“Not caring about things since 1971, so that you don’t have to.”
7. Renee Zellweger’s Face – Yawn. There are an uncountable number of things throughout the multiverse vastly more consequential than another celebrity spackling themselves with Botox and collagen.
6. Renee Zellweger’s Face – And even if a particular actress’s plastic surgery does have some relative import, the deluge of mean-spirited comments and un-funny jokes tossed around under the guise of “snark” (worst word ever) is a reflection of just how emotionally barren and casually cruel we’ve become as a society.
5. Renee Zellweger’s Face – Should Ms. Zellweger do whatever she wants with her body and/or general appearance, whether it’s blepharoplasty or gaining 200 pounds and attending the Elle party in a thong, if that’s what makes her truly happy? Of course. But is defending her right to go under the knife without fear of sadistic tweets sort of like complaining that Two and a Half Men continues to draw ten million viewers an episode?
4. Renee Zellweger’ Face – It’s totally disingenuous to cry “shaming!” (another now-meaningless word the world could do without) when people have a startled reaction to a public figure having such radical plastic surgery that they are now basically unrecognizable. Fairness is less relevant, at least under the yoke of social media, than inevitability.
3. Renee Zellweger’s Face – People forge emotional attachments with actors’ faces. And why not? They spend years or decades staring at those faces projected in massive dimension and with great clarity. One of the small pleasures in life is aging alongside an admired actor, watching them change as you change. Grandma Navy always said, “We like the stars who we would prefer to wake up in the skin of, after just having intercoursed the star we secretly lust after, and who we suspect would be a good person to eat cold cereal with.” But what if you woke up as Clooney one morning, lying next to Ms. Zellweger, and had zero clue who she was?
2. Renee Zellweger’s Face – Because even her most avid defenders, the ones insisting that no one should have any reaction at all, would have to admit that if they’d just ordered a double Johnny Walker Blue at the Elle party bar and turned around and saw Ms. Zellweger 2.0 walking off the red carpet, and the person next to them said, who is that?, they’d be hard-pressed to answer anything but A: Kelly Lynch or B: I have no fucking idea.
1. Renee Zellweger’s Face – Which is understandably disconcerting, if not license for everyone to be a dick about it. More important than the million tweets debating whether she looks good or not, are the few dozen tweets asking what level of self-loathing or terror of losing a career would compel someone to fundamentally alter an appearance already settled in the public consciousness. You could ask Bruce Jenner or Jerry Jones. You could ask Sly Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. You could ask Michael Jackson or Axl Rose if they weren’t already dead. You could ask Barry Bonds’ head, which is still, like an inverse of the Grinch’s heart, three times its normal size. But I suspect none of them would have an answer, because to age secure in the inevitability of becoming less attractive, as measured by whatever cultural metric you subscribe to, is essential to basic self-knowledge and human understanding.
This is the best thing I’ve seen all weekend (and I’ve had lobster and swordfish on back-to-back nights). Thank you.