Educational Media Reviews Online

In her deeply personal film, Diane Israel draws upon her experience as a track and triathlon star to attempt to analyze American culture’s obsession with youth, beauty, and imposed body image and their effects upon feelings of self-worth and the drive to achieve “perfection” at whatever cost to an individual’s body and mind. Told in a general documentary style with subtitles, the education version of the film (edited from its original form) employs personal and public archival film as well as interspersed interviews with the narrator herself, family members, other athletes, authors, philosophers, and critics of “beauty culture.”

There exists some “bad” language as well as images of frontal nudity and same-sex touching, but nothing immediately unknown to high-school students or older.

But, while the producer/narrator Israel has intended, she says in voice-over, to examine body image, extreme thinness, and aspects of “exercise bulimia,” she immediate notes that she “didn’t expect to face [her] own personal demons along the way. This is my story….” Within the first minutes, then, the film is derailed from an overall critique of the cult or “culture” of beauty and becomes focused on Israel’s own (too subjective?) experiences.

Israel delves into her own personal narrative of anorexia and physically-damaging hyperactivity at age 12, her incredible obsession with fitness and physical “perfection,” and how her body simply shut down by the time she was in her mid-20s. Added to this are, helpfully, interviews with her past and present partners, other extreme athletes, cultural critics, and contemporary adolescents. Distractingly thrown into the narrative are the narrator’s ideas about her childhood, her parents, and myriad subjective and often unsupported ideas about culture. Throughout Beauty Mark, hearing “real stories of real people,” as it were, will be helpful to audiences; but pop-psychological tropes married with seemingly ersatz second-wave feminism and subjective personal narratives more than subtract from those benefits.

For example, Israel’s examination of the Dove Company’s “Real Beauty” campaign could potentially be useful. The “Real Beauty,” says its promotional literature, wants to “help free ourselves and the next generation from beauty stereotypes” and has been universally lauded. An examination of this campaign and its effect on individuals and their feelings of self-worth contrasted with other beauty myths and standards would provide a useful “point/counter-point” to support the narrator’s ideas. An interesting fact explained by a Dove spokesperson is that of 3000 women in 10 countries, only two percent noted themselves as “beautiful” amongst a host of other positive terms. This would provide Israel the opportunity to look into the reason and the cultures involved further, but the film does not take her (or her audience) there. All the viewer is told along the lines of anything substantial is that the proliferation of American pop-culture has spread damaging ideas of self-worth and body-image globally. The American television program “Baywatch” is somehow implicated in causing the commencement of anorexia nervosa in “countries like Buton [sic]” (there is no country of “Buton,” but there is a Bhutan). Israel’s trip to this fact with the Dove spokespeople necessitates her leaving the “Boulder bubble,” which had no good female role models for her in her youth and was “overly masculine with athletic mania.” It is difficult to believe that from the late 1980s until the filming of this documentary there was no opposition or opportunity to see antitheses to extreme fitness and “exercise bulimia” in Colorado. Third, there is the fact that Dove is a global company; and while its campaign is certainly a truly positive step in beauty culture, it is still consumerist-based and meant to make money.

If only the film would address these obvious criticisms!

A further episode involving a mannequin manufacturer notes that “less than one percent” of people might achieve the physicality denoted in these dolls. Of course! The film needs to investigate if there is a subculture trying to emulate these impossible body types, though there is no follow-up.

Much more damaging to the intended desire of the film to bring body image issues to light and to help others is the increasingly subjective attitude of the narrative. Statements are made by the subject and others, but they are never disputed, never explored. Several other athletes are, well, not interviewed; they talk to the camera; but they say things like, “I feel sad sometimes that I can’t love myself,” “I was [and wanted to be] the perfect little girl,” and similar tropes along those lines. Why do they feel this way? Why do they feel this need? Where did it come from? Their reasoning is never really explained; and it seems as if every runner or bodybuilder you’ve ever met might have incredibly distorted self-perceptions. Again, leaving the “Boulder bubble” and talking to representatives of one consumer campaign cannot address these important issues.

Israel often describes her experiences with her family. Though her brother is filmed and vaguely affirms some of the narrator’s points regarding the structure of their upbringing, Israel makes some disturbing comments and accusations about her early life which are just not validated. Her father, she says, was something of a control freak (at least!) and not only did he push Israel (somehow) to become a self-destructive ultra-athlete, but he also tormented her mother. In one recitation, the audience is told how, after the birth of her older, developmentally disabled brother, Israel’s father refused to tell her mother that the child was “brain damaged,” leading her mother to believe that she was “doing a real bad job of parenting.” While it is unclear when this took place (given the film’s narrative, it might have been as early as the late 1950s or well into the 1960s), it is simply impossible to believe that some cabal of doctors, care workers, teachers, neighbors never let her mother in on this secret!

While this brother was eventually institutionalized, Israel’s voice-over that her mother never visited her son because it was “too painful for her,” evidences an at least skewed perspective in the narrative. Here and in other places, the narration explains that the protagonist’s mother was so beautiful, and that beauty drove her insane (!). The dynamics of this are completely unclear! To say that her beauty transformed her into something of an object for others and unfairly defined this obviously vibrant person into a “thing“ and backing it up with counter-points or scientific data would bolster the film‘s muddy message and certainly balance the narrative for viewers. But the allegations that she was somehow a victim of our culture’s standards of beauty—to the point of madness—is just plain strange.

To further add that the narrator bound her breasts because physical development equaled womanhood equaled mother equaled mental illness always feels like bad pop-psychology. (As an unexplained, competitive idea, her father “wanted her to be a boy.” Please, please prove this! Are these the narrator’s own thoughts or her father’s/the patriarchy’s/the large culture’s imposition of ideas?) The mother adoration/father vilification feels like a cliché; and while this very well may be the narrator’s personal experience, and thus really, truly important to individuals undergoing similar body-issue-related experiences, Beauty Mark often “reads” something like a medically irresponsible self-help book with a slightly glossier coat. There are moments to truly recommend in the film, but these are too often muddled with unsubstantiated subjectivity, disturbing accusations, and an overwhelming sense of personal victimhood. For Israel, “sanity was control…. athletics and food, athletics and food….” This of course speaks to the anorexic’s desire to provide some sort of stability over her or his chaotic surroundings—the thought being that body weight is the only thing the victim of the disease might have control over personally and environmentally. But never is it addressed how such behavior might have, then, “controlled” the overall family dynamic. Israel is always the victim, never the active participant in family or social dynamics; and this construct is increasingly questioned in cognitive therapy and certainly makes for poor documentaries.

Several episodes provide an intensely needed counter-point to the evident bias of the overall narrative. For example, the already-touched upon scene of today’s students revealing that they feel good about themselves is important. (Somewhat amusingly, given the constant, defensive tone of the film, a high school student is filmed noting that that she is constantly mistaken as a boy—but she’s alright with that, very comfortable in her own skin. Good for her! But please, Beauty Mark, tell us why she and her classmates are “good” with themselves! Is there something new culturally which accepts individualized personal expressions or is there a “rebel” sub-culture that just doesn’t care about dominant cultural dictates? Which? Why? How come?

Similarly, scenes that highlight Israel’s ex-girlfriend are a bit fascinating. (The, I imagine, long-suffering) Ivette notes that Israel would “three or four times a week” obsess over her hair, outfit, but how she, herself, could not comprehend the worry. Ivette mentions her own mother, who, she says, instilled in her daughters a sense of beauty and worth. Critical viewers will certainly want Ivette to explain more and for the film to address why two friends would have such incredibly different experiences. But the film is silent here. The narrative, then, implies that their mothers were different, their experiences opposite. And while the film then proves that individuals who came of age a few decades ago as well as high school students today can have positive body images, it makes unclear the reasoning and dynamics of why they have them, and what we as parents, teachers, friends, and as a culture can do to validate self-worth.

In the final episode, “Going Home,” Israel visits her family. Her mother has suffered a stroke and her disabled brother is there (for the first time?) as is her father. Obviously, the last is the most important to the coherency of the narrative; but he expresses how, yes, he was, personally, an overachiever academically. Notably he does not address the allegations of the film thus far; but, then, it is somewhat obvious that he was not asked to do so!

Israel notes, importantly, that self-discovery and healing are not (in a fitting analogy) a matter of finding the finish line as in a race. There is no finish line; self-discovery is a process and an evolution. This is true and it is nice; but saying that “In the beginning, I wanted to blame the media…. [But] it’s a lot more complex than that,” necessitates having had shown how there exist biological, psychological, and environmental factors that contributed to her illness. None of this is shown; and the film ultimately blames…whom? The father? The city of Boulder, Colorado? A mysterious and impenetrable “Culture”?

Beauty Mark feels like aggressive self-absolution. While surely open to being accused of blaming the victim, the film as it is might be guilty, in this reviewer’s mind, of something of a quasi-iatrogenic irresponsibility—from her position of authority, the narrator may very well force and foist unfair and skewed ideas of identity and gender politics and the nature of victimhood upon impressionable viewers. This is, in an uncontrolled setting, dangerous.

The film ought to market itself as a biography of a truly worthy individual. The film, though, may not market itself as an aid for anorexics, bulimics, “exercise bulimics,” those with body dysmorphia, or students of culture studies. Inside an intensive therapeutic environment, such as a skilled high school counselor or adult therapist’s office, the film might be helpful in identifying specific psychological needs; but for educational purposes, Beauty Mark is very much not recommended for students, adults, and/or any victims of self-identity or eating disorder-related issues or scholars researching cultural studies.

Awards

• Audience Choice Award, Estes Park Film Festival
• Finalist, Best Documentary, Moondance International Film Festival