1980s darling Justine Bateman shot to fame alongside Michael J. Fox on the smash hit sit-com Family Ties. Last year, her book Fame: The Hijacking of Reality gave us a remarkable insight into what it’s like to experience extraordinary fame, what fame does to a person, and what happens when fame starts to fade. Her new book tackles the topic of beauty. Face: One Square Foot of Skin takes a radical look at why – even after decades feminism, the body positivity movement, a shift in civic values — society deems that natural beauty, unenhanced by surgery or dermatological procedures, is not possible for women after age 50.
In advance of her April 1 conversation with actress Carrie-Anne Moss, she answered some of our questions about her ideas on the subject of beauty.
Q: You’ve said that as a young adult in your 20s, you admired British and European actors like Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert and Anna Magnani who let character grow into their faces as they aged. Can you talk about your experience with embracing your own beauty as it developed through the years?
At that time, what struck me about these women was their style and confidence. I took the lines on their faces and the bags under their eyes as indications of that confidence. Their attractiveness was the entirety of them as people. The way they dressed, moved, and spoke, their lack of people-pleasing, their independence, their insouciance. At the time, I wanted to become like that, and to me, the condition of their faces was a necessary visual indicator.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen how tenable that assumption was. Every crease has the potential to chip away at a woman’s confidence, if she subscribes to the idea that a change in her looks equates a decent of her worth. However, the opposite is also true: every crease has the potential to make you increasingly bulletproof, if you believe that a change in your appearance equates an opportunity to buck societal norms that are inherently spurious to begin with.
Q: How have Hollywood and the traditional media distorted the idea of female beauty? How and why did this happen?
The Entertainment Business is a business. And like any business, they sell what the customers want to buy. Many would argue this is a chicken-or-the-egg problem, wherein few can tell if smooth, unlined faces were foisted upon the public by the film business, or if instead the public’s purchase of tickets to films with smooth, unlined faces far outweighed their ticket purchases to other films, and caused the film business to merely generate more of the same.
I personally believe that our confusion about older women’s faces is rooted in other societal foundations. And that that informs how the public spends their money at the movies.
Q: Why is American culture obsessed with youth? What has that meant for your generation?
America is incredibly young, compared with other nations and civilizations in human history. The extent of our progress has been fueled by fast and relentless hard work. The recognition of that type of work as "the recipe of our success" has placed an expectation on its citizens. There’s an invitation (or a demand) that they hold up their end and continue the tradition. Striving, winning, never stopping, not wanting your generation to be the one that pauses or halts what has always seems like the inexorable American pace to the finish line, the Manifest Destiny of position in The World.
This kind of pace is associated with youth. Incorrectly. The youth have the energy, but can also be incredibly lazy. Older people tend to “slow down,” either from physical need or an emotional wisdom, and yet many retain a relentless ambition.
All to say, the American focus is mistakenly placed on “youth,” when what it really means to be placed on is ambition and indomitable, efficacious effort. And those qualities are irrespective of a human’s age.
Q: What would you say to this generation of teenagers and young people about our culture’s notions of beauty?
That there is not necessarily a “notion of beauty” in our culture. What is most often before our eyes is simply advertisement concepts. So, an attempt to align oneself most closely to what is currently being used in America’s advertising is more akin to maximizing consumer conversion of the widest collection of the population possible. On a personal level, “consumer conversion” is nothing more than people-pleasing.
The true “notion of beauty” for humans is more tied to what our spirit recognizes as attractive, appealing, moving, and genuine. I don’t believe that plastic surgery gets one closer to any of those qualities.
Q: Where do you find inspiration?
In anything that rings true and that is rooted in and operating with a lack of fear or self-consciousness. Nature, art, music. As long as it holds to those ideals.