond it. One of Christian’s most interesting relationships is that with ‘Natasha Charles’ (2.11), a blind woman who wants her dead eyes removed and replaced with implants. Significantly, the point here is that the real eyes are unsettlingly blank and the glass ones more ‘lifelike’. In the end, Christian drives her away with insults because her unconditional love touches him more deeply than he can quite bear. She is one of the women who turns up in his vision of past lovers to whom he says goodbye when he gives up his bachelor apartment to be with Michelle (‘Diana Lubey’ (4.12)) along with Kimber and Abby Mays. Natasha is also an example of Murphy’s unfortunate tendency to sentimentally represent the Disabled or Racial or Sexual Other as Magical Truthtellers. Where dolls and masks are, shadow doubles are never far behind. Even when he is not actually present in the show, Escobar haunts Sean as a source of the pragmatic murderous advice he feels less than a man for needing; Escobar is the criminal Other in the face of whom he is figuratively impotent. In ‘Escobar Gallardo’ (1.13) Sean turns up in Escobar’s home with a gun but cannot bring himself to shoot. As I explain at greater length below, Ava Moore is Christian’s



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shadow to a quite disturbing extent, while the relationship between James and Michelle in Season Four, where lesbian interaction is a power game between heterosexual women, is a distorting mirror for the quasi-erotic quasi-fraternal relationship between the show’s male protagonists. One of the few points at which Eden’s character works in the overall mode of the show is when she goes to work for Kimber in the porn business (‘Lulu Grandiron’ (5.12)); the scenes in which she plays the young Kimber having sex with her mature self are genuinely uncanny. Christian and Sean are, like many other heroic buddies, complementary aspects of a complete human being; they are brothers of the heart and they are also each other’s shadows. Christian is spontaneous where Sean is phlegmatic; Sean is idealistic and romantic where Christian is cynical; Sean is the brilliant surgeon and Christian the organizer and marketer. Sean is almost incapable of having casual sex without over-investing emotionally and inappropriately; Christian runs away from intimacy even when he has genuine feelings for his sexual partners. Sean is a flawed parent who works out his own flaws and issues in a way that damages each of his children; Christian, who is not related to Wilbur, is capable of absolutely selfless and unconditional love for the child. (Christian is significantly less good at being Matt’s father figure once he knows of their biological relationship.) It is because they complete each other – in ‘Adelle Coffin’ (1.10) Sean says, simply that ‘We fit’ – that Sean and Christian’s relationship can so easily be read as a romantic one. In Plato’s Symposium Aristophanes tells a fable of how early humans were two-faced spherical beings who rebelled against the gods and were cloven asunder; since when we have sought for our other half, a term which has become part of standard speech without conscious reference to Plato. In their best moments, Sean and Christian are prepared totally to sacrifice themselves for the other – Christian prepares to cut off his own hand to preserve Sean’s thumbs and skills when Quentin threatens them. At their worst, of course, these two men feel betrayal by the other more terribly even than betrayal by the women they love – ‘I loved you best’ Sean says in ‘Agatha Ripp’ (2.8), knocking Christian to the floor – yet they can forgive each other far more easily. It is because the show establishes this so convincingly in its

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earlier seasons that the later idea that Christian needs to free Sean from his bad influence is not absolutely convincing. Christian has been damaged by his childhood; he confesses to a child-abusing priest (whom he threatens to castrate unless he hands himself over to the law), ‘I’ve lost my faith father. I’ve drunk, I’ve taken drugs. I’ve fornicated with women and discarded them like trash. I’ve lost my soul’ (‘Cara Fitzgerald’ (1.8)). His friendship and partnership with Sean has given him some sort of moral centre – he alludes repeatedly to the way that Sean’s tutoring got him through medical school (‘Adelle Coffin’ (1.10)). There is, however, a very real sense in which he is the person he is – a charming Don Juan – because that is who Sean needs him to be. Sean is the talent in the partnership, but Christian is quite as essential and has made himself essential to Sean. Given the mess Sean makes of his adulteries, we can even see Christian’s affairs as a way for Sean to cheat vicariously. If, and the show is ambiguous on this issue, Christian is in love with Sean and in denial about his bisexuality, that too is a way in which he has remade himself into a version acceptable to Sean. If the actual Sean is far more prepared than Christian might expect to accept, but not respond to, an erotic component in their relationship, that is one of those ironies in which Murphy, and life, deal. Christian is a self-made man who performs hyper-masculinity as a way of being with his best friend – in ‘Dan Daly’ (6.11) it is made clear that the trade-off for Sean’s tutoring Christian at medical school was Sean’s participation in Christian’s social life and his introduction to Julia. It is because of this performance that Ava, when we find out her history, offers some worrying parallels that suggest that she is Christian’s shadow double. When we find out that Ava is transgendered (‘Joan Rivers’ (2.16)), we specifically find out that she does not have the standard transsexual history – she is quite unlike the show’s transsexual characters, Sophia Lopez and Cherry Peck. Avery was a gay man who fell in love with the heterosexual surgeon Barrett Moore, for whose pro bono work he fund-raised. This love was so intense that Avery gave up his identity and gender to become both the woman, and the ideal surgical subject, of Barrett’s dreams; she achieved, and he created, a ‘flawless’ performative femininity in an attempt to make the



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relationship work, discovering that, in the end, Pygmalion can never forget that Galatea was a statue. Up to the point where Christian discovers this story, he is deeply hostile to Ava, and specifically mocking that she is transgendered. After the story, he is altogether abashed, as well he might be. Changing your essential self and acquiring a performatively extreme gender identity for the love of the person you most admire is a story that happens twice in Nip/Tuck and there is no way around that fact. When, after the sexual intercourse that confirms Christian’s growing intuition that Ava is transgendered – he has looked at the list of drugs she asked Matt to steal for her from McNamara–Troy and has now discovered that her vagina is shallow – he pulls away and she says, ‘Am I too much woman for you?’ He may mock her behind her back, but to her face he has no quick response. This is one of those moments that repay endless decoding3 – it is a moment of utter hubris on Ava’s part, yet is deeply touching precisely because she and Christian have so much in common as well as so much that drives them into antagonism. Far more than any one other character, with the possible exception of Christian himself, Ava is the Perfect Lie, the lie that has become truth. As such, she has particular powers in respect of truth – she deduces Matt’s parentage without being told more than that Julia has a secret in her past. In Julia’s anaesthetized dream of another life (‘Julia McNamara’ (2.12)), Ava acts as her spiritual guide and as a psychopomp leading her towards the peaceful death that is one of her choices; Ava is a life coach, and she also teaches the alternate Julia how to die. (There is a sapphic vibe between them in this episode otherwise absent from their relationship – death and sex are closely intertwined.) The show’s other villains are murderers; any damage that Ava does to Sean, Christian, Julia and Matt comes from making them face facts and from the Machiavellian way she exploits those facts. Ava is one of those characters to whom Ryan Murphy gives a profoundly symbolic name. Her surname is easy – in a show that is profoundly conflicted about consumerist society, Moore signals her as a figure of excess and desire. Ava is a more interesting name to examine – obviously at one level it is merely a reference to the sultry good looks Famke Janssen shares, in a distinctly skinnier version,

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with Ava Gardner. It is a near-homonym for Eva, or Eve – Ava is a woman like no other, singular and sinful and the cause of men’s fall. Like Eve, the name is a palindrome. Ava is someone who needs no other to be complete in and of herself. Ava is almost totally amoral and wants to have whatever she wants. In a sense, she is the logic of everything that the show’s central trio are – the sense of entitlement, the careless hedonism, the rationalizations for selfishness disguised as care, the assumption that everyone else has to pay for her bad decisions, and the fact that at bottom she remains attractive in spite of everything. In the end, though, she does need other people to complete her. Ava is also the only Big Bad in the show to achieve a sort of redemption. Sean and Christian find Barrett and offer Ava the option of the surgery that will make her genuinely flawless as a quid pro quo for leaving for Europe without Matt; she takes the deal. Though she leaves behind her an Adrian who has committed suicide – and leaves him literally for the worms – and breaks Matt’s heart, still she is allowed a moment of grace. The trans woman counsellor who gives Sean and Christian access to Barrington talks of how she will only feel secure in herself when she can walk past airport security without a qualm – this gets transferred to Ava, as she leaves for Europe, showing security her passport and not looking back. Nor does this change when she leaves again with Matt and Jenna. Sean is a better man than Barrett, an effete snob who has given up surgery for orchids, so that Christian never needs to walk away from Sean’s selfishness the way Ava has to walk away from Barrett, taking ‘their’ child, rather choosing in due course to end things for Sean’s sake. The life that Sean and Christian have made together may be based on some unspoken truths – Christian denies having romantic feelings for Sean, but at the end of Season Four he breaks his engagement to Michelle in order to renew his commitment to partnership with Sean in Hollywood; Sean is entirely heterosexual, but his resentment of Christian’s relationship with Michelle feels in part like jealousy. The difference between Ava and Christian is that Ava eventually gets what she gave everything for, whereas Christian gets to choose to renounce Sean’s company for Sean’s sake rather than his own. One of the perpetual appeals of doubling in Romantic narratives is that doubling provides thought experiments whereby



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we can see how the lives of the principal characters might have worked out otherwise – the life of a shadow is an Alternate Universe all of its own. There is a parlour game called Consequences in which participants write down a name, fold and pass the paper, then write down another name, subsequent actions and dialogues, and the consequences of these, before reading out the surreal results. The game embodies an important perception, which is that consequences are always based in part on the unknown and unknowable; in both Dickens and Murphy, secrets affect events long before they are known and especially after they are revealed. In Murphy’s Nip/Tuck, plastic surgery brings together disparate characters in a context where they will be folded, or indeed nipped and tucked, into new shapes, and does so in a context where secrets, lies and their consequences constantly unfold in front of us. Nip/Tuck is a show about consequences – one of the things that unites this theme with the theme of constructed selves is the next generation, all of whom are shown as likely to be as damaged by their upbringing as were their parents. All of this damage is shown in the most extreme terms – to be brief, Matt is a self-destructive addict, bully and thief; Annie eats her own hair until it forms a bezoar inside her; Conor, Wilber and Jenna lose so many parents that it is hard to think that their stories will end happily. All three principals are shown to have been damaged by their upbringings to a grotesque extent – in each case there is a major revelation about their pasts just as we would expect in Gothic. We learn that Christian was not only sexually abused by his foster-father, but that the foster-father made him feel complicit by giving him money. On three occasions, Christian acts as a rich woman’s gigolo; he sleeps (but does not have sex) with Mrs Grubman to stop her suing the practice (‘Nanette Babcock’ (1.3)) and he takes a large sum of money to sleep with Dawn Budge (‘Dawn Budge’ (4.5)). Interestingly, in these two cases, he comes to feel a degree of affection for the woman who has bought his favours – the same is not true in his relationships with the women in Season Five, whose gigolos he poses as. Two of the women he comes closest to loving – Kimber Henry and Michelle Landau – are, respectively, a porn star and a reformed whore who married up and out of the life. Christian’s relationships with

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women are often involved enough with the cash nexus that we note his foster-father has had a lasting effect on him. It is in part because of his history that Christian cannot accept the possibility that he is bisexual and in love with Sean, something which is obvious to many viewers and to various characters. On the eve of Christian’s marriage to Kimber, when he and his best man Sean are testing wedding-cakes together (‘Madison Berg’ (3.10)), the cake chef assumes that they are the ‘elegant couple’ getting married. When his therapist Faith Wolper suggests this as a reason for his problems, Christian rejects it, partly because Faith is a sexual compulsive who plays revenge games after they have, inevitably, had sex, but his dreams show a more complex truth. In the dream that opens ‘Faith Wolper, Ph.D.’ (4.6), Christian and Sean are seen as a couple at a gay resort. The metrosexual Christian fits right in to this world of waxed oiled musclemen; the less fit, hairy-chested Sean is uncomfortable and retreats into their room, into a closet. The closet turns into an operating theatre, where Sean is having his chest waxed and dies of the procedure; Christian is about to perform the kiss of life, when he wakes, into a bedroom where he is about to kiss Sean, when he wakes again. Clearly, his most deep-seated fear is not of being gay, but of losing Sean. Ironically, Christian spends most of Season Four pursuing the untrustworthy Michelle Landau and doing everything he can to alienate Sean by doing so, at first by putting their deal with Michelle’s husband at risk. For Michelle, he discards not only his promiscuity, but the apartment where he slept with so many women. Later, after Burt Landau’s death, he constantly takes Michelle’s side in disputes with Sean over his pro bono work and then over Sean’s romantic preparedness to help Diana Lubey (4.12) place her lover’s ashes inside her breast implants. While he may not know the details of Michelle’s connections with James’s murder of her husband and complicity with the organ-legging ring, he knows enough to realize that she lies to him – choosing her over Sean is his way of running away from what Faith Wolper has suggested are his real feelings. Interestingly, when Faith tells Sean, Sean’s reaction is sensible and measured. He believes her, in the face of Christian’s denials and her undoubted other agenda, and makes it clear to Christian that, on the one hand, his love for Christian is merely fraternal, and that, on the



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other hand, it would not matter to him if Christian did have sexual feelings for him. He dissolves their partnership out of resentment for the way Christian puts Michelle first – Sean is positively petulant when they go away for Christmas without him, after the final collapse of his marriage, and descends into a drunken tailspin. It is important to remember that, at this point, Sean has no reason to suppose Michelle the complexly corrupt person that she is. When Christian discards her, and turns up in LA, Sean is pleased to see him and takes him back. For Christian, homosexual desire is always something he identifies with his abuse as a child; he reacts to passes from the young hustler (in ‘Blu Mondae’ (4.2)) and from Quentin with homosexual panic and violence. He is obsessed with Alexis Stone precisely because she rejects him, and then rejects her, both as woman and then as a man when she reveals that she is transgendered and asks him to help her to detransition, and later retransition. It is clear that he feels genuine affection for Alexis, but cannot bring himself knowingly to express it. His tendency to think this way is not helped by either his rape by the Carver or the way Burt Landau punishes him and Michelle for their affair by forcing them to have sex in front of Burt. Abuse has made Christian’s sexual autonomy very important to him, which is one of the reasons he rejects the ‘pure’ love felt for him by Natasha Charles in favour of the ‘impure’ relationships he has with Kimber or Michelle, and why most of his relationships with women are mere transactions without affection or soul. He treats his friend Liz, of whom he is genuinely fond, appallingly when she becomes his lover and his wife; he marries Kimber, in large part, to stop her marrying his colleague Mike and then rejects her when he discovers the masturbatory joys of auto-erotic strangulation. Once she is dead, he remembers again how much he loves her – but he could not love a living person like that. He does his best to break up Julia’s relationship with Olivia. He then dumps Julia when she is very ill, refusing to believe in her illness. Christian is the Fatal Man of Gothic, a Byronic Don Juan whose soul is as twisted as his face is handsome. It is not until Season Four that we learn anything about Sean’s family background – all we know up to that point is that he was reared

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by a single mother in some poverty and that he had to work his way into a successful medical career. In ‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8), the male nanny Marlowe, himself a dwarf, tries to persuade Julia to oppose Sean’s plans for surgery on the infant Conor’s hands. Marlowe argues, citing studies, that children who have surgery are haunted by it in later life and often become compulsive and obsessional. Not only do we learn that Sean’s parents split up over whether to use their savings to correct his hare-lip or as his college fund, but we see that, unbeknownst to Marlowe, Sean is quite precisely the sort of damaged child Marlowe is talking about. The surgery carried out on Sean is seen quite specifically in terms of Marlowe’s descriptions, even down to the teddy bear his father brings him, presented in hallucinatory terms as large and scary like the doctors who have operated on him. This history for Sean is an afterthought perhaps, but one which makes perfect sense as a piece of retroactive continuity. If there were any doubt that one of the subjects of Nip/Tuck is the way that children are moulded by their parents far more decisively than by any surgery – that, as Philip Larkin put it, ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad,/ they may not mean to, but they do’ – it is removed by Julia’s complexly dysfunctional relationship with Erica. Erica is a highly accomplished woman, a psychotherapist and author, who finds her daughter’s decision to be a homemaker and mother entirely bizarre and disappointing. Even when Julia cuts loose from Sean, and makes a successful business out of the De La Mer recovery spa and its branded products, Erica is disappointed that Julia has not gone back to medical school and got herself a proper career. Nothing Julia does can ever please her mother; the dislike between the two women crackles on screen. Even the secret that Julia hugs to herself, that she slept with Christian before marrying Sean, is contaminated by Erica, who slept with her son-in-law’s best friend on the wedding night. When Erica is assumed dead in an air-crash – in ‘Sal Perri’ (3.12) – Christian identifies what he takes to be her charred corpse by an intimate birthmark. In this crucial episode, Christian, Sean and Julia look for Erica by making themselves useful in the triage station – Julia, whom the officiating doctor refers to as ‘Med School’, makes herself useful both as comforter of the dying and harvester of the dead’s skin to provide material for emergency grafts. She demonstrates, indeed, that she had



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it in her to be the doctor of her mother’s dreams, the equal of her husband and her lover – in some ways, she copes better with the dire emergency than either of them. Julia befriends another woman who is waiting to find out what happened to her mother; later, Julia talks to that mother about the functional loving relationship she and her daughter had, as the mother dies. (Julia then harvests the skin off the woman’s back for emergency grafts.) When Christian takes her to Erica, Julia stands over what she believes to be her mother’s corpse and in a long speech exorcizes their relationship – it is over and she is done with it. The corpse comes back to life with a hideous choking noise and Julia expeditiously puts her out of her misery with a pillow. In the event, of course, we do not get to exorcize our upbringings that simply – Julia returns home to discover her mother, who was not on the plane, camped out on the sofa. In ‘Alexis Stone’ (6.6), Erica tries to take Julia’s children away and Julia retaliates by framing her for drug smuggling. If we factor in all of the show’s other bad family relationships – Ava’s incestuous relationship with her ‘son’, Adrian; the mother and daughter who haunt the singles bars together and sleep with Christian in a threesome in ‘Cindy Plumb’ (4.1); the incestuous parents who begat the monstrous siblings Quentin and Kit and abandoned them in an orphanage; Wilbur’s mother Gina who kidnaps him away from Christian (‘Willy Ward’ (4.14)) after losing custody, only to discover that she really has no gift for parenthood – we can see that one of Nip/Tuck’s major themes is that we fail as human beings by being less than adequate parents, and that there are almost no parents who do not so fail, most of the time. If almost all of the characters fail that particular test, is there any area in Nip/Tuck where people are seen as possessing grace? I would argue that one such area is in their professional lives – this is a show where people are often redeemed by their work, not all the time, and often only for moments. Nip/Tuck is frequently seen – in some of the chapters in this book for example – as a show which is entirely sardonic and cynical about the often tawdry and commercial medical enterprise in which its principals are engaged; at least as often, though, it offers a precisely contrary case. Both Sean and Christian, for all their commercialism and participation in a cult of stereotypical beauty, are often at their best

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and kindest when doing surgical work; both men are sometimes seen as healers. When a young girl is hideously disfigured by a hit-and-run driver – actually his son Matt, but Sean neither knows nor suspects this – Sean fights with her mother to restore her face and save her sight (‘Cara Fitzgerald’ (1.8)). This capacity to act as healers is sometimes independent both of their mixed motives and the actual outcome – I have mentioned the face-transplant episode, but the same is true of the reconstructive work they (somewhat implausibly) do on a clitoridectomy victim in ‘Manya Mabika’ (2.3) or the breast reconstruction Sean performs on cancer victim, and his mistress, Megan O’Hara (‘Megan O’Hara’ (1.6)). Sean is often annoying, judgemental and petty. He is generally at his best when he is simply acting as a surgeon rather than trying to apply any agenda, personal or otherwise, other than doing the work properly. His original disinclination to involve himself with the needs of Miami’s working-class Hispanic transsexual community – his judgemental comments to ‘Sophia Lopez’ (1.4) – are entirely set aside when Sophia summons him to an emergency room where her friend Marcie is dying from a botched operation. Sean respects the dignity of people in need, because he does not have to think about it, just use his skill. Surgery is sometimes seen as restoring dignity to the dead – most notably when, in ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9), Sean and Christian surgically reconnect the conjoined twins in whose separation they participated as part of a team. The weaker twin died on the table and the stronger chooses to follow her – in death, it is right that they be rejoined, and Sean and Christian perform that service for them. Similarly, even though in life she was an annoying and self-destructive surgery addict who blackmailed the partners into so much surgical work that she eventually had a stroke, Christian operates on Mrs Grubman’s corpse to spruce up her appearance for her funeral – which, in the event, only he and her housekeeper attend (‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8)). He speaks movingly about their strange friendship in a way that he never could have when she was alive: Mrs Grubman, you were a huge pain in the ass … You were funny, you were honest, and you stuck up for yourself. I loved



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the fact that you never let me off the hook. Life was more interesting with you in it and … and I’m gonna miss you. And I love you too. Goodbye Mrs Grubman. He cries for her – normally Christian only cries for his own pain – and he kisses her; Christian normally favours intercourse from the rear so that he does not have to look women in the face, so when he kisses a woman it speaks to the importance of the relationship to him. Not having a career, or something you are good at, leads to discontent. Julia is not an especially good mother – she humiliates Matt with her intervention over his threesome and she kills her daughter’s hamster; she knows that she should have continued with medicine, and both her alternate world dream in ‘Julia McNamara’ (2.12) and her performance in the triage station in ‘Sal Perri’ (3.12) indicate that she would have been good at it. The very moment that Julia finds something to do that she is good at, her life improves and she is able to deal with Sean on equal terms during the crisis that surrounds her pregnancy (from a one-time sentimental tryst with Sean during their divorce) and her decision to have the child Conor, a decision that she sticks to even when she knows that there is a chance he will be deformed. One of the many reasons why Liz Cruz is one of the moral centres of the show is that she is a superb anaesthetist who keeps her mind on the job almost all of the time. Another, of course, is that she has a deeply religious name – Cruz means Cross and St Elizabeth was the mother of the Virgin. If Sean and Christian are brothers, she is their sister, their irritable, disapproving sister whom Christian teases remorselessly – when she dates Poppy in Season Four, it is clear that part of Christian’s disapproval comes from the way Poppy mocks her for her weight problem in the way only he is allowed to. Her presence in the show reminds us forcibly that Miami is a Hispanic city as well as an Anglo one – a completely white McNamara–Troy clinic would be a far less effective symbolic universal location. Yet it is only at the end of Season Six, in ‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19), that she becomes a partner. Even some of the characters coded as villains or at least as antagonists are redeemed to the extent that they are good at what

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they do. Ava in her role as Julia’s life coach manages to prod Julia into some of what she needs to do – express her discontent at what life with Sean has made her. Though her role in his life is fatally compromised by her sexual involvement with Matt, Ava is generally a good influence on him nonetheless. Michelle is clearly a good administrator – it is just unfortunate that she is completely amoral when it comes to defending her own interests. Gina has a flair for work as a realtor, which leads to her asking Julia to invest in the building that becomes the spa they own, and is a competent manager once Julia has talked her out of trying to control building contractors with sexual favours. When Sean and Christian attend her funeral after her death, we learn that she was a much-loved centre of the sex addict community (‘Kyle Ainge’ (5.11)). By contrast, people who are no good at what they are supposed to do professionally are generally seen as contemptible. Merrill Bobolit is not a very good surgeon to begin with – he is a successful rival to Sean and Christian only because he is even better at publicity than Christian. He takes on the surgery on a dog which Sean and Christian decline and loses everything when the dog dies – he becomes a hack who disfigures the working-class Hispanic women who come to him for experimental treatments and kills a woman by over-liposuctioning her while out of his mind on nitrous oxide (‘Oona Wentworth’ (2.13)). He ends up as Escobar’s prison sex slave; the man who once traded Christian a sports car for Kimber Henry’s favours is reduced to selling himself for protection. It would be a serious mistake to regard the universe Ryan Murphy portrays as an amoral one – he can be deeply punitive towards characters who transgress in areas he regards as important, and not doing properly what you set out to do is one of them. One of the areas in which Quentin and Kit are monstrous is the way that their role as the Carver betrays their supposed professions as surgeon and police officer. Nip/Tuck is a show in which episodic material – the various surgeries that Sean and Christian carry out on their clients – often acts as metaphoric commentary on their individual and joint character arcs. I have referred to some of these above – notably Natasha Charles and Agatha Ripp. Susan Kerns, in her chapter above, offers a particularly telling example of this – the episode ‘Rose and



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Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9) in which, after the temporary severing of their professional relationship, Sean and Christian participate in the cleaving of conjoined twins, demonstrates how impossible a permanent break between the two men actually is. Sean picks up a whore whom the two men end up sharing – and not only calling her ‘Julia’ but seeing her change into Julia at a number of points in the threesome. They are so close that they share hallucinations. Other episodes provide other such metaphors: after Sean leaves in Season Three, Christian refuses to sever the leg of Ben White (3.7), who has Body Integrity Identity Disorder; and in ‘Willy Ward’ (4.14) Sean identifies with an ageing ventriloquist whose dummy (another doll) has become a vehicle for Ward’s self-hatred. At one point, Ward and the dummy are replaced in Sean’s fantasy by himself, with Christian on his knee; the dummy here is specifically an evil possessing dummy, like the one in the classic horror film Dead of Night (1945). An overtly fantastic show like Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) uses concretized metaphors as the show’s ‘Monsters of the Week’; even though Nip/Tuck is an overtly realistic show, its ‘surgeries of the week’ are concretized metaphors that give it at least as much in common with Buffy as it has with a standard medical show like ER. At the same time, each season has an overall story arc in which the central relationships of Sean, Christian and Julia, and of the secondary characters who cluster around them, most notably Kimber and Matt, go through crisis after crisis, exacerbated in each season by external threats of one kind or another. These are not, quite, the Little Bads and Big Bads around which Joss Whedon organized each year of Buffy – Escobar in Season One is only present in the first and last two episodes of the season while Ava’s role is more ambiguous in any case. The Carver and his secret identity dominate Season Three – though this arc starts in Season Two and is almost as important as Ava’s. Season Four has the slow revelation of the organlegging ring and the role of James in it; the return of Escobar seems unconnected to this until the last couple of episodes when he replaces James as central villain. The latter two seasons are weakened by lacking the focus a Big Bad provides. It is important when looking at the show in retrospect to remember what we and the characters know, and when we and they first knew

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it. We do not begin fully to suspect until the end of the first season that Matt might not be Sean’s, in spite of early references to the lack of resemblance between them: we only discover definitively that he is Christian’s in Season Two when Julia collects the results of a DNA test; we only learn in (3.10) that the sexual intercourse between Christian and Julia happened when they went to try out the cake for the wedding and got drunk on champagne. One of Nip/Tuck’s particular delights is that the storytelling skill of its creators includes the ability to construct plausibly retroactive continuity. At its best, Nip/Tuck portrays coherent emotional truth, even though quite often this truth is created over time in the midst of the breakneck schedule of television production. Far more than the later seasons, Season One inhabits a world of immediate consequences in which Sean, Christian and Julia suffer fairly immediate penalties for folly and pride and greed, and so do the people around them. It is a coarser-grained season than some of what followed it – Christian’s sale of Kimber to Bobolit is followed almost immediately by the scene where she tortures him, for example, and Julia’s not especially innocent flirtation with her fellow student Jude provides Sean with a pretext for going ahead with his affair with the doomed cancer patient Megan. Julia arranges to see Christian in something like an assignation, and is so keen that she arrives early and catches him with the twins Mandi and Randi (‘Mandi/Randi’ (1.2)). This is a show in which intentions as well as overt acts have consequences. Often, though, those consequences are unforeseeable; in a parable well known from Catholic sermonizing, St Anthony of Padua told a penitent gossip to walk through the town plucking feathers from a chicken, and then to attempt to gather up the feathers. When Sean allows a difficult patient to sign a consent form in a hurry (‘Bobbi Broderick’ (2.6)), he has no idea that she will neglect the aftercare of her liposuction and blame him for a bad outcome. He certainly has no idea that his decision to trump her media campaign against him by taking on pro bono restoration of faces slashed by the Carver will put his and Christian’s lives in jeopardy and involve them in the complex treacheries of Quentin Costa and Kit McGraw. He performs a right action from mixed motives, and its consequences are endless.



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One feature of the current golden age of American television drama is the constant battle between the networks’ desire for easily marketable episodes into which new viewers can walk without back-story and the creators’ desire to tell rich and complex stories. Part of the triumph of Nip/Tuck is that by counterpointing its long-running story arcs with individual weekly cases that are often memorable and sensational, it achieves balance. Its style, which draws, as I have shown, on both realist discussion of moral issues and extravagant Gothic symbolism, draws new viewers in – they are attracted by a sensationalism that has popular appeal but is highly intelligent and highly artificial. It would be improper to omit from a discussion of Nip/Tuck a brief discussion of its flaws. Like any long-running television drama, the direction of the show has been altered by extraneous circumstances; the final divorce of Sean and Julia, for example, was a necessity caused by the departure of Joely Richardson for personal reasons. If the resulting episodes nonetheless feel emotionally consistent, that is a tribute to Ryan Murphy’s abilities as an improviser. I have no particular problem with the sensational Carver story arc – the weakness of Season Three derives less from this than from some less than brilliant passage work in mid-season. Sean leaves the practice, again, for no especially good reason, and returns once more – this weakens the effect of his dramatic departures in the second and fourth seasons. Occasionally storylines are simply aborted – the aftermath of Cherry and Matt’s vengeance on Alderman is hardly mentioned except as a trauma that draws Matt into Scientology. As I have argued in my introduction to this book, these weaknesses are exacerbated in Seasons Five and Six. Murphy is, like most moralists, a sentimentalist who is distinctly prone to seeing the physically or socially challenged as Magical Others who tell Uncomfortable Truths. This often patronizing attitude weakens his portrayal of outsider figures like Sophia Lopez and doomed characters like Megan; one of the attractive things about Season Four is that the dwarf Marlowe Sawyer is not so much a Magical Outsider as a flawed human being who is pursuing personal agendas. The homeless man who stops Sean destroying himself in ‘Reefer’ (4.13) would be worryingly close to being another Magical Truthteller were he not so brutally murdered and dismembered by

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James. ‘Reefer’ has to be the darkest Christmas episode of any show ever, as she and Michelle smuggle the eviscerated Reefer out of the clinic wearing red bobble hats and carrying Santa sacks. The show is well researched – its technical adviser Linda Klein regularly appears as the originally silent Nurse Linda. (She starts to get lines in Season Five, mostly talking about her interest in golf – Sean’s original role on Hearts and Scalpels precisely parallels Klein’s, though of course he later becomes that show’s star.) Occasionally Nip/Tuck cuts intellectual corners for the sake of story – as with the ludicrously speeded-up surgeries Christian performs on Alexis Stone. The surgery that completes Ava Moore is either one so simple it hardly needed the specialist attention of Barrett Moore, or one sufficiently complex that she would not be flying to Europe later the same day. The trouble with surgery as metaphor is that sometimes the needs of the metaphor take precedence over the facts of the surgery. One could multiply examples but, in the end, a long-running television series is always going to have flaws; it is not within the power even of Ryan Murphy to achieve the perfection his characters so often discuss. Murphy’s constant use of a full battery of phantasmagoric uncanny Romantic and Decadent tropes allied to melodramatic plotting that dramatizes crucial issues in contemporary society is akin to the hyper-realism of Dickens. In Dickens’s work, shadow doubles, dolls, masks and such credible implausibilities as the spontaneous combustion of Mr Krook in Bleak House go hand in hand with detailed examination of such issues as the reform of the law courts or the corruption of the civil service. I mention Dickens not as a value judgement as to the final worth of Murphy’s work but in order to place him generically. Like Dickens, Murphy is fascinated with the way that urban life is a constant stew of coincidence; like the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, the plastic surgery clinic of McNamara–Troy is a site which brings together all sorts and conditions of people and throws them into improbable and fertile conjunctions. It is a place where people, but most importantly the show’s central characters, try constantly to remake and refashion their lives towards a perfection they never achieve.



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Notes 1 In From Alien to the Matrix: Readings in Science Fiction Film (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005). 2 E.g. National Public Radio, 18 May 2009. Asked about his parents, Murphy says, ‘I think you know we were Catholic’; http://www.npr.org/templates/ transcript/transcript.php?storyId=104199257. 3 Not least because this moment, like so much of this subplot, could be read as intensely transphobic. As a trans woman, I dreaded coming back to it and having to examine why it was not offensive; this reading is an attempt, I think a plausible one, to reclaim it.

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brighter discontent: Sean McNamara, his mid-life crisis and the failure of individualist transformation Jennifer Stoy

Over the hundred-episode run of Nip/Tuck, Sean McNamara is positioned as the ‘straight man’, the moral, hard-working and talented surgeon and family man who provides a contrast to his rakish bachelor partner, Christian Troy. This is true from the very beginning: in the pilot episode (1.1), Sean confronts Christian about his discontent concerning the lack of non-cosmetic surgery the practice performs, and Christian’s general exploitation of Sean’s skills as a surgeon. ‘The mute finally speaks!’ he screams at Christian, swearing that, at last, the opportunistic, exploitative relationship between the two surgeons is over. Indeed, Sean’s objections to Christian’s materialistic practices are borne out when the pair find themselves entangled with Colombian mobster Escobar Gallardo directly due to Christian’s greed as well as the deceit enabled by Sean’s ignorance of Spanish. Sean’s moral objections to commodified beauty culture, materialist greed, and a focus on plastic surgery as a business rather than as medicine, are all shown as valid within the first hour of the show.



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Yet that first hour of Nip/Tuck also demonstrates that Sean’s moral objections do not render him an innocent. Sean, the supposedly exploited ‘mute’ in his relationship with Christian,1 is the constant beneficiary of the rewards of Christian’s actions. His ‘frantic mobilization conceals a more fundamental immobility’;2 the mute doth protest too much. This contradiction between Sean as victim and Sean as willing participant in reifying the structures of oppression for his own gain undermines Sean’s character growth throughout the course of the show. His many overtly admirable acts and developments are usually countered with a fundamental inability to think beyond his individual quest for self-improvement and self-aggrandizement. He may finally leave the partnership in ‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19) to aid orphans in Romania, but after six seasons of watching his cycles of admirable action followed by selfish and immoral behaviour, petty treatment of the family and friends he holds power over, and resentful self-destruction, it seems not an end but the beginning of yet another round of Sean’s frantic cycle of personal immobility. What makes this cycle particularly frustrating for viewer and critic is the show’s inconsistent handling of the Sean character. Whereas Christian’s materialist, oafish behaviour is usually accompanied by some sort of ameliorating circumstance – either proof that Christian does not quite believe his vicious motto of ‘When you stop striving for perfection, you might as well be dead’ or a consequence that lets the audience understand that the show does not approve of the exploitation of women – Sean’s representation is more complex in a way that makes the character seem feckless and hypocritical. There is also more ambiguity about how his character should be received; are Ryan Murphy and company condemning the traditional values that cause Sean to be called ‘uptight’, a ‘rock’ and so forth? Is Sean the voice of sanity in a world of ‘porn stars and transsexuals’ as he himself glosses it in ‘Sophia Lopez’ (1.4)? Can this be true of a man who tells his amnesiac ex-wife Julia that they are still married in ‘Candy Richards’ (5.14) even though he has spent the past set of episodes sleeping with her 18-year-old stepdaughter Eden? Or is the narrative arc of the show a way for Sean to find compromise between his conservative American ethics and the realities of a postmodern, multicultural American landscape, letting Sean enjoy that most

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traditional of American narrative resolutions of having his cake and eating it, too? I fear that the last is likely and, to turn to Žižek, Murphy unwittingly reifies ‘our self-proclaimed postideological universe: we perform our symbolic mandates without assuming them and “taking them seriously”’.3 In doing so, he represents Sean with a significant flaw, one that is shared in representations of Baby Boomers and in other texts made by genre/‘fanboy’ creators from the late 1990s4 onwards: a tendency to recognize the many injustices of the culture and their urgent need for redress, but an unwillingness to suggest the need for collective action and de-emphasize the special individuality of the protagonist who recognizes the injustice.5 In short, by refusing to see Sean as one of many oppressed by late capitalism and patriarchal heterosexism, but always turning back to the pre-eminence of the individual, progressive social attitudes espoused by the show are betrayed by the narrative. Thus, ultimately, Murphy falls back on an old Baby Boomer cliché about the failures of the 1960s: ‘we set out to change the world’ and ‘end up just changing ourselves’.6 This toxic combination of American exceptionalism, privilege and quietism makes any wholly positive analysis of Sean McNamara difficult. However, by unpacking how this attitude infects and affects the entire series and considering the possible narrative intervention of the Season Four finale, one may more clearly see Sean McNamara’s potential as social critic and social critique and the way this failure affects Ryan Murphy’s reading of plastic surgery and the American culture that both despises and adores it. Thus, I return to the pilot and the aforementioned scenes that demonstrate Sean’s deep investment in the deeply compromised dominant ideology of American life, of capitalism, hierarchy and ownership that are all large parts of the typical American Dream. Our first scene with Sean not as surgeon, but as private individual, begins with this thought: ‘I’m going to fire the gardener.’ The scene, which involves music video style intercutting between Sean’s stodgy conservative life and Christian’s hedonistic one, is a damning and foundational scene for the series and the character of Sean: he allows himself to vent his discontent with his life and relationship to his medical practice and medical partner on his wife Julia, with whom he is having sex while he plots the firing, and on his working-class



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Latino gardener. Rather than confront Christian about his ethical and personal disagreements about McNamara–Troy’s business practices, Sean externalizes his discontent onto an Other, and someone who is subject to Sean’s power. This is not an isolated pattern; in Season Five, Sean endures all manner of inappropriate behaviour from his deranged agent, Colleen Rose, but it is not until he discovers she is a mere mall kiosk operator (despite the fact that she has functioned quite competently as his agent) that he angrily demands the end of all contact between them. The portrayal of Sean’s sex with Julia is equally damning to Sean’s pose as an ethical superior to shallow, greedy Christian; while Christian is having hedonistic, ‘meaningless’ sex with Kimber Henry – meaningless being a bit of a misnomer, given the lasting effects this sexual encounter has on the narrative – Kimber and Christian are both taking a great deal of pleasure from their sex. Sean, on the other hand, seems unconcerned with even Julia’s physical pleasure, let alone her emotional state, during their sex – while she is equally bored, mentally composing a grocery list in her mind while Sean thrusts, he at least experiences climax – and is surely in this scene ‘using’ Julia at least as badly as Christian uses Kimber. This is even a scene where we can be reasonably sure the writers intend us as the audience to see a parallel; while Sean may perform within the ‘charmed circle’ of sexuality7 and Christian on the bleeding edges, both men objectify and use their female sexual partners. Sean’s actions are no less objectionable for being performed in the marriage bed, and I am reasonably confident Murphy expects us to see both Sean’s classism (against the gardener) and sexism (against Julia). The point is further driven home when Sean loses his temper over his daughter Annie using Spanish to communicate with the housekeeper. As Sean’s family and Christian remind him, he lives in Miami and his ignorance of Spanish is a sign of privilege and a negative for him; when pushed on this point by his son, Matt, who tauntingly asks Julia, ‘Mamacita, necessito dinero por mi … lunch?’ which sets off a barrage of Spanish, Sean glares angrily at the family, but instead of confronting them, he instead fires the gardener – who speaks to him in English. Sean’s ignorance of Spanish and the privilege it signifies is one of two plot devices that kickstart Nip/Tuck’s narrative by allowing

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Christian to embroil the practice in the seedy underworld that provides at least two seasons of plot arc. This makes it difficult to pin down Murphy’s motive for having Sean become hostile at the use of Spanish in his home, despite his many ethical and progressive attitudes. One way to read the scene is that Murphy intends us to view Sean as something of a hypocrite, mouthing pious platitudes about plastic surgery while doing little to resolve his problems, and the pilot is one of Sean’s least sympathetic episodes. But there is a complicating factor to this, and it is that when Sean finally confronts Christian, he demands, as a condition of maintaining the partnership, the ability to serve pro bono clients on a regular basis. This is a good and ethical goal, and it fits well with the character’s ambivalence about cosmetic plastic surgery and commodified beauty culture. However, it also fits well with Ryan Murphy’s practical desire to find narratively compelling and multiculturally diverse cases that we are constantly told stand in stark contrast to the ‘seventy percent’ of McNamara–Troy’s cases, which are ‘tit jobs’ and other commercial, cosmetic surgeries usually performed on richer, whiter clients. Sean’s desire to do pro bono work drives a great deal of plot on Nip/Tuck, latterly assisted by the Hedda Grubman Fund in Seasons Five and Six. While subsequent episodes confirm that his desire to do pro bono work is ‘real’, his ethical objections are both surface and rather easily silenced in the name of narrative development. A definitive example of Sean’s tendency to be sabotaged by narrative development’s conflict with his character comes during the middle of Season One, when he falls in love with Megan O’Hara and has an affair with her. His attraction to the character, which begins in ‘Megan O’Hara’ (1.6), is closely related not only to her physical attractiveness, but also to shared ethics and Sean’s admiration of Megan’s perseverance through a bout of breast cancer. Yet Sean’s humane treatment of Megan – he gives her the space she needs to decide whether she wants breast implants, a decision which causes her husband to separate from her – stands in stark contrast to his treatment of Julia, who asks him in the pilot if she would benefit from breast implants and is told no, but in a way that reveals his inconsideration of her. His indifference to his wife’s body and emotional needs in turn triggers Julia into asking Christian to



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examine her breasts later in the pilot, prompting Christian to tell her, ‘I can’t recommend surgery, Julia – your breasts are perfect.’ Sean’s attraction to Megan is thus suspect; he is able to be a kind and wonderful doctor to Megan as revenge on Julia, who has reminded him ‘I’m not your patient!’ in her listing of marital discontent. Reading Sean’s attraction to Megan as revenge is further strengthened by Megan’s desire to have children although the chemotherapy has rendered her infertile, in contrast to Julia, who recently miscarried. Sean has already read the miscarriage as an attempted strike at the marriage and him: ‘You didn’t love me – us – enough to even try’ he accuses Julia post-miscarriage. Hence, while Megan is a gentle and attractive personality, and Julia is deeply flawed and as cruel to Sean in her way as Sean is to her, Sean’s attraction to Megan is in part because Megan is the anti-Julia: a woman who puts others before herself, and one whose compassion and general suffering compare favourably to what Sean sees as Julia’s selfishness. This contrast and Sean’s discontent is covered by his pilot diatribe: ‘What do you do with your days, Julia? You shop. You get your vagina waxed like some porn starlet! You go to lunch with your girlfriends! Sorry, that seems like easy street to me!’ Sean can angrily blame Julia for her choices while a housewife without much consideration, but can also see and criticize how Megan’s husband is ‘pushing’ Megan to get the implants. Thus, it is clear that Sean can be quite enlightened about the emotional work demanded of women in marriage – except in his own ‘unique’ situation, once again showing the vein of hypocrisy that is Sean McNamara’s keynote characteristic. The resolution of this conflict – Sean’s affair with Megan – could thus be seen as the privilege of a male mid-life crisis asserting itself over the perceived entitlement to emotional wifework. Again we find Murphy and Nip/Tuck equivocating on just how to read Sean’s infidelity; the audience is allowed to know that despite Julia’s similar temptation to stray, she refuses the affair, and that Sean wrongly assumes she is sleeping with Jude. The mute does not speak in this instance, and does Julia a great wrong in the meantime. So there is a possibility of reading Sean’s affair with Megan as the result of Sean’s assumptions and inability to communicate his emotions, as well as to what Laura Kipnis calls ‘this turn of events’

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that ‘may raise fundamental questions about what sort of emotional world you want to inhabit, or what fulfillments you’re entitled to’,8 but it is undercut by several factors. First among them is the tragic denouement of the affair, chronicled in ‘Adelle Coffin’ (1.10) when Megan’s breast implants, which she has asked for to feel whole, strain her immune system and allow the cancer to metastasize. When Megan announces her intention to commit suicide and die with dignity, Sean, who has sworn off the affair, not to save Julia’s feelings, but for fear of losing his son Matt’s regard, is stricken with what role he should play. In a moment of perverse yet touching love, he takes the ‘advice’ of the disembodied head of Adelle Coffin, which has been speaking to him throughout the episode, and assists Megan’s suicide to minimize her suffering. The funeral scene that follows is a prime example of the ambiguity with which the text presents Sean McNamara. His honest grief is starkly touching, but it is immediately used as another club to use against Julia, who, due to his grief at the funeral, realizes Sean has had an affair with her. As she says bitterly, ‘Even your infidelity is passive-aggressive … she’s dead, and she died a horrible death, and I can’t hate a woman who died of cancer at age thirty-six.’ Worse yet, due to Julia’s premarital infidelity with Christian, Sean’s disrespect for Julia has been somewhat justified, though the character does not yet know of it. Sean is later allowed to be devastated and furious when he discovers that Matt is not his biological son, choking Julia, beating Christian and finally hissing, ‘I loved you the most’ in ‘Agatha Ripp’ (2.8) with the fury of the righteously scorned, but the show does not offer the same sympathy to Julia. Sean’s infidelity is made sympathetic if not ethical by his love of Megan and the tragedy of her death – a unique, individual circumstance that trumps Sean’s sexist and callous emotional neglect of his wife, which the show does not extend to Julia’s youthful infidelity and its similarly extraordinary circumstances. A final example of how Megan and Sean’s illicit love affair is hagiographized comes in ‘Julia McNamara’ (2.12), when Julia glimpses, in her alternate present where she married Christian instead of Sean, a Sean who is happily married to a cancer-free Megan, who is a working paediatrician, a loving mother to a biddable, non-troubled Matt, and happily pregnant with what will



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probably be a happier Annie as well. Megan becomes, without complication, a saint – a woman with a good but feminized career, the good mother to Sean’s children, and the helpmeet/support of a Sean who has completely eschewed materialism to work for Médecins Sans Frontières. While this episode must be evaluated in terms of being Julia’s fantasy or an alternate universe, the show does not even touch on the troubling implications of fantasy Megan being a perfect ‘angel of the house’ updated for the twenty-first century. All of the mistakes Sean and Julia make despite their best intentions are obliterated by Megan and Sean’s licit love, whereas alternate Julia ends up drunk and alone and abandoned by Christian for being infertile. While the reasons for this are compelling within Julia’s character arc, Sean escapes any responsibility for Julia’s failures with the events of (2.12), and further garners a certain pity, as Sean’s discontents are indirectly attributed to Julia and Christian, and he is ‘saved’ by the perfect woman. Once again, we as viewers are left with an extremely confusing reading of Sean – has he no culpability in this situation? Are we meant to read him as a victim of Christian’s materialism and Julia’s passivity? One notes that in (2.12), Sean is not tempted by Julia’s attempt to throw herself at him, and is in all ways the ethical plastic surgeon with high ideals; is this supposed to indicate that without the negative influences of Christian and Julia, Sean McNamara would be a better, happier person? Such a reading undermines the centrality of the Sean–Christian relationship, but it is not outside of the realm of possibility. At the same time, I suspect it is not exactly the reading of the character dynamics Murphy and company wish us to take away: sex and materialism are treated much more complexly in Nip/Tuck than as unabashed evils, and there is a slight comic aspect to Megan and Sean’s domestic bliss. But for the most part, (2.12)’s depiction of Megan and Sean agrees uncomplicatedly with Ava: ‘they seem perfect together’. I suspect the problem with interpreting Megan and Sean’s relationship is that Megan O’Hara, as a cancer survivor and victim, is overly sentimentalized, which is an unfortunate tendency of Ryan Murphy’s when dealing with the disabled and certain sorts of Others. Unlike, say, a Kimber Henry, who is allowed to be both victim and villain, Megan remains totally unmarked by her willingness to have an affair with a married man or commit suicide – she is basically a

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saint, and hence Sean’s interactions with her are freed from the scrutiny which affects most of the other characters of the show. Sean’s relationship with Megan also is tied to the best characteristics of the man – his ability to be non-judgemental, pragmatic and deeply compassionate in his role as healer. Indeed, in his role as healer, Sean is often able to accept things that he previously struggled with, such as transsexuality, and even to become an advocate in the face of indifference and prejudice. This character trait, when added to Murphy’s sentimentalized, sanctified view of ‘victims’ such as Megan, gives Sean an unwarranted pass in regards to his infidelity with Megan that in itself makes sense – until we begin to look at Sean’s less-than-savoury relationships with other women, particularly Julia. Affairs, sexual insecurity and ill-fated relationships are perhaps the narrative indicator of a mid-life crisis, of course, with the other major trope being dissatisfaction in work. Over the course of the show, Sean McNamara has at least five major incidences of intending to dissolve his partnership with Christian, and six adulterous or inadvisable relationships, all of them tied to his mid-life crisis. His relationship with Megan raises the ‘fundamental questions about what sort of emotional world [he] want[s] to inhabit’, and is the most typical of fictional mid-life crisis affairs – the tragic love affair. However, the other relationships – his Season Two relationship with Kimber Henry, his extremely problematic relationship with Nicole Moretti in Season Three, his gruesomely comic affair with Monica Wilder in Season Four, his liaison with Eden Lord in Season Five, and finally, his involvement with the black widow Teddy Rowe in Seasons Five and Six – are perhaps more instructive in how Sean inhabits such a problematic space in the show, as perennial victim of exploitation and misfortune, while being strongly unsympathetic and grossly hypocritical in that space. Sean is a victim of late capitalist exploitation: Julia’s fantasy/alternate life where Sean is blissfully fulfilled as both family man and a surgeon for Médecins Sans Frontières, as well as his failures to achieve happiness through most of his individual choices, does suggest that he is miserable with the ‘whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings and values’9 of being a surgeon and a man in late capitalist America. But as I also mentioned, his ability to recognize his exploitation without



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recognizing it is the hegemonic hierarchy that has caused it or relinquishing his hegemonic privileges as a straight, white male surgeon, which allows him to decry his exploitation as individualized bad luck, makes him unsympathetic. Nowhere is this more true than in his affairs; for example, even when slightly deranged nanny Monica Wilder is nursing his infant son Conor in ‘Faith Wolper, Ph.D.’ (4.6), Sean’s behaviour towards her and his grossly hypocritical anger at Julia for her affair with night nurse Marlowe makes the end of that affair just deserts for Sean in a very darkly comic way. After Monica is killed by being run over by a bus, a leering hallucination of Escobar informs Sean ‘… it’s okay, Sean. She probably didn’t feel a thing’, before a final scene where Julia, completely unaware of Monica’s death, wonders why she ‘stood us up’ as Sean pours her wine and ignores the presence of Escobar and a gore-covered Monica toasting, along with Julia, ‘to us’ while the Rolling Stones’s ‘As Tears Go By’ plays in the background. As with most of Sean’s affairs, how to read the scene is difficult: Sean’s actions towards both Monica and Julia are deplorable and are so acknowledged, but Monica’s positioning as a deranged semi-stalker whose demeanour is gratingly perky at best causes a straightforward reading to go astray. Further complicating a simple reading is Sean’s continual hallucination of adversary/worser angel Escobar Gallardo throughout the affair. Escobar, of course, is a symbol of the aggressive, rapacious, violent masculinity that Sean despises and fetishizes at the same time. Whereas Christian’s masculinity, while occasionally threatening to Sean – especially during the discovery of Matt’s parentage – is somewhat neutralized in part by Christian’s failures as a surgeon and in part by the homoerotic subtext that threatens to become text in Season Four, Escobar is a vampiric ghost that hovers in Sean’s unconscious – a man and a symbol of negative masculinity that Sean is unable to kill. Rather than recognize his own superior ethical code of masculinity that does not require violence to be a ‘real’ man, Sean becomes anxious over it and, in asserting himself for self-assurance, reifies the world of unequal gender relationships and patriarchal control that Escobar Gallardo stands for. Ironically, Escobar himself – the real one, rather than Sean’s fantastic version of him – has to inform Sean that lying to Julia about his affair with Monica is ridiculous and counterproductive, a form of control that

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will not work. Even though Sean’s fantasy of being the 1950s patriarch is oppressive and inimical even to himself, he is unable to relinquish it until literal disasters, such as the hurricane in ‘Conor McNamara, 2026’ (4.11), drive it away from him and then only for a short time. If ideology is ‘a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge’,10 then Sean McNamara is most definitely the perpetrator and victim of his own misery, trapped in the false consciousness of the conservative American Dream of wealth, a patriarchal family structure, and owning and controlling his own business. Indeed, it is control of his business, rather than his deep reservations about the healing value of cosmetic plastic surgery, where Sean’s mid-life professional conflict stems from. His breaks with Christian – as I mentioned before, there are several serious incidents where Sean temporarily or permanently dissolves McNamara–Troy – are often superficially triggered by Sean’s ethical concerns about plastic surgery, but are usually about the control issues at the heart of Sean’s mid-life crisis. The first near-breakup, in the pilot, is about Sean’s enraged reaction to realizing the depth of his exploitation at the hands of Christian, which has now involved him in organized crime, and most authentically represents Sean’s feelings about plastic surgery. Others – one during the aftermath of (2.8), one in the middle of Season Three, and the last in (4.14) and ‘Gala Gallardo’ (4.15) before the possibly final dissolution of McNamara–Troy in ‘Hiro Yoshimura’ (6.19) – are personal crises inflicted upon the ‘business’ (as all the characters constantly refer to McNamara–Troy, reminding us of the blurry lines between healing and commodification in the plastic surgery field) by a personally hurt and uncommunicative Sean. Sean has legitimate points about pro bono work, the commodification of the body that plastic surgery entails, and the exploitation of young women both professionally and personally by Christian – but these are usually covered better in standalone episodes. When Sean threatens to leave the business, he is recognizing that ‘the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed’,11 demanding redress of what he feels is an asymmetrical power structure between himself and Christian. In most cases, Sean seems to wish only to reverse the asymmetry and occupy the place



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Christian does – a sign of Sean’s insecure masculinity, his false consciousness about hierarchy and power relations, and his stunning hypocrisy – though usually these crises in the narrative are followed by an equalizing balance between the two partners. As with his affairs, the message we as viewers are to gain from Sean’s passive-aggressive power play is equivocating and ambiguous. Sean has legitimate wrongs that deserve redress – but his methods and demands are often impossible and have consequences that most hurt his female and economically dependent workers, given voice by the relatively privileged Liz.12 Casting McNamara–Troy as a ‘family’, as Liz does in ‘Rose and Raven Rosenberg’ (2.9), does not uncomplicate matters any; Sean is cast as resentful co-patriarch with Christian, quietly desiring his ‘rightful’ role as sole patriarch and suspecting that Christian has quietly usurped that role, as he did as Matt’s biological father. It is extremely easy to read Sean McNamara’s character as the victim of his own patriarchal expectations that demand he be sole patriarch and alpha male due to his talent as a surgeon and ethical authority. Periodically sabotaging his relationship with Christian Troy (which produces all of the ‘best things’ in both mens’ lives – Matt, their surgical practice, etc.) to gain power he is unwilling to share is a good example of this thesis. Yet, the show continually goes to lengths to redeem Sean and show his capacity to heal others and be stalwart in times of trouble, making a strongly negative reading of the character difficult. One interlude of romantic and business-related mistakes stands out, however, among the repeated themes of personal and career discontent that Sean McNamara suffers as strongly negative – his brief, bizarre, and poorly plotted involvement with the Witness Protection Program and mobster wife Nicole Moretti, played by Anne Heche. This interlude is in the midst of Season Three, when the partnership is being strained by the addition of Quentin Costa, a talented bisexual surgeon Sean brings in to partially replace Christian after Christian’s attack and rape by the Carver. Quentin’s desire for glory and burgeoning relationship with Julia discomfits Sean, and his relationship with Christian has once again been strained, this time due to Sean’s willingness to believe that Christian is the Carver.13 Yet the tone of Sean’s exit from the practice is once again framed as a disagreement about the ethics of plastic surgery, which tracks poorly

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with, for example, Sean agreeing to play mortician in ‘Frankenlaura’ (3.6) after McNamara–Troy’s business declines in light of the false accusations about Christian. Rather than having a legitimate complaint that plays out ambiguously, Sean is the author of his own misery in this estrangement. He brought Quentin into the practice, his mistrust of Christian has damaged their relationship, and he initiated the separation from Julia that has finally led to divorce and Julia successfully running a business and having new romances. The only organic character development that drives Sean towards the Witness Protection Program and eschewing the vain world of his family and friends is his recent work with the Miami police in the case of grossly obese Momma Boone in (3.1), which he does with genuine grace. However, the show’s choice to play Sean’s interest in a new direction in this case does base itself in this, and Sean comes off looking petty for abandoning the problems he himself has created in the business-family. One might also note that Sean even has control and power over the business at this point, due to Christian’s extended recovery from his rape and Quentin’s position as an outsider. Sean has got exactly what he claims to desire: fewer cosmetic cases, more interesting/challenging patients, power over the business and Christian, and the moral high ground over Julia. Yet, rather than admit that all of this power and patriarchal hierarchy makes him miserable and consider alternatives, Sean flees his problems in an echo of his abandoning father, who we learn in ‘Conor McNamara’ (4.8) left because his patriarchal dictates were circumvented by Sean’s mother with Sean as willing accomplice. As driven home by Marlowe reading about victims of traumatizing juvenile surgeries and the music choice of George Michael’s ‘Jesus to a Child’ placed over the intercutting surgeries of Conor and young Sean, Sean has had a ‘ponderous silence’14 placed on the ‘coded contents’ of his life traumas, all of which tie into his anxieties about masculinity and, explicitly, masculinity as a patriarch. His long muteness about his own childhood plastic surgery and his guilt that this caused his father to leave is only another incidence in a pattern of the Sean character’s history. In the case of his Season Three abandonment, it is his failure to recognize that he is not happy in the hegemonic role that makes his actions so unpalatable. Again, this conflict with dominant ideology and hegemonic roles



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in late capitalist America being the one that drives Sean McNamara’s characterization is highlighted in this crisis by his immediate and ridiculous attraction to Nicole Moretti that begins in ‘Ben White’ (3.7). Sean has been warned by grim Agent Sagramore that he is not to get emotionally attached to his patients; even as the healer in Sean rebels against this, is it any surprise that Sean ‘falls’ for a woman with a young son who seeks out Sean’s attempts to be in loco parentis?15 Sean’s attraction to Nicole Moretti is at least as much about her son Austin’s need for a father figure and Sean’s discontent with his son Matt, who has only recently rescinded a restraining order against him. It is safe to say that Sean is not interested in either Nicole or Austin for themselves, but for what they offer: a blank slate, an illusory second chance to be a ‘good’ patriarch, as well as the ability to leave behind his own identity and his mistakes. It is as neat and false a domestic fantasy as the one Julia dreams for Sean in (2.12). But without the love between Megan and Sean, and with the knowledge that Sean’s abandonment of the business has nothing to do with his ethics and everything to do with avoiding his mistakes and his desires as a surgeon and a man, the fantasy looks immature, selfish, and serves to reify a hegemony that has already made Sean miserable any number of times. It is no surprise, then, that Sean’s stint in the Witness Protection Program ends in anticlimactic disaster. He discovers that Nicole is not the blank slate he imagined, having shot her mobster husband to escape. One of the core parts of his identity is further challenged when he is told he will not be able to practise as a surgeon, which gives him serious doubts but does not end his dream of having a new chance at being a good patriarch. These doubts are furthered when Christian, faced with a high, incapacitated Quentin during the experimental facial transplant in ‘Hannah Tedesco’ (3.9), begs Sean to return to his side and partner him during the surgery. Sean’s satisfaction in his work is evident to everyone, including himself, who admits the surgery is ‘the most fun I’ve had in years’, but Sean is still unable to admit what is obvious: he cannot leave with the Morettis. The decision must be made by Nicole and the Witness Protection Program, who leave Sean alone in an empty house. While the viewer can perhaps feel sympathy for Sean’s empty life, the storyline is ultimately unsatisfactory because Sean’s leaving is clearly never going to happen

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– we know how television works, and the lead does not leave mid-season like this – and his reasons are shallow. Again, rather than Sean having an epiphany about his unhappiness in hegemonic roles and dominant ideology, he individualizes and exceptionalizes his experiences, despite their rather pedestrian and common nature. At this point, the question of why Sean has these repetitive, non-epiphanic epiphanies that only represent a climax – or nadir – of his discontent with his life and the patriarchal, late-capitalist, materialistic social structure it reifies and represents needs answering. Is there a lesson to be learned from Sean’s frustrated and frustrating attempts to reach the catharsis and transformation he so often dispenses as a surgeon and a healer? Does Ryan Murphy wish us to read each of Sean’s discontented mid-life crises straightforwardly and conclude that Sean McNamara is hapless at best and a raging hypocrite at worst? I doubt this, and concede that a great deal of the repetitive nature of Sean’s mid-life crises and their decreasing effectiveness as a plot device comes from the nature of serial television. Nip/Tuck’s core narrative structure requires Sean and Christian to balance each other as characters as they navigate ‘our “postmodern” time, with its freedom to deconstruct, doubt, [and] distantiate oneself’16 and the spectacular cases they take on to symbolize it. For the show to work, there must be both conflict and difference between Sean and Christian, making a seemingly ‘natural’ resolution – Sean leaving the business to pursue a less commercialized version of his career – untenable. Yet this explanation alone is not enough; Christian, while still materialistic and prone to brag about the power of his ‘ten-inch dick’ at the least provocation, has been developed as a character in ways that make him the more appealing character. In Season Four alone, both his embittered and poignant eulogy of perennial patient and unlikely friend Mrs Grubman and his reunion with his ‘son’ Wilbur demonstrate the emotional range and complexity of the character. Christian is still a capitalist, chauvinist pig whose libido, greed and inability to delay his own gratification cause himself and others a great deal of pain, but his ability to break free of social norms and love a one-time tryst’s mixed-race child as his own son, to say nothing of a vain, ageing woman who has literally tried to pimp him, makes the character more sympathetic.



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It is not until extremely late in Season Four that Sean at last is allowed by Ryan Murphy and the other writers of Nip/Tuck to demonstrate some of the same potential for complexity in a way that is not mostly negative. Starting with ‘Conor McNamara, 2026’ (4.11) and the departure of Joely Richardson from the show, Sean’s constant discontent finally leads to a more genuine catharsis and examination. In ‘Diana Lubey’ (4.12), Sean assists the titular character, played by quintessential French romantic icon Catherine Deneuve, to keep her lover’s ashes with her. In this same episode, the long-subtextual question of the homoerotic attraction between Sean and Christian is partially resolved when, faced with the revelation of Christian’s homoerotic dreams about Sean, Sean stands with and supports Christian against the revenge of his therapist, Faith Wolper. Rather than react to Christian’s latent attraction with another masculinity crisis, Sean asserts his brotherly love for Christian and affirms his desire for Christian to be happy with new love Michelle, despite his own well-justified dislike of the character. Given past events, and the crisis Sean suffers two episodes later in ‘Willy Ward’ about being Christian’s silent, abused partner yet again, it is a remarkably mature response from Sean. In a similar vein, Sean’s temporary fall into despair due to the loss of his position as patriarch of his household (and increasingly more obviously, his business) in ‘Reefer’ (4.13) is resolved, for Sean, with surprising grace. It is only due to the unexpected consequences of Christian’s libido and greed that Reefer, the homeless alcoholic Sean befriends, meets a terrible end on Christmas Eve; a moment of the show’s unsentimental irony that does not quite work, and looks primarily grotesque and rather mean-spirited. Sean, no longer encumbered with family, is finally being allowed ways to move beyond his role as discontent ‘mute’ exploited by the expectations of capitalism, family and American masculinity. All of this slow-building transformation comes to a head in the climax of ‘Gala Gallardo’ (4.15), during a lip-synched musical number to the song ‘Brighter Discontent’ by Los Angeles band The Submarines.17 Sean has once again left the practice due to ethical and personal discontent; but at last, rather than to passive-aggressively punish Julia or Christian, his departure seems genuinely based in a desire for transformation, as marked by his change in location to Los

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Angeles and the structural development this represents for Nip/ Tuck’s format. The musical number is remarkable in the way it establishes and re-establishes the characters of the show, but even more for referencing much of the conflict I have referenced throughout this chapter – against late capitalism, commodified body modification standing in for radical personal transformation, the patriarchal/traditional family structure, and perhaps even heterosexist assumptions. I include significant parts of the lyrics here because they so directly demonstrate so much of what this chapter addresses: Got a brand new roof above my head All the empty boxes thrown away I rearranged the place A hundred times today But the ordering of objects Couldn’t hide what’s missing All these things should make me happy Make me happy to be home again All these things should make me happy Make me happy to be alone again (The Submarines, ‘Brighter Discontent’, emphasis mine) This only serves to convince me that Murphy and his production team are all-too-aware of what Sean McNamara and his many mid-life crises symbolize: a ‘brighter discontent’ with the significant social hierarchies of ‘mainstream’ (white, straight, male, Christian, upper-middle-class) American hegemony. The musical sequence begins with Sean, alone in his new Los Angeles apartment, finally free of the supposedly malign influence that Christian, Miami and, by indirect association, Julia, represent to him. Yet as the lyrics state and the sequence informs us, Christian at least is not the root of Sean’s problems. His silence, his muteness and willingness to reify ‘all these things’ that ‘should’ make him happy, are the problem. Further, Sean’s own failure to speak, and his implication in his own oppression, is suggested by the next stanza of the song: ‘I think I



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might know/ What I really want/ But is a brighter discontent/ The best that I could hope to find?’ The viewer, like Sean himself, is fairly aware of what the character ‘really’ wants – and in the scene where Christian and Sean reunite over a routine ‘eye job’ it is highlighted that Sean enjoys the challenge and craft of his work, as well as the healing aspects of plastic surgery – both have been implied and directly stated throughout the series. He is not deeply invested in the material rewards, but he takes great joy in being an excellent surgeon, which makes sense given that Sean’s alienated periods have previously been ended by a unique and challenging surgery – the Rosenberg twins, the facial transplant – which reinforces that the character deeply resents being alienated from his labour. Christian, of course, retains his status-conscious materialism – ‘It’s Beverly Hills or nothing’ he tells Sean of the new practice they plan to begin in Los Angeles – but there is a new balance in the narrative structure between Sean and Christian. Sean is no longer relegated to mutely living out the hegemonic roles he is supposed to live; he is no longer as deeply invested in reproducing the oppressive structures that have so damaged him. Indeed, Sean in Season Five reverses the general power structure of the show up to that point, where Christian is the glamorous, handsome partner and Sean is the attractive but undistinguished one. But, true to pattern, Sean cannot resist embracing materialism and conservative American values and ends up hurting himself and others because of it. If anything, the Los Angeles-based seasons are worse in this regard because instead of being content as a rich and well-regarded surgeon, Sean begins to seek celebrity and its benefits. He becomes a popular supporting character in the nighttime soap opera Hearts and Scalpels (an odd pastiche of Nip/Tuck and Grey’s Anatomy) in ‘Carly Summers’ (5.1) and then its star in ‘Magda and Jeff’ (5.10) while Christian is unable to find fame in Los Angeles. Christian, instead of Sean, is the resentful partner angry about the other man’s sex appeal who does ill-advised things like becoming a gigolo to prove his virility. However, Sean’s sexual triumph over Christian does not lead to Sean escaping his cycle of poor sexual choices, hypocrisy, resentment and self-destruction only partially redeemed by virtuous acts. If anything, Sean makes worse choices than Christian in partners once

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he moves to Los Angeles. In early Season Five, Sean starts an affair with Eden Lord, an 18-year-old schoolgirl whose mother is Julia’s new partner, Olivia (Portia de Rossi). Unlike his previous affairs, Eden is ‘a little bitch’ who encourages an eating disorder in Annie, poisons Julia with mercury and eventually becomes a porn star who evicts Kimber from yet another comeback (‘Giselle Blaylock and Legend Chandler’ (5.22)). Sean chooses her over his co-star Kate Tinsley, whose previous fatness as well as an incident where she defecates in a hot tub (‘Dawn Budge II’ (5.4)) make him disinterested in her. His breakup with Kate in ‘Chaz Darling’ (5.5) shows Sean at his worst: ‘I think you’re going to get fat again,’ he tells Kate after becoming embarrassing at a swingers’ party for white couples looking for African-American men to sleep with the female partner. Kate has previously indulged his schoolgirl uniform fetish, unaware that Sean is secretly lusting for Eden and her uniform, but Sean refuses to indulge Kate’s fetish, finding it degrading and distasteful. Once again, Sean judges a woman for her sexual fetishes but refuses to recognize his own or that there could be any moral equivalence between the two. Further, given that, despite his involvement with both Kate and Eden, Sean is still in love with Julia and admits as late as ‘Roxy St James’ (5.17) that he will never accept Olivia as Julia’s lover, Sean’s moralizing is well-nigh unbearable. Even though Sean is somewhat punished for his early Season Five actions by being stabbed by his agent, Colleen (another older woman he has sexually rejected) in ‘Candy Richards’ (5.14) and repents of his fame-seeking, he seems unable to eschew his feelings of sexual entitlement. Sean, despite never voicing ‘my cock has mystical powers’ as Christian does in ‘Roxy St James’, still believes his cock deserves a beautiful woman that entirely accepts and forgives it. This leads to his final major relationship with a woman, the ‘black widow’ anaesthetist, Dr Theodora ‘Teddy’ Rowe. Teddy is a gas-inhaling thrill-seeker whose interest in Sean is clear from her first appearance in ‘Manny Skerritt’ (5.19), but whose appeal to Sean is questionable. Sean enjoys traditionally beautiful women, and in Eden, Monica, and Kimber at the times he sleeps with her, he finds emotionally fragile women whom he can both potentially heal and judge attractive as well. But until this point, none of his sexual partners have been thrill-seekers, nor has Sean been dependent upon



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their approval. In the past, it would be hard to imagine Sean photographing a patient for laughs. Even during his ill-thought-out escapades with Eden, there were certain behavioural lines drawn. Yet with Teddy, no such lines exist – but no particular reason is given for the changes. Teddy thus reads as a sloppy misfire at the hands of the writers in yet another dreary storyline about Sean’s ennui and discontent with his life. Her death at the hands of a random serial killer in ‘Jenny Juggs’ (6.4) after failing to kill Sean, Annie and Conor seems almost merciful in that her character is no longer around to be gratuitously shocking, sow discord, and be evil for petty reasons that are quite pedestrian compared to Nip/Tuck villains such as Escobar Gallardo, Ava Moore, or even Quentin and Kit. As the final season of Nip/Tuck winds down, Sean’s narrative arc remains nearly what it was in the pilot: a brilliant, driven surgeon who desires the power and glamour of being a sexual potent patriarch respected and loved by family, his partner Christian, and those others he has power over, who consistently fails to reach that goal, in part because of his maltreatment of those he loves and in part because the role does not fit him or make him happy. As he is told in a semi-prophetic dream by Budi Sabri when he asks, ‘why can’t I move?’, his frantic motionlessness is his ‘curse’ (‘Budi Sabri’ (5.20)). Sure, he identifies his relationship with Christian and its decades-long toxicity as being a source of misery in his life but this is another iteration of the mute finally speaking (1.1) or hen-pecked Sean being told to shut up by malevolent dummy Christian (4.14). It is only the end of the narrative that allows Sean to escape the cycle – the end of the narrative and Christian, always the more dynamic partner, letting Sean escape, much in the way their son Matt escapes, to the dream both men have always assumed would make them happiest. Sean goes off to do charity work with orphans in Romania, and Matt and Ava go away together. Christian, who has taken action and legally ended the partnership where Sean has been all talk, is left to assume Sean’s stasis; he approaches a young woman strongly reminiscent of his dead lover Kimber and tells her that he is a plastic surgeon in a scene that recalls his initial encounter with Kimber in the pilot. We are left with an ending as problematic as Sean McNamara during his hundred episodes of narrative. Murphy and co. seem

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aware of the problem of Sean McNamara, with exchanges like those in ‘Budi Sabri’ and the interlude at the end of ‘Gala Gallardo’, and it is true that the permanent dissolution of the partnership between McNamara and Troy would be the end of Nip/Tuck, so any feints by Sean to escape his motionless, alienated existence would by definition have to be unsuccessful. Yet the neatness of Sean’s escape rings hollow: he believes that only by doing charity work can he ever find fulfilment. Sean, having harboured this belief since the pilot, is proven right with no complications. Respect, family, the enduring partnership and love between himself and Christian are not to be compared to the self-sacrifice of foreign charity work. It is a radical thesis, to say the least, though Murphy’s assertion that Nip/Tuck ‘is a show that basically says to the culture you’re working on the wrong things’18 supports that reading. But even if one wishes to accept Murphy’s take on his own show as the only one, the nagging question remains of why Christian, the one obsessed with beauty and materialism, is the one who is able to free Sean to go and perform his good works and why Christian is then trapped in Sean’s hamster wheel of frantic motionlessness. In the end, Sean’s character, like much of Nip/Tuck, is a mixed result that is the product of radical thinking mired in closely held privilege (and perhaps, personal belief) that fails the radicalism. The challenge to late capitalism, traditional family structure, and the meaning of friendship between heterosexual men that Murphy’s show so regularly provides are never allowed to stand. Nip/Tuck returns to its ultimately hypocritical construction of loving relationships between family and friends as a cure-all for the discontent suffered by Sean due to the hegemonic ideology of American society, with sometimes Gothic and outsized punishments for those who do not conform. Sean McNamara may have ridden off into the sunset to do his good works for now, but a brighter discontent may be all that he can hope for in the fatally flawed narrative world of Nip/Tuck. Notes 1 This trope, of Sean as the silent victim of Christian, recurs occasionally: another noteworthy instance is in ‘Willy Ward’ (4.14), where Sean imagines himself as the abused puppeteer to Christian’s demonic puppet, being told to ‘shut up, dummy’.



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2 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, London: Verso, 2002, p. 7. 3 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, p. 70. 4 Among those creators would be Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Alan Ball of Six Feet Under, J. J. Abrams of Alias, and to some extent, Ronald D. Moore of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. 5 Admittedly, Sean leaving to do charity work with orphans ameliorates this, but it also remains Sean’s long-dreamt-of goal and thus a possible way of realizing his self-image as a good man rather – once again, an individual act, not a collective one. 6 Todd Haynes (director), Velvet Goldmine, Miramax Films, 1998. 7 See Gayle Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex’, in Carole Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 8 Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic, New York: Random House, 2003. 9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 109. 10 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 55. 11 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, New York: Random House, 1990, p. 95. 12 Liz, as lesbian, woman and Latina, is an impressive array of Otherness; at the same time, she often practically occupies the role of Voice of Reason on the show, and her class position, education and role on the show give her a certain level of privilege. This is perhaps why she, rather than Nurse Linda, is made the ‘voice’ of the office and the workers Sean and Christian so casually endanger with their overwrought semi-domestic struggles. 13 Of course, the true irony is that Quentin himself is the Carver, and that Sean has actually brought his nemesis closer into his life. Oddly, despite the fact that repairing the Carver’s work has been Sean’s crusade, Quentin has much more of a relationship with Christian, and his interactions with Sean are quite secondary, even compared to his interactions with Julia. 14 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, p. 29. 15 Sean is almost always vulnerable to surrogate sons who appreciate him; besides Austin Moretti, he is also mentor, in Season Five, to the talented young surgeon Raj, who stands in stark contrast to the drug-addicted and broke Matt. 16 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, p. 2. 17 http://www.myspace.com/thesubmarinesmusic is the band’s official site. 18 Ryan Murphy, interview conducted with Terry Gross, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR, 18 May 2009; http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/ transcript.php?storyId=104199257.

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nip/tuck episode guide Season One 1.1 Pilot: Christian changes the face of Perez, a mobster on the run from ganglord Escobar Gallardo whose young daughter he molested. Christian picks up and operates on Kimber Henry, a model. Escobar tortures Christian with Botox in his penis; Perez is killed and Christian and Sean dispose of the body. Sean has been thinking of leaving the practice; he forces Christian to agree to more pro bono work and hiring a psychiatrist. Julia kills her daughter’s gerbil. 1.2 Mandi/Randi: Identical twins want to be made distinct; they then want to be changed back. Christian’s growing obsession with Julia makes him impotent. Sean and Christian sack psychiatrist Pendleton and hire Grace Santiago – Sean has moved out of his home and is turned down by Grace. Matt, rebuffed by his girlfriend Vanessa, tries to circumcise himself. 1.3 Nanette Babcock: Obese Nanette wants to be transformed for a high school reunion; her blood work reveals she is being treated for depression. Told that they will not operate, Nanette kills herself. Sean repairs his son’s penis; Julia is charged with animal cruelty. Sean leaves an instrument in Mrs Grubman; Christian persuades her not to sue by spending the night with her. She insists on free surgery. Matt discovers Vanessa is a lesbian. 1.4 Sophia Lopez: Christian operates on a porn star; when Sean objects, Christian considers leaving to work with Merrill Bobolit. Christian arranges for Matt to lose his virginity – Matt nearly catches

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an STD from his partner and Julia is furious with Christian. Sean rejects the idea of doing pro bono work for transsexual Sophia, but changes his mind when he realizes she and her friends are being butchered by his former mentor Grayson; he tries and fails to shut Grayson down. Julia returns to medical school and meets Jude. 1.5 Kurt Dempsey: Kurt wants to make his appearance Asian to placate his fiancée’s family. Julia becomes pregnant – Sean offers to take paternity leave so that she can continue at medical school – but she miscarries. Grace suggests that Christian attend a sexual compulsives meeting – he does, and picks up Gina Russo there. He sleeps with Grace. They try to fix the nose of Ellen, who is addicted to surgery and has damaged her nose beyond repair. 1.6 Megan O’Hara: Bliss has lost weight for an online lover and wants her loose flesh tidied; she finds out her correspondent is himself overweight. Megan has lost two breasts to cancer and her husband wants her to get implants; she decides to leave him instead. Someone is damaging Christian’s car – he wrongly suspects Gina, and starts a relationship with Kimber. A threesome between Matt, Vanessa and her girlfriend ends by leaving Vanessa out. Sean kisses Megan. 1.7 Cliff Mantegna: Julia and Jude flirt – he becomes an intern at the practice. Christian removes chest-flab from swinger Cliff, who tells him about an exclusive sex party; Christian attends with Kimber, as does Jude, not with Julia. Julia catches Matt with his girlfriends and calls in their parents. Christian fires Jude, who threatens to tell Sean that Christian loves Julia. Cliff is diagnosed with Hepatitis C. Christian and Julia kiss. 1.8 Cara Fitzgerald: Matt and friend Henry run over Cara, then cannot find her body and drive off. Cara is hideously disfigured and likely to go blind; her parents have religious objections to surgery. Matt – without telling Sean of his guilt – persuades him to do her surgeries under medical custody. Christian turns away Devon, who wants her nose fixed because it reminds her of an abusive father. Christian removes a birthmark from the penis of Mike, who turns out to be a paedophile priest. Christian bullies Mike into confessing,



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apologizes to Devon, and reveals to Sean his own abuse as a child. Megan has her breast implants done – she is sleeping with Sean. 1.9 Sophia Lopez II: Sophia’s gender reassignment is cancelled, then performed, after she has a momentary fling with anaesthetist Liz. Matt discovers Sean is sleeping with Megan, whose cancer has returned. Christian trades Kimber to Bobolit for a sports car; she retaliates by seducing Christian, threatening to carve him up and leaving him tied up. Julia’s friend Suzanne tells her that Jude is a male escort; he denies it. Matt continually visits Cara in her coma. 1.10 Adelle Coffin: Sean and Christian have to pass recertification exams – Christian is worried and prepares by operating on morgue corpses. Megan’s cancer becomes terminal and she decides to kill herself; Sean reluctantly agrees to help her. He is clearly upset at her funeral and Julia gets him to confess to the affair; he had thought she was sleeping with Jude, which she could have done, but did not. Sean and Christian freshen up the genitals of Mrs Grubman and her new fiancé. 1.11 Montana/Sassy/Justice: Sean operates on a woman with Multiple Personality Disorder – the happier she is the less her alternates will emerge. Cara is back at school – Henry is keen on her, but it is Matt she asks to the prom, and Henry talks of confessing. Gina is pregnant; Christian agrees to support her child. Julia steals Christian’s hair and has his DNA, and Matt’s, tested. 1.12 Antonia Ramos: Escobar demands that Sean and Christian pay him back the money Perez stole and forces them to operate on a sequence of his female drug mules who have cocaine in their implants and one of whom develops a bad infection. Christian discovers Gina lives on a houseboat and makes her move in with him. Escobar threatens Julia and taunts Sean. Julia takes Sophia to a Pilates class and Suzanne objects to having a transsexual there. 1.13 Escobar Gallardo: Escobar becomes more demanding, shooting Liz in the leg when Sean and Christian demur at removing a mule’s kidney. Broke, they nonetheless turn down performing a hair

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transplant on a dog; Bobolit does it and is sued when the dog dies. Julia collects the paternity test results. Sean tries to kill Escobar and cannot; Escobar asks Sean to change his face. Sean and Christian transform Escobar into the double of another criminal and he is arrested. Gina’s child is born and is clearly of African-American descent; Christian stands by the child. Season Two 2.1 Erica Noughton: Sean turns forty and develops a small tremor or ‘yip’ from mental stress. Christian performs a face-lift for Erica, Julia’s mother (played by Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson’s real-life mother). Erica and Christian have sex, after revealing they also did so at Sean and Julia’s wedding. Christian and Sean operate on Andrea Zucker, a woman with a serious facial deformation after a shotgun blast to the face caused by a failed suicide pact with her gay best friend Chad. After discovering Chad has fallen in love, Andrea kills him. 2.2 Christian Troy: Christian’s nose is broken in an accident during sex. When Sean’s yip threatens his ability to operate, Christian attempts to reset his nose himself. Matt is under investigation for Cara Fitzgerald’s accident after his friend Henry rapes Cara. He denies any wrongdoing; only Sean misbelieves him. Christian operates on a man with a third nipple; Sean on a man with a large growth on his neck, who he nicks due to the yip. Julia and Erica discuss Matt’s problems. 2.3 Manya Mabika: Sean and Christian reverse a clitoridectomy on Manya Mabika, a model who was a victim of female genital mutilation. The show introduces Ava Moore as the life coach of Elias Barry, a hairless man seeking hair implants. Sean hires Ava to help Julia, who helps Julia get rid of Erica. Christian and Gina fall out and Christian seeks to gain sole legal custody of Wilbur. Gina calls Wilbur’s father, James Sutherland, to assist in her case. 2.4 Mrs Grubman: Mrs Grubman’s daughter has cancer; she demands a knee-lift as her final free procedure. She has a stroke on the table and



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suffers serious neurological damage. Annie starts her period, and after a traumatic ‘Princess Menses’ party, Matt’s taunting about period mishaps causes Annie to give herself Toxic Shock Syndrome. Wilbur’s biological father discovers Gina’s sexual addiction and agrees to support Christian in his custody suit. Christian rebuilds a coke-addicted Kimber’s nose to keep her from testifying against him. 2.5 Joel Gideon: Christian and Sean treat Joel Gideon, a mountain climber with frostbite damage. Sean is involved in a car accident. Christian and Gina fight for custody of Wilbur; despite being impressed by his devotion, the court arbiter awards custody to his biological father. Julia tells Christian that Matt is his son. 2.6 Bobbi Broderick: Sean performs liposuction on Bobbi Broderick, a housewife. It goes badly, and Bobbi stalks Sean to denounce his work. Christian and Sean perform a lip reconstruction on a Mrs Caulderello. Liz wants to get pregnant and Christian offers to be her sperm donor. Matt confesses his role in Cara’s hit-and-run to Ava. He is later caught masturbating in front of her house. Ava and Matt have sex. Ava realizes Matt is Christian’s biological son after discussions with Julian and Christian. Matt discovers Ava has a teenage son, Adrian. 2.7 Naomi Gaines: Business declines for McNamara–Troy due to Bobbi’s actions. Bobbi goes to Andrea Hall, a local reporter, and Christian seduces Andrea to prevent her negative report. Sean and Christian operate on Naomi Gaines, the victim of a serial rapist known as ‘the Carver’, who slashes the faces of his victims. Adrian tells Julia over a tense dinner that Matt and Ava are lovers, and Matt finds out Christian is his father. 2.8 Agatha Ripp: Sean and Christian remove stigmata from Agatha Ripp, a former prostitute. People flock to the office, certain that Agatha’s stigmata are genuine. Agatha’s feet also bear stigmata, which were done by a parish nun trying to prevent the shutdown of her charitable programme. Julia gets shingles. Liz discovers she’s pregnant, but that there is something wrong with the baby, and has an abortion. Sean discovers Matt is not his son, chokes Julia, and hits Christian in the face.

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2.9 Rose and Raven Rosenberg: On the verge of breaking up the partnership, Sean and Christian travel to New York to help separate conjoined twins Rose and Raven Rosenberg. Raven dies during surgery, and Rose dies soon after, unable to face life without her sister. Sean and Christian have a threesome with a prostitute who they call Julia. They rejoin the twins but do not dissolve the partnership. 2.10 Kimber Henry: Sean and Christian implant breasts for Ike Connors, a famous columnist. Ike wants them removed, but only after his wife finds them too arousing. Kimber, now a porn star, asks McNamara–Troy to resculpt the vagina of her real doll. Sean has sex with the doll, and then with Kimber. Julia has an unpleasant sexual encounter with a man who mistakes her for a prostitute, is rescued by Sean, and then is given the cab fare to go home. 2.11 Natasha Charles: Christian and Sean make false eyes for Natasha Charles, a blind businesswoman. Christian, attracted to Natasha, begins an affair with her. Julia gets breast implants and Erica dubs her ‘in crisis’. After another fight with Erica, and dealing with a case of Annie’s head lice, a drunken Julia falls through a plate-glass window. 2.12 Julia McNamara: Julia has an extended alternate universe vision while Sean fixes her face. In it, Ava shows her a life where she and Christian are married plastic surgeons who have Kimber as their mistress, Sean has married Megan and works for Médecins Sans Frontières, and Matt is their much-nerdier son. Alternate Julia attempts to seduce Sean during his trial run at Troy/Troy, who rebuffs her. She discovers that she can’t have children, and that Kimber is pregnant with Christian’s baby. Alternate Julia then crashes through a sheet of glass as Ava informs Julia she is her angel of death. Julia decides not to die, even as alternate Julia is zipped into a body bag. 2.13 Oona Wentworth: Sean and Christian treat Ms Garcia, the victim of fake Botox injections made by old nemesis Merrill Bobolit. Christian tracks down Bobolit and tries to help him. Jealousy, however, causes Bobolit to lapse back into drug addiction and kill a young woman on the table. Christian is almost his next victim, but he



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outwits Bobolit and turns him in to the police for murder. After Matt and Adrian get in trouble, Christian gives a free eye-lift to the school principal, Oona Wentworth. When Adrian gets in trouble again, Ava gives away his clothes. We discover Adrian and Ava have been lovers. 2.14 Trudy Nye: McNamara–Troy fix the nose of Trudy Nye, a battered wife who is unable to leave her abusive husband. Sean changes Kimber’s love line, which does not prevent Christian and Kimber’s relationship from rekindling. Adrian tells Julia about his incestuous relationship with Ava. Julia and Sean inform Matt, which almost ends Matt and Ava’s relationship. Christian breaks up with Natasha after her blindness and closeness become too much for him to handle. 2.15 Sean McNamara: Sean treats two more victims of the Carver. The Carver visits Sean, cuts him, and threatens him if he fixes any more of his victims. Christian brings Quentin Costa, an Atlanta plastic surgeon, to fix Sean’s face. Gina returns and informs Christian she’s HIV positive. Christian must inform all of his lovers from the past year, as well as Wilbur and his father. His test results come back negative, but the experience brings him closer to Kimber and Gina. 2.16 Joan Rivers: Joan Rivers asks Sean and Christian to undo all of her plastic surgery. When she sees the virtual results, she quickly changes her mind. Sean decides to lure the Carver to him so that he can kill him. Christian discovers Ava is a transsexual. To prevent Matt from leaving with her for Paris, he and Sean find Barrett Moore, her husband/surgeon, to do a final surgery. Adrian kills himself in front of Ava. Ava leaves for Paris. The Carver attacks Christian. Season Three 3.1 Momma Boone: What appears to be Christian’s funeral turns out to be his dream; he confesses to Sean that the Carver raped him. Julia, who is sleeping with Jude, asks Sean to sign divorce papers; eventually he does so. Sean separates an obese woman from the sofa into which

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she has grown; she dies. Kimber complains of Christian’s impotence; he is seduced by predatory detective Kit and she joins him and Kimber in a threesome. 3.2 Kiki: Matt finds Adrian’s corpse; told that Ava was transsexual, he cruises bars and picks up Cherry, whom he beats when she turns out to be preoperative. She and her friends beat him up. Sean hires Quentin while Christian convalesces; they remove tear tattoos from gang-banger Marlon, who is beaten by his former gang. Christian removes a scar from a gorilla which has been lined up for mating; her mate kills her anyway. 3.3 Derek, Alex, and Gary: Christian tells Matt he slept with Ava; Matt becomes wilder and Sean ends up hitting him. Christian and Quentin separate super-glued fratboys; Sean and Quentin attend a frat party together. Christian invites Quentin into a foursome with Kit and Kimber; Quentin makes a pass at him and Christian throws him out. Kit tries to make Kimber choose and Kimber chooses Christian. Sean and Julia sleep together. 3.4 Rhea Reynolds: Sean operates on Ellie – her husband has Alzheimer’s and does not recognize her so she wants to look younger for him. This does not work. Christian operates on Rhea, a supposed Carver victim, actually an attention-seeking fraud and self-mutilator; the anaesthetic does not work. The Carver kills her. Matt takes out a restraining order against his father. 3.5 Granville Trapp: Kit arrests Christian as the Carver and evidence piles up against him to a point when Sean and Liz start to doubt him. Kit finds Christian’s birth-mother, who believes he has inherited bad genes from his rapist father. The press announce his arrest but he is released when the Carver strikes again; Christian leaked his arrest, guessing this would happen – the new victim is Kit. Meanwhile, Sean plumps the face of a man left cadaverous by AIDS. 3.6 Frankenlaura: The clinic is in financial difficulties and Christian reduces his payments to Gina, who approaches Julia to invest in a real estate deal. Julia goes into partnership with her, running a recovery



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spa; she has to stop Gina having sex with contractors. Liz leaves the clinic for the spa. Sean tries to recruit ageing patients – one is interested but her skin is too thin. He gets involved in restoring to their original corpses limbs severed by a morgue attendant who built his own girlfriend using these and his sister’s head; Sean gets him to talk, and double-crosses him. 3.7 Ben White: Sean leaves the clinic to work for Witness Protection, where he meets Nikki and her son, on the run from the Mob. Christian is approached by Ben, who wants a leg removed; eventually Ben shoots it off. Julia and Gina bottle human-sperm face cream as the spa’s signature product. Christian proposes to Kimber. 3.8 Tommy Bolton: Sean becomes emotionally involved with Nikki and her son. Christian operates on a boy with Down’s Syndrome to give him a nose that resembles the rest of his family. Quentin, who is working for the spa, makes advances to Julia, to which she responds with enthusiasm; Matt is furious. Christian helps his half-brother get into college, but his mother still excludes him from her life. 3.9 Hannah Tedesco: Quentin is keen to do a face transplant; Hannah, a girl whose face was ripped off, is compatible with a dying diabetic. Quentin’s cocaine-induced nerves mean Sean has to come and help at a point when he is thinking of running away with Nikki and giving up surgery. Nikki leaves without him, sure the Mob are closing in. Christian introduces a would-be Kimber clone to Kimber, who makes her over; Kimber devises a fidelity pre-nuptial agreement. The transplanted face is rejected. 3.10 Madison Berg: Matt gets involved with Ariel, who has strong anti-plastic-surgery views based on racism. She persuades him to wear a swastika ear ring and give her father Alderman the clinic’s medical records. At a cake-tasting, Sean and Christian are mistaken for a couple. Gina awakens and then allays Kimber’s distrust of Christian before the wedding; Christian and Julia come to terms with their past. Kimber disappears from the church – a note says she is jilting Christian, but she has been abducted by the Carver. Adolescent Madison gets a birthday nose job.

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3.11 Abby Mays: Plump plain Abby gets aggressive liposuction from Christian; he offers to have sex with her if she wears a bag over her head. She discovers her inner masochist and enjoys it – Christian weeps. Sean fixes the face of a wounded soldier, whom Quentin seduces and outs; Sean and Christian buy him out. Under duress, Kimber writes a farewell letter to Christian. 3.12 Sal Perri: Erica patronizes Julia, who tells her to leave; Erica’s plane crashes. Julia befriends a woman whose mother was on the plane. She recruits Christian, Sean and Liz to help in the triage station; Julia herself nurses the dying mother of her friend, then harvests the dead woman’s skin. Sean severs the arms of Sal, who plans to sing at his son’s wedding; Sean does not cope as well as Julia. Christian finds what he takes to be Erica’s corpse. Julia talks to Erica about their relationship and then smothers her when the corpse comes to life. She fires Quentin for bad attitude; at home she finds Erica. 3.13 Joy Kringle: Liposuction on a professional Mrs Santa reveals a petrified foetus, not her husband’s. He leaves her for a younger Mrs Santa. Matt helps Ariel steal nativity figures and paint their faces white; she reveals her own black ancestry and burns her face with whitening cream. He helps her, but she lies when he tells her father the truth. Julia turns out to be pregnant; Sean realizes the child she’s carrying is his when he learns she did not sleep with Quentin. He helps her go for an abortion, which she decides not to have. Rain washes the nativity figures clean of the paint. 3.14 Cherry Peck: Cherry had bad reconstructive work done after Matt’s beating; she pressures Sean to repair it and Matt persuades him. Matt and Cherry bond. The Carver releases Kimber, all of whose surgeries have been reversed without anaesthesia; Christian repairs her, but she ends their relationship. Quentin is arrested as the Carver, but turns out to have no penis. 3.15 Quentin Costa: The Carver attacks nine sorority girls with a strap-on. Police go to Quentin’s apartment – he too has been carved. Kit arrests Liz. Matt and Cherry are kidnapped by Alderman, who gives them a choice as to which will castrate the other; Matt cuts



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Cherry, and they shoot Alderman. Quentin reveals himself as the Carver, tying Sean and Christian up. Christian offers to sever his own hand to save Sean. Kit arrives and shoots Quentin – who revives in the morgue. Kit is his formerly deformed sister, and accomplice; Sean and Christian discover this too late. Julia worries about her foetus; Quentin and Kit prowl Spain for more victims. Season Four 4.1 Cindy Plumb: Sean and Christian do their five thousandth surgery; Christian celebrates with a mother–daughter duo while Sean has unsatisfactory sex with Julia. They give health services tycoon Burt larger testicular implants; he and his younger wife Michelle, with whom Christian flirts, offer to buy them out. Sean operates on a phone sex worker’s voice, and becomes her client. Therapist Faith Wolper suggests to Christian that he is in love with Sean; he seduces her. Julia learns that her child will be born with fused fingers. 4.2 Blu Mondae: Christian is asked to make millionaire Arthur’s toyboy Mitchell prettier; Mitchell is confused about his sexuality and Christian arranges for him to sleep with stripper Blu Mondae. Arthur throws him out; Mitchell offers Christian sex in return for a bed and Christian hits him. Sean operates on a coffee-shop man’s face, but does not improve things much. Kimber converts Matt to Scientology. Sean and Julia agree that he will operate on his son’s hands as soon as possible. Liz sees Michelle being groped by a mystery woman. 4.3 Monica Wilder: Christian becomes self-conscious about his weight when someone puts a sex tape of him on the internet; he is busy having surgery when he should be attending Julia’s labour. Michelle threatens to sack Liz for offering her lesbian solidarity over the mystery woman; Sean makes her back down. Sean sleeps with Monica, the night nurse he and Julia have hired, and sacks her. Julia hires Marlowe, a dwarf artist, as Conor’s carer. 4.4 Shari Noble: Shari needs a nipple replaced when bitten by the dog she is having sex with; her soldier husband kills the dog. Sean sleeps

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with Monica again. Liz picks up a beautiful woman in a bar and wakes with a kidney missing, victim of a ring of organ thieves. Michelle is being blackmailed by mystery woman James, for whom she used to work as an escort. James smashes a woman’s face with an ashtray so that the surgeons will change it. Christian blackmails Michelle into sex. Marlowe helps Julia with depression and Sean becomes jealous. He has visions of Escobar and Megan. 4.5 Dawn Budge: Lottery winner Dawn wants surgery; when this does not make her happy, she buys fashion advice and sex from Christian, who is being blackmailed by James. She is also blackmailing Michelle, whom she involves in kidney theft. Sean and Christian offer Matt a Porsche to keep him from Scientology; he moves out, and escapes the deprogrammer they hire. Sean and Julia re-marry. 4.6 Faith Wolper, Ph.D.: Christian dreams about being Sean’s lover. Burt has to have a penis pump removed; Faith, who is a sexual compulsive, tells him Christian and Michelle are lovers and he makes them have sex so that he can watch. When Marlowe is ill, Monica becomes Conor’s nurse; Sean tries to pay her off and she threatens to accuse him of rape, but is then hit by a bus. 4.7 Burt Landau: Burt has a stroke after taking Viagra and needs his face fixed; Christian suspects Michelle of attempted murder and alienates her. Liz becomes ill – Sean could donate his kidney but is scared. Matt offers; in the end, the donor is Dawn, whom Liz has befriended while Dawn was having an ear reconstructed after a mugging. Christian seduces Kimber to prove she still has feelings for him; she allows Matt to become her lover. 4.8 Conor McNamara: Sean fixes one of Conor’s hands in spite of Julia’s misgivings; Marlowe has told her about the trauma of child surgical patients. Ironically, we learn that such trauma is at the root of Sean’s personality; his parents broke up over having his hare-lip fixed. Sean hits a man whose son mocks Conor and has to apologize. Dying Mrs Grubman asks Christian to operate on her corpse; only he and her housekeeper attend the funeral.



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4.9 Liz Cruz: Liz acquires a girlfriend, Poppy, who nags her into having surgery. James is threatened by her bosses. Christian asks James to sleep with him; she drugs him and threatens to take his kidneys if Michelle does not help her. Christian dumps surgical waste in James’s car; to save Christian, when James sends one of her escorts to kill him, Michelle kills Burt and harvests his organs. Marlowe asks Sean about leg-lengthening; Julia and Marlowe become lovers. 4.10 Merrill Bobolit: Matt has married Kimber, who is pregnant; when she has her breast implants removed, Christian steals the child’s DNA, hoping wrongly to prove himself the father. Released from jail, Merrill needs anal reconstruction after rape by Escobar. Escobar’s face has been burned and he wants his old face back; this is a scam to escape justice – he kills his minion Alejandro, who was his witness of Sean and Christian’s complicity in Season One. Sean confesses to Julia of his affair with Monica. 4.11 Conor McNamara, 2026: During a hurricane, Sean and Julia accept that their marriage is over and she leaves – not for Marlowe, with whom Sean commiserates. In 2026 Conor has his other hand fixed by Matt, now a surgeon. Conor arranges a dinner to get his parents talking again after a long estrangement. 4.12 Diana Lubey: Sean helps Diane, who wants her lover’s ashes inserted into her implants in the face of disapproval by Michelle and Christian, who are now engaged; he even tricks the lover’s jealous wife for her. Faith tells Sean that Christian loves him; the two men cope well with this revelation. James makes Michelle use the clinic for organ thefts. 4.13 Reefer: Sean drinks himself into messing up a G-spot surgery and has sex with a dwarf woman while acting as replacement for a Santa. Homeless man Reefer persuades him to stop drinking and Sean patches his injuries from a bum fight; Sean gives Reefer a bed overnight at the clinic, where James kills and harvests him. Wilbur’s father died in a car crash and left Christian as the boy’s guardian; Michelle agrees to adopt Wilbur.

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4.14 Willy Ward: Gina tries to get access to Wilbur and resents Michelle’s role. James wants to kill the child for his organs. Sean operates on Willy, an ageing ventriloquist constantly mocked by his perpetually young dummy; Sean asks Christian and Michelle to buy him out. Wilbur disappears – luckily kidnapped by Gina, who realizes she does not want him. James kills herself in front of Michelle – who is contacted by Escobar, James’s boss, and told to run the organ ring. Matt tries to spice up his relationship with Kimber by filming their sex; the film gets onto the Net and they are rebuked by the Scientologists. 4.15 Gala Gallardo: Sean is about to leave when Escobar compels him and Christian to restore his wife Gala’s mutilated breasts. Michelle lies to Christian about the extent of her involvement in the kidney thefts. Liz tries to shoot Escobar, but cannot; she gives her gun to Gala, who kills him and leaves the body for Liz, Sean and Christian to dispose of. Sean tells Kimber to try to love Matt. Sean goes to LA, where he works in a large clinic. Christian turns up – he has ended his engagement to Michelle and plans to set up in LA in partnership with Sean. Sean agrees. Season Five 5.1 Carly Summers: McNamara–Troy lacks business. However, Christian finds the pair a publicist, Fiona, who connects Sean and Christian with Hearts and Scalpels, a nighttime soap that needs a technical adviser. Freddie Prune, the producer, allows them to be extras on set. However, Sean rather than Christian is more telegenic. The publicist also refers Carly Summers, an actress in her early forties, to the firm. Christian sleeps with her and initially tells her she needs no surgery. However, this shifts and Carly gets plastic surgery; Christian tries to tattle to the tabloids. Sean treats a Hollywood studio executive who has scars from his dominatrix. 5.2 Joyce and Sharon Monroe: A pair of Marilyn Monroe impersonators come to the practice looking for plastic surgery. Sean and Christian oblige, though one of the Marilyns attempts suicide in



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after-care. Sean is semi-famous due to his new role, much to Christian’s anger. Christian poses in Playgirl, which wins him a large gay fan base. Sean begins dating Kate, a co-star in Hearts and Scalpels who was previously overweight. Julia arrives in Los Angeles and, to Sean and Christian’s surprise, is dating a woman named Olivia. 5.3 Everette Poe: Christian takes money for sex again. Olivia’s daughter Eden attracts Sean, despite her cool, manipulative ways. She wishes for a hymen replacement. Liz disbelieves that Julia is attracted to Olivia. Matt shows up in LA claiming he has left Kimber and the church, but it is a ploy. He and Kimber are now meth addicts. 5.4 Dawn Budge II: Dawn returns, having been attacked by an eagle while hang-gliding. She persuades McNamara–Troy to take her to the Hearts and Scalpels set after she is attacked by the ‘Ass Bandit’ in recovery. There, she meets Freddie Prune and falls in love after a light falls on her. She also becomes a producer and pays overages. Freddie gets plastic surgery, possibly to be attacked by the Ass Bandit. Christian gives a nun a breast reduction, after dealing with a woman who wants his gigolo services to include ‘waking’ her after she has gone into near-coma by hypothermia. Eden gets Annie kicked out of school via emotional abuse and manipulation. 5.5 Chaz Darling: Eden blackmails Christian into reducing the nipples of her gay friend, Chaz Darling, because of his sex with Julia. Christian does the surgery and even gives Eden drugs, but he uses those drugs to tell Olivia and Julia that Eden has a drug problem, sending her off to rehab. Meanwhile, Sean’s obsession with Eden and disgust at Kate’s accident cause them to reveal fantasies. Kate complies with Sean’s schoolgirl fantasy, but Sean is disgusted by Kate’s interest in having sex with a black man while he watches, and the pair break up acrimoniously. Kimber appeals to her old porn manager, Ram, but he is more interested in Matt. Kimber refuses to let Matt do gay porn and instead sleeps with their drug dealer to get more meth. 5.6 Damien Sands: McNamara–Troy films a pilot for Plastic Fantastic, a reality show, to ‘reveal the truth’ about plastic surgery. Damien

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Sands, a male escort, wants to be younger and not use anaesthesia; Sean brings in Olivia to consult on the surgery. As Sean and Christian bicker on-camera, Julia is jealous of flirting between Liz and Olivia. Eden exposes everyone’s secrets and Christian causes conflict in the name of getting more screentime. The show is not picked up as audiences find Sean and Christian unlikeable. 5.7 Dr Joshua Lee: Eden and Sean have sex, but she rejects him as too old to date. Sean tries to be younger by having trendy treatments and partying with Aidan from Hearts and Scalpels and doing ecstasy, which causes Sean to have an adverse reaction. Kimber and Matt request surgery to restore Kimber’s looks, post-meth addiction. Sean and Christian remove an implant from an older man who is either suffering from Alzheimer’s or is an alien abductee, the situation being made more problematic when the daughter who retrieves him turns out not to be his real daughter. Julia and Olivia are car-jacked and menaced by a creepy gunman. Christian does Kimber’s surgery so that Kimber will break up with Matt, but Kimber returns to porn and keeps her child. Julia and Christian start another affair. Matt sets himself on fire cooking meth. 5.8 Duke Collins: A group of carolers need surgery after a confrontation with gang-bangers; a Santa is shot in the face by a small boy. Sean repairs his scar but is confronted by the boy’s mother, Santa’s ex-wife, who complains about his being a dead-beat dad. She accidentally shoots one of the carolers, who is dressed as a snowman. Matt’s burn counsellor is an Israeli woman massively disfigured by a suicide bomber. Sean finds out about Christian and Julia; Kimber announces she is going to marry Ram; Eden offers a piece of doctored fruit-cake to Julia. 5.9 Rachel Ben Natan: At first resistant to the idea of plastic surgery, Rachel finally agrees to it due to the pain she is in from pieces of the suicide bomber lodged in her body. Sean hallucinates the bomber, who encourages him to vengefulness about Christian and Julia’s affair. Julia is quite ill, due to her poisoning at Eden’s hands. Freddie realizes he is gay after attending West Hollywood pride; Freddie and Dawn break up.



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5.10 Magda and Jeff: Aidan’s sex tape with Eden is leaked by Eden, and thanks to Sean’s agent, Colleen, Sean is made the new star of Hearts and Scalpels. Sean takes his revenge on Christian for sleeping with the previous receptionist by having Gina return to McNamara–Troy as her replacement. Gina and Christian have sex and Gina falls off a building and dies, mid-thrust. Jeff, the younger partner of a mean old woman, is permanently disabled after sex following his plastic surgery. 5.11 Kyle Ainge: Christian attends Gina’s funeral and discovers she was much loved; he is unable to tell Wilbur that his mother is dead. Wilbur’s kindergarten teacher is biting students and blaming it on Wilbur, a scheme Christian partially disables. Colleen lures a rival agent interested in Sean to her home, where she stuffs him using her teddy-bear machine. Kyle Ainge gets plastic surgery for his scars, caused by feeding his flesh to his new wife when they were involved together in a horrible car accident. He almost dies when she attempts to feed pieces of her flesh into his wounds in an attempt at making them even. 5.12 Lulu Grandiron: Jealous of Sean’s growing fame, Christian wins the approval of a group of his society women by his cockiness. Eden becomes a porn actress working with Kimber and Ram. Sean does plastic surgery on Ram’s actresses to free Eden from her contract. Colleen lies to Eden so that she will break up with Sean; Eden goes back to porn. Ram and Kimber bring Eden into their relationship, which leads to Kimber being eclipsed by Eden’s youth and ruthlessness. Christian operates on Lulu Grandiron, who wants to look feline. Her surgery is a success, but she has come up with the idea while off her meds, causing her friends to be very angry with Christian. Sean discovers Colleen is not really an agent, but sells bears in a mall. Colleen reacts by slitting her wrists at Sean’s condo. 5.13 August Walden: Reviewer August blasts Sean’s performance and appearance on Hearts and Scalpels. Sean and Christian continue to work on Rachel’s face, but her appearance will only improve so far. She leaves Matt. A young woman with a port wine scar, Emmy, turns out to be Christian’s daughter by a one-night stand. Sean confronts

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August, who is ugly; Sean apologizes and does August’s surgery. Christian leaves Julia, who is still super-sick for no apparent reason. Julia finds out that Eden has poisoned her with mercury and confronts her. Eden shoots her. Emmy and Matt have sex, not realizing they’re siblings. An actor whom August has savaged burns his new face. 5.14 Candy Richards: Actress Candy needs help as a result of too much surgery. Christian is still chasing fame; Sean decides to leave Hearts and Scalpels. Eden deceives everyone into thinking that Julia tried to commit suicide. Sean is sceptical, but Olivia is in denial about Eden’s possible guilt; Julia wakes with amnesia and Sean claims they are still married. Emmy’s mother alcoholic Darlene has lost her legs to diabetes; she tells Christian that Emmy is his daughter and they confront Matt about the incest. Darlene and Christian have tender sex. Liz explains that Sean and Christian have respect, which is better than fame. Paparazzi cause a car crash in which Christian and Annie are injured. As Sean is fixing Annie’s face, Colleen shows up and stabs Sean. 5.15 Ronnie Chase: We learn that the wounded Sean has killed Colleen. Four months later, still in a wheelchair, he is teaching at a medical school and meets Raj, a young Indian surgeon of great promise but somewhat annoying personal behaviour. Liz goes in for a breast cancer screening after Christian finds a lump. However, it is Christian who has breast cancer. Matt begins attending college with hopes of becoming a doctor. Sean is able to walk, despite being in a wheelchair – the latter is a sham, resorted to for sympathy. 5.16 Gene Shelley: A man with andropause wants masculinization surgeries. Christian begins a course of chemotherapy, with Liz’s support. Julia is slowly recovering from amnesia. Kimber says that Christian’s cancer is karmic. Sean continues to flirt with a plastic surgery intern, and they have sex. She turns out to have a baby fetish, and is ejected from the condo, allowing the watching Julia to discover that Sean is faking his inability to walk; she tells everyone. Shelley’s wife gives Raj a blowjob, but she turns out to be transgendered, much to Raj’s surprise. Christian, feeling uncertain of his masculinity, has sex with Liz, who is now deeply confused about her own sexuality.



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5.17 Roxy St James: Candy is back as Coco. She has discovered she has a hint of African ancestry and wants a larger butt to support her rap career. Sean suggests Christian goes to a breast cancer group. Olivia wants plastic surgery, and during her consultation reveals that she and Julia are moving back to New York. Christian’s breast cancer group includes Roxy, who does not have cancer but wants her breasts removed because she’s afraid of getting it. When Christian refuses, she tries to remove them herself. Olivia dies from her surgery due to taking anti-depressants, causing Julia to reject Sean angrily. Liz has unsuccessful heterosexual sex with another doctor. Eden appears and blames Olivia for shooting Julia, before throwing Olivia’s ashes onto Sean and Julia. 5.18 Ricky Wells: Liz and Christian work on their relationship but possibly have ‘lesbian bed death’. Liz feels ugly and gets a makeover. Ricky wants to look older because he’s married to his grade school teacher, Carrie May. Matt, struggling in his pre-med courses, is jealous of Raj’s rapport with Sean. Raj’s exacting father requests a penis enlargement and wants Raj to operate. The stress of his father’s demands causes Raj to crack and, with Matt’s help, to destroy his hands, in order to escape his father’s influence. Christian starts cheating on an angry Liz, who quits the practice. 5.19 Manny Skerritt: Manny wants his penis reduced because his ability to self-fellate distracts him from his yoga. Kimber wants Christian to give Jenna collagen injections in her lips for baby-modelling purposes, which he does after Kimber tries to do it herself. Sean is attracted to Teddy Rowe, the new anaesthetist at McNamara–Troy. Aidan, from Hearts and Scalpels, is writing a script based on Sean’s life, which Sean only sells him the rights to after Teddy takes compromising photos of Manny, so that he can pay him a settlement. Aidan breaks his neck trying to self-fellate, but does not die. 5.20 Budi Sabri: Teddy introduces Sean to adventures, like eating entirely in the dark, drinking hallucinogenic tea, and having sex in open houses, to prove he is interesting enough for her. Budi Sabri has a virus that causes barnacle-like growths to develop over his hands

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and feet. Sean and Christian initially make advances in treating it, but the virus eventually thwarts their efforts. Christian’s cancer returns and he is told he will die. He goes to Miami and proposes to Liz, who accepts. 5.21 Allegra Caldarello: Liz prepares for the wedding and needs breast reduction to wear the family dress; Christian reduces her bust size but only by a little, buying her a new dress instead. Allegra has been brought by her dying husband to Los Angeles so that she can receive plastic surgery. He wants her to be attractive for her next husband and suggests candidates – she takes his second pick. A possible replacement for Christian is sexually fixated on their furniture. After several confrontations, Liz rejects her hateful mother, tells everyone Christian is dying, and accepts her created family as her real family. 5.22 Giselle Blaylock and Legend Chandler: These patients are vampires who need plastic surgery to hide their scars after an energetic session. They are still addicted to blood; Christian throws them a blood bag. Teddy, a ‘black widow’, kills her current plastic surgeon lover/employer. Kimber is kicked out of Ram and Eden’s relationship; incredulous, she discovers that Christian is marrying Liz. She attends the wedding, intent on ruining it, but instead leaves. Christian ponders cryogenics. About to leave on honeymoon, however, he discovers that his doctor muddled his blood work and that he is not dying at all. Season Six 6.1 Don Hoberman: With a voice-over talking about the recession, Sean struggles with alimony and other debts; Christian will not cut back on expenses until Liz sues him for everything in their divorce. Matt decides to train as a mime but is unsuccessful and takes to armed robbery. Kimber has become an electrolysist. Mike Hamoui, a younger more glamorous surgeon, is doing vaginal tuck consultations, and Sean and Christian let him work out of their office. Teddy proposes to Sean. Sean accidentally overdoses on sleeping pills.



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6.2 Enigma: A heavily tattooed and scarified youth is given by his parents the option of military school or having his markings removed; restored to normality, he kills them and himself. Christian suggests that Kimber market a dildo cast from his penis, but she opts for Mike’s, and starts an affair with him. Teddy breaks up with Sean, who fires her. Sean has a brief fling with drug addict Vivien, who teaches him how to self-harm and score pain meds. Liz withdraws her lawsuit against Christian. 6.3 Briggitte Reinhart: Sean and Teddy elope and marry; Annie comes to stay – she is pulling out her hair and eating it, and has developed a bezoar. Brigitte insists on having leeches to reduce her swelling; she recognizes Teddy as ‘Dixie’ from an earlier surgery, and Teddy uses the leeches to kill her, disguising herself in the whole-face mask that Sean and Christian have designed for a transvestite. Mike asks Christian’s advice about how to deal with Kimber’s flagging sexual interest; Christian claims that Kimber likes her men to crossdress. As it happens, she rather does like Mike in drag. Teddy discovers that Sean’s life insurance goes to his younger children. 6.4 Jenny Juggs: Christian and Sean suspect that Matt is the Mime Bandit, but he demonstrates he has been before an ID line-up and the police no longer suspect him. Large-breasted angry lap-dancer Jenny assaults Christian with her breasts; he agrees to reduce them but she is still angry. On a camping trip, Teddy plots to drug and gas Sean, Annie and Conor, but Annie wakes up and raises the alarm. Teddy goes walking in the woods to establish an alibi for herself, but is killed there by a serial killer. Matt is shot by a shopkeeper he tries to rob; he goes to his fathers for help. 6.5 Abigail Sullivan: Abigail is a concert pianist with a partial twin embedded in her shoulder; when Sean removes it, she develops anxiety and reinserts parts of it, causing massive infection. Matt tries to flee to Mexico, but Kimber, Christian and Sean unite to hand him over to the police. The police get Sean to talk to Teddy’s killer, and reveal that she had killed three previous husbands; Julia takes Annie and Conor away. Sean swims out to sea.

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6.6 Alexis Stone: Christian picks up bar worker Alexis and has amazing sex with her; she rejects him, then turns up asking him to turn her back into the man she used to be. He refuses, but Kimber, now Mike’s fiancée, persuades him. Erica exploits Sean’s suicide attempt to apply for custody of Annie and Conor; she has a new young husband, Renaldo. Kimber breaks up with Mike because of her feelings for Christian. 6.7 Alexis Stone II: Alexis finds life as a man awkward sexually; she has Christian restore her breasts. Matt has become the victim of a predatory fellow convict who wants him to be given breasts; Christian gives Matt pills with which to chemically castrate his abuser, who finds out. Matt strangles him. Erica’s husband proves to be a paedophile with designs on Annie; Erica throws him out and gives custody back to Julia, who frames Erica as a drug smuggler. 6.8 Lola Wlodkowski: Christian removes moles from Liz’s fat nudist friend, who seduces him; Kimber retaliates by over-eating. Lola considers having liposuction but is talked out of it by fat male nudist friends; she has cancer, so will lose weight due to chemo. Meanwhile Sean removes the nipples of doll-collecting Tracy, who is in a celibate marriage and wants to be more like Barbie. They have sex, which she quite enjoys; when her Ken-like husband leaves her for a GI Joe look-alike, Tracy has sex with Kimber and Christian. 6.9 Benny Nilsson: Sean’s supposedly dead drug-addict brother turns up, clean but with a face ravaged by meth. Christian’s hostility partly derives from Sean’s financial support of Brendan at a point when Christian was badly in debt. He frames Brendan for theft and Brendan leaves in disgust. Christian has made a supposed son look more like his father, Nilsson – who is actually a man who sexually abuses him to amuse rich paedophiles; Christian beats Nilsson up and extorts money for his silence. Christian forges Sean’s signature on a bank loan, with the partnership as collateral. 6.10 Wesley Clovis: Sean and Christian are asked to perform massive liposuction on Wesley to make it possible to execute him by lethal injection; Matt will get early release. Sean refuses and Matt throws a



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tantrum; the father of Wesley’s victim appeals to Sean, who changes his mind. Other convicts tell Matt that Wesley is innocent and that, as the beneficiary of his death, he should turn his life around. Matt tells Sean and Christian that Wesley is guilty. Christian agrees to marry Kimber if she aborts his child; Mike offers to take her back but she has the abortion, turning to Liz to accompany her to the clinic. 6.11 Dan Daly: Sean and Christian operate on Daly, whose genetic disorder makes him self-mutilate. They get an award from their college for excellence and Sean meets former friend Curtis, now doing pro bono work all over the world. In flashbacks we see Sean and Christian meet; Christian trades tutoring for introducing Sean to Julia. Christian copies Sean’s term paper; the subsequent accusation of cheating stops Sean from going to Harvard with Curtis. Sean comes to see that friendship with Christian has cost him everything he wanted, and he smashes the award; Daly uses the shards to mutilate himself further. 6.12 Willow Banks: Sean restores a measure of youthful appearance to Rupert, who has woken from a twenty-year coma; Rupert picks up a woman, and collapses back into a coma. Christian reacts to married life with slobbishness; he refuses to operate on super-model Willow, who wants to stop being beautiful. They eat fast food together; she shaves her head, after which, mocked in the street, she drives her car too fast and crashes, permanently wrecking her face. Kimber is sleeping with Sean. 6.13 Joel Seabrook: Sean repairs the face of a man who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and thought better of it halfway down. Christian treats the scarred neck of Adam Wise, who talks about the joys of auto-erotic strangulation; Christian nearly dies experimenting and decides he no longer loves Kimber. She turns to Sean, who is thinking of going to Africa to work for Curtis; he tells her to make a new start. Mike treats her like a servant to his boatful of girlfriends, and she jumps into the sea. 6.14 Sheila Carlton: Christian is devastated by Kimber’s death and falls for her mother Brandie. Sean treats Sheila, whose face has been

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ripped off by her friend’s ape and who is sick of her friend’s sentimentality. Curtis’s wife comes on to Sean, claiming that she and her husband have an arrangement; she tells Curtis that Sean propositioned her, and Curtis refuses to let Sean work with him. 6.15 Virginia Hayes: Sean and Christian are visited by Aurelia, Escobar Gallardo’s daughter, who wants to know the truth about her past; Sean tells her about her abuse by Perez and she informs on him to the FBI. Christian gives breast surgery to ‘Virginia’, a con artist who has stolen the real woman’s identity; Christian sweet-talks her into having further surgery and repossesses her implants. She tries to make amends to the woman she has robbed, who uses her pain control to kill her. Sean, Christian and Liz dispose of the body. 6.16 Dr Griffin: Christian and Sean go into relationship counselling with Griffin. Christian reveals and repays his thefts; Matt tells Sean and Christian he is marrying Ramona and wants nothing further to do with them. Sean is close to leaving the partnership. Griffin is shot by another client and they operate on him, continuing therapy with another doctor. Liz is pregnant with Sean’s child. 6.17 Christian Troy II: Former patients ask to have their face-lifts reversed – plastic surgery is becoming unfashionable. Christian gets a face-lift in order to film the procedure and put it on the web; under anaesthetic, he sees visions of Kimber, of his rapist father and of a party of beautiful people to which he is not invited. The YouTube audience reacts to the clip with horror. Liz dates bi-curious Daniella, who ejaculates when she orgasms. Liz is at first repulsed, but comes round – Daniella goes back to her husband, appalled by herself. 6.18 Walter and Edith Krieger: Walter and Edith have their concentration camp tattoos removed in spite of the disapproval of their daughter. Walter develops a minor infection and in delirium reveals that he was not an inmate, but the camp tattoist, who disguised himself, but then fell in love with Edith. Their daughter rejects Walter and informs on him; Edith forgives him. Ava returns, with a scarred adopted son, Rafael – Sean refuses to operate. She visits Matt and gives him and Ramona a cheque as a wedding present. Matt gives it



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back, but ends up sleeping with Ava. Sean is at first unhappy that Julia is leaving for England with the children and her new husband, then gives his permission. Matt leaves his own wedding with Ava. 6.19 Hiro Yoshimura: Liz becomes a partner in the practice. Hiro is a middle-aged porn star, big in Japan, who wants the scar from his bypass removed; he dies from a heart attack in the middle of filming. Christian offers Ava surgery for Rafael if she ditches Matt. Rafael’s scars can be improved but not removed, and Ava cannot bear to rear an imperfect child. After a vision in which Kimber tells him to let Sean go, Christian dissolves the partnership and Sean accompanies Rafael, for whom he has fatherly feelings, back to Romania where he will look after him and other orphans. Matt follows Ava to the airport and offers her Jenna to rear if he can come to. Christian picks up a woman in a bar.

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hearts and scalpels In the first two-thirds of Season Five, Sean McNamara becomes first a technical adviser and then an actor on an imaginary television medical show, Hearts and Scalpels. (Christian is originally an adviser too, but walks off the show when his looks simply don’t work on television.) Obviously, the major function of this plot-line is to shift the power balance between the partners, and to introduce Colleen as one of the season’s villains, but there are other more self-indulgent or polemical aspects to the show-within-a-show’s presence. One aspect of this is as a rather jokey tribute to Linda Klein, the actress and registered nurse who has been a constant presence in Nip/Tuck since its first episode, both as technical adviser and as constant silent participant in the operating theatre scenes. In Season Five, her character, Nurse Linda, received occasional lines for the first time, many of them concerning an obsession with golf and her absolute lack of interest in the emotional shenanigans going on around her. Sean’s role on the show-within-a-show originally parallels hers, up to the point where the career melt-down of the star Aidan pushes him into a central role on the show. It is surely only marginally necessary to point out that this part of the storyline is a reprise of a Hollywood showbiz musical trope so hackneyed as to have become a camp cliché, as in ‘Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster but you’ve got to come back a star’ (42nd Street (1933)), often misquoted. Ryan Murphy is quite fond of storylines that put his two male leads in the sorts of situation normally experienced by female leads – the deadly attack on Sean by Colleen in ‘Candy Richards’ (5.14) is positioned very much as a reversed woman-in-peril set-up.



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Linda Klein has also been an adviser/actress on Grey’s Anatomy, although Ryan Murphy has disavowed1 any specific parodic intent about that other show: You know, the thing that I was adamant about is that we’re not sort of attacking any specific network or anything like that. It’s not really about that, it’s very insulated. The idea was basically just to sort of satirize our own show and the things that people have said about it over the years, which I think are always hilarious. But the show, the Hearts and Scalpels show really is sort of an amalgamation between our show and ER and Grey’s Anatomy where you have sometimes inappropriate romance scenes and these incredible scenes of carnage, which don’t really make sense, but are very funny to write. But the ‘Hearts and Scalpels’ stuff is really a spoof of medical shows. It’s kind of insane and frenetic and it’s shot really chaotic like ‘ER’. And it has insanely flamboyant characters like our show. And then it has bizarrely sort of romantic moments as they’re pulling people’s brains apart, like ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. So it’s all that stuff. This is fair enough up to a point – and he is right to suggest that Freddie Prune is to some extent a self-caricature, except that, of course, it is a very long time since Murphy was in the closet. On the other hand, there are some clear references to Grey’s Anatomy and its scandals in the storylines surrounding Aidan; for example, in ‘Manny Skerrit’ (5.19) his cover story for a neck he injured while auto-fellating is that he had a car crash while out on the town with Patrick Dempsey. The storyline in which he is sent off to rehab after being caught on camera having sex with Eden while insulting the network head is positioned precisely as a parallel to the rows about Isaiah Washington’s homophobic remarks and his sacking from Grey’s Anatomy as a result: ‘Too bad you’re not black,’ Freddie Prune says; ‘we could have kept you around till the end of the season’ (‘Magda and Jeff’ (5.10)). More generally, one can understand how Murphy might have some reservations about the greater success of Grey’s Anatomy, given

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that his own show is often criticized for things in which Grey’s Anatomy is at least as excessive. Nip/Tuck has been criticized for poor taste and improbability – Grey’s Anatomy has had storylines in which the main characters had to deal with two characters impaled on the same pole, one of whom was going to live if the pole was removed, while the other was going to die. It also had a storyline in which a live howitzer shell had to be removed from a man’s chest cavity, with the risk that if anything went wrong it would reduce those standing around to ‘red mist’. Its heroine, Meredith Grey, was dead for a couple of episodes and then resuscitated, whereas the apparent deaths of Murphy’s characters have always been teasing set-ups or hallucinations. The satiric moral compass of Nip/Tuck is at least reasonably clear: we are meant to disapprove of Christian’s money-grubbing ways. Grey’s Anatomy is often far more forgiving of its characters’ peccadilloes – Izzie’s career survives her cutting a crucial cable in an attempt to move her boyfriend Denny up the list for a transplant, and the only person to condemn her utterly for this – Erica Hahn – does so several seasons later and is promptly written out of the show. Because it is ultimately a show about sentiment rather than morals, Grey’s Anatomy gets away with plot-lines for which Nip/Tuck would be crucified. One can understand why Ryan Murphy might feel inclined to a little mockery … Note 1 Monsters and critics.com, 24 September 2007, http://www.monstersandcritics. com/smallscreen/features/article_1359201.php/A_Chat_with_Nip_Tuck_ creator_Ryan_Murphy.

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index (Certain topics have been excluded from this index because they crop up too regularly for their inclusion to be useful – the obvious examples are cosmetic surgery and Ryan Murphy. For the same reason, there is no character index because most of the characters are either omnipresent in the essays – the six principals – or crop up in only two or three episodes. There is a middle range of recurring characters, some of whom, but not others, get extensively treated in these essays – obvious examples of these are Ava Moore and Mrs Grubman, but it seemed pointless to have a character index that only dealt in these; there are also a few characters who only occur in one episode, but are memorable enough that several essays deal with them – the Rosenberg twins are the obvious example here. We suggest that readers spend some time with the episode guide in order to familiarize themselves with the often bizarre and complex plotting and characters of Nip/Tuck.)

abject 66–83, 83nn, 84nn, 86nn, 100, 132 ageing 24, 26, 66–86, 150, 167, 186, 205, 210 alternate universe 149, 159, 179, 202 American Dream 2, 8, 14, 20, 22, 23, 27–9, 31, 32, 35, 153, 174, 182

Beerbohm, Max 109 bisexuality 156 Brecht, Bertolt 151 brother 3, 50–2, 122, 130, 133, 155, 165, 187, 205, 236 Buffy the Vampire Slayer xvi, 69, 83n, 118, 149, 167, 193

Baby Boomers 9, 174 Baudelaire, Charles 99, 103, 105, 109 beauty xvi, 4, 7, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33–4, 35, 61, 74, 82–3, 97, 99–100, 104, 106, 110 , 111, 112, 115, 120, 125, 148, 152, 163, 172, 176, 192

cable TV xv, 1, 12, 114, 116–18, 123, 127n castration xvi, 46–9, 52–3, 64nn Catholicism xvi, 9, 122, 147, 148, 168, 171n celebrity xv, xvi, 1, 6, 14, 45–6, 66, 76, 84n, 118, 146, 150, 189

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celebrity casting 1, 120, 150 child abuse 3, 111n, 153, 159, 161 Christmas 10, 125, 153, 161, 170, 187 cinematography 139 consumerism 20, 34

homosexuality/gay 5, 6, 13, 14, 21, 42–3, 120, 150, 156, 160–1 hyper-realism 148, 150, 170

dandyism xvii, 3, 96–113 Dickens, Charles 159, 170 disfigurement 2, 9, 27, 31, 33, 79, 121, 124, 152, 164, 166, 198, 212 dolls 6, 61, 107, 124, 148–9, 152, 154, 167, 170, 202, 218 doubles 14, 74, 133, 154, 156, 170 dreams 3, 6, 41–6, 49, 62, 64nn, 79, 108, 110, 121, 137–8, 146, 149, 151–2, 154, 157, 160, 165, 187, 191, 203, 208

Lacan, Jacques 38, 45, 48–9, 63, 64nn, 82 lesbianism 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 16, 50, 83n, 155, 183n lies xvi, 8, 12, 146–7, 159, 160 Los Angeles 19, 32, 45, 56, 71, 145, 187–9

Kristeva, Julia 38, 54, 81, 83nn, 86n, 100

gangsterism 125, 153, 154 genre 70, 71, 77, 78, 80, 85n, 116–19, 121–2, 145, 174 Glee 9, 10, 13–14, 18n, 87, 150 Gothic xv, 85n, 122, 145, 148, 159, 161, 169, 192 Grey’s Anatomy 90, 134, 189, 223–4

makeovers 66, 71–2, 82, 121–3, 146 Marxism xvii masculinity 13, 19–22, 30, 34–5, 48, 50–2, 124, 156, 181, 183, 185, 187 masks and disguises 9, 22, 33, 77–80, 146, 148, 154, 170 materialism 179, 189, 192 metrosexuality 21–2, 160 Miami 14, 19, 69, 71, 81, 85n, 145, 146, 164, 165, 175, 184, 188 misanthropy 16 misogyny 11, 16–17, 18 see also abject mother 2–4, 6, 10, 11, 15, 16, 23, 47, 49, 50, 53–6, 57, 75, 77, 82, 111n, 119, 121–2, 136, 143n, 150, 162–5, 177, 179, 184, 190 murder 7, 15, 16, 34, 49–52, 57, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82, 117, 134, 149, 152, 153, 157, 160, 169 music 13, 20, 67–70, 73–8, 82, 83n, 85, 94, 138–9, 143n, 149–50, 174, 184, 187–8

Hearts and Scalpels 37, 45, 70, 71, 76, 110, 170, 189, 222–4

paradox xvi, xvii, 8, 10, 61, 96, 103, 142, 145, 146

fat 17, 33, 73, 82, 84n, 190, 218 father xv, 3, 7–8, 10, 11, 12, 31, 40, 45, 47–53, 54, 62, 64nn, 103, 120, 125–6, 129, 140, 147, 153, 155, 159–60, 162, 183–5 feminism and postfeminism 19–21, 27, 32, 35 Foucault, Michel 97, 99 Freud, Sigmund 38, 39, 41, 44–5, 47, 49–50, 52, 53, 58–60, 62–3, 64nn, 81



INDEX

Popular 9–11, 119, 148, 149, 151 pornography 124, 140 postmodernism 10, 19, 20, 22, 23, 28, 30, 32, 34, 98, 131, 173, 186 pregnancy 12, 14, 120, 165 Pretty Handsome 9, 11–13 privilege 9, 22, 27, 28, 31, 35, 174, 175, 177, 181, 183, 192, 193n pro bono work 8, 23, 25, 28, 124, 133, 156, 160, 168, 176, 182, 197, 198, 219 Pygmalion 148, 152, 157 race and racism 7, 8, 27, 28–9, 30, 31, 32, 52, 147, 186, 193n, 205 repression 2, 12, 38–41, 46, 50 Running with Scissors 9, 10, 119 Scientology xvi, 6, 24, 34, 152, 169 sex addiction 121, 166 sexuality 5, 22, 48, 56, 57, 93, 120, 175 see also bisexuality; homosexuality/ gay; lesbianism

227

Six Feet Under xv, 116, 149, 193n statues and mannequins 20, 112n, 146, 148, 154, 157 suicide 3, 8, 9, 15, 17, 34, 40, 56, 58, 108, 122, 226, 151, 158, 178, 179 transsexuality and transgender 10, 12–13, 15, 17, 28–31, 51–3, 125–6, 132, 147, 156–8, 161, 164, 171, 173, 180 truth xvi, 3, 5, 8, 40, 45, 49, 51, 58, 111, 122, 131–2, 145–69 twins xvi, 10, 60, 83n, 84n, 91, 94, 122, 128–44, 152, 164, 167, 168, 189 uncanny 81, 82, 146, 148, 151, 154, 155, 170 Whedon, Joss 14, 167, 193n Wilde, Oscar 99, 100, 104 Žižek, Slavoj 174