본질 강화로 귀결되는 성형수술의 역설

A Paradox of Plastic Surgery Reinforcing One's Substance: 200 Pounds Beauty, Cinderella, Time

Nowadays, plastic surgery is no more special events in the Korean society. Even one of the foreign presses, Financial Times, has reported in 2008 that it is generalized as a kind of accessaries in South Korea. There have been various and intensive arguments around this issue and trend, so pros and cons. The film industry responded to it and produced three films in 2006 dealing with their heroines who get plastic surgery due to different reasons : 200 Pounds Beauty, Cinderella, Time. All of them suggest some specific type of power relation judging a fluid or mutable identity through it. Especially 200 Pounds Beauty and Cinderella foreground bodies as an important stage where intersect social pressure making main characters get an operation as well as a criterion defining 'normal' or 'standard', and a personal desire reflecting his/her will to mainstream or high class's habitus at any risk. Meanwhile, Time focuses on ambiguousness and contradiction of one's identity in the most complex and dramatic way among three though is it's interest in mutable one through the operation relatively locked in a private sphere, so called obsessive love. However, despite these differences and characteristics, they revive the traditional belief about identity astonishingly similarly and reinforce it. All of them, in result, don't doubt or repudiate a fixed and eternal identity while emphasizing mutation through the operation which presumes a visible change in the first place; main characters with it are respectively punished as forms of humiliation, catastrophe and penalty. The core of anti-essentialism is a doubt of substance which originates from arbitrariness of the power in a specific time and space. For it defines and mystifies the essence not on the base of reasonable reasons but of it's own will. Unfortunately, all of the three don't suggest any potential alternative power or system at all. They rather underscore a tragedy, disorder or scandal restoring a 'real' and 'eternal' identity.