The corporate mirror

The first moments of the film, “The Illusionists,” play over the background of a Gaetano Donizetti composition, crescendoing in the rhythmic and galloping pace of trumpets, drums and violins. As the screen continues to transition between different beauty advertisements from around the world, Susie Orbach, a British psychoanalyst and author, begins. “We see the selling of the westernized image as the badge of modernity in India, in Singapore, in China, in Japan. Where the notion of how you join globalized culture is the taking of a western body.”

“The Illusionists” was screened on Thursday, March 4, as part of the MSU Office of Health Advancement’s (OHA) “Shucking Society” film series. The three films featured by OHA were focused on challenging the audience to confront and analyze preconceived notions and hierarchical thoughts about the human body. Specifically, the documentary directed and produced by Elena Rossini gained insight from authors, professors, politicians and scientists about the curation of the body in popular culture as a gendered, fetishized “item” for mass public consumption. The multiplex of ideologies and cultural practices that create such a market for “perfect” bodies is far too complex to fit into the one and a half hour movie length, but Rossini does a good job at displaying the global fascination with eroticized bodies.

The main point that Rossini seems to be making to the viewer is that, while bodies are specifically feminized or masculinized in order to attract consumers, bodies that are not deemed “perfect” are equally defined. To use an example from the film, beauty advertising companies created the notion of cellulite as a negative bodily attribute in order to create a market for “cellulite eliminating” cream and treatments. While manipulative beauty companies are reliant on a capitalistic economy, capitalism is equally reliant on retail corporations, like these beauty companies, to curate new markets and avenues for profit. By constructing a general narrative of a “correct” male and female body through entertainment, advertisements and information manipulation, the profiting corporations have constructed a highly patriarchal, white, western-centered idea of bodily perfection.

The film displayed different contemporary cultural practices that resulted in, or were born from, profit-minded corporate use of social norms such as heteronormative racism as a result of white colonization. Global aesthetics trend toward white, western features that accentuate the whiteness of skin, European body features and lack of body hair. Each of these features, and many more, find themselves appropriated through the production of hair removal, weight loss and skin-whitening treatments that reach global markets and mass consumption, specifically in India, Africa and communities of color around the world. Gossini also touches on how global markets have, until this point, focused exclusively on the strict gender-binary of bodies, ignoring people that are either excluded or exclude themselves from the dualistic definition of the human body.

Unfortunately, as “The Illusionists” depicts, beauty product advertisement and trend curation exploit and perpetuate body insecurity in order to create a market for beautifying products. Thus is the cycle of historical events such as colonization, cultural norms and practices, corporate image and narrative creation that finds itself displayed in Gossini’s 2015 documentary, “The Illusionists.”