Almost every day it is inevitable that we encounter advertisements.
Among these commercial advertisements especially of clothing and other body
related merchandises (shoes, perfumes, etc.), displays a body of that of a
model. This visual representation of the human model who poses on the
advertisement is the so-called ideal
image of the user, which is projected. The bodies of the male and female models
are selected and represented in a way that those bodies become an image of
fantasy, a thing to be achieved, and to be reached. These advertisements go beyond
the representations of the products themselves; they produce a discourse on
human body and its aspirations. In psychoanalytical terms those bodies become objet petit a (“unattainable object of
desire”). And unfortunately, it is within those visual representations, popular
notions of beauty and handsomeness are being understood, and
the quest for them by the masses, fuels the market in many ways which is
obvious. Within those norms, Beauty for woman has come to be synonymous for a supermodel and handsomeness or maleness
comes in the way of toned body and six-packed abdomen.
This discourse on body and the metanarrative of beauty and
the beast (the distinction between the supermodel and the masses) is even more
prominent in a recent Tamil movie (ஐ[1]), wherein the
revenge motif is disfiguration of the other. Disfiguration as an act of revenge
spells out for us the way media works on the discourse of beauty and ugly
polarities. If in a normative way the model represented in the advertisement
becomes the ideal beauty and the rest
are marginalized into the other polarity, the serious question then arises, what
of those who really suffer from serious bodily ailments of physical
disablements, they become doubly marginalized by the market forces and social
norms and are even more forcibly ebbed out of the beauty discourse perpetually.
We should respond to the question if not politically at least theologically.
As a part of theological response to beauty/beast discourse,
we could turn to the gospels and focus on the life of Jesus. Gospel of Mark
reports that, of the three times Jesus’ foretelling of suffering and death
(Mark 8:31; 9:30-32; 10:32-34), immediately after the first prediction, the
event of transfiguration is placed (Mark 9:2-8) and in the last prediction they
were on the road to Jerusalem, which is the death knell of Jesus and the
imminence of his crucifixion. This very journey from transfiguration to crucifixion
could be seen as an Christological significance of a kenotic journey of the Son
of God. However, one notices a polarity between the journeying from transfiguration
mount to the disfiguration on the cross on another mount. The journey which
begins in transfiguration as “dazzling white” ends up in the “darkness over the
land.” This whole journey when read through notions of beauty/ugly polarities, transfiguration
event reveals to us the dazzling beauty of the Son of God which is objet petit a, that ends in the total
disfiguration of the same on the cross. And the event of the Cross which in the
words of Isaiah makes it more significant, were he writes “so marred was his
appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals”, “as
one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no
account”(Isaiah 52:14; 53:3). This passage talks about the disfiguration of the
messianic figure on the account of salvation.
If we claim that, it is on the cross that we have found our
redemption, then our redemption or total liberation or salvation, comes from
the absolute disfiguration of the transfiguration or transfigured (mysterium tremendum et fascinans). And
it is this liberative aspect of disfiguration comes alive on the event of the
Cross, wherein disfigured body remains to be gazed as only means to salvation. It
is imperative that we need to be redeemed or saved from the discourses of absolute
beauty discourses, which finds itself in the form of transfigurations of human
bodies which are “dazzling” in every hoarding and billboards. It is these “dazzling”
experiences of transfigurations have come to haunt us in the name of beauty and
handsomeness, which are no less oppressive. It is also in these discourses that
our salvation remains in the Cross, where the glory is beheld in the ultimately
disfigured body which delivers us from every distinction of beauty/ugly oppression.
It is in the scars and stripes we are healed and delivered.
[1] The movie has protagonists both from the discourse of beauty model and
bodybuilder categories. And the antagonists mar the body of the bodybuilder
turned model and in turn the protagonist takes revenge by disfiguring the villains
one by one. This kind of narrations and reinforcement of beauty as ideal and
disfiguration as “revenge” motif is terribly insensitive and perverse.
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