You must have seen The Weeknd’s changed face on the internet lately – bloody and covered in bandages or transformed by fake plastic surgery. With the 30-year-old singer set to perform at the Super Bowl LV halftime show on February 7, it will be interesting to see if he will continue to perform before hundreds of millions of viewers.
The changes in The Weeknd’s face didn’t just appear overnight.
Instead, they came out as a slow crescendo, like notes in a larger arrangement.
Initially, there were facial bruises at the end of his “Blinding Lights” music video, in which night torture ends in a car accident. He displayed a bandaged nose for performances on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in January 2020 and “Saturday Night Live” in March 2020. Later that March, the bloody nose and lips appeared on the cover of “After Hours”, his album last.
He took it a step further by receiving two awards at the 2020 American Music Awards, appearing with his head all covered in bandages, which worried some fans who assumed the bandages were real. When these bandages are removed for the “Save Your Tears” music video, a face disfigured by excessive plastic surgery is revealed – a face carefully constructed with makeup and prostheses that make it almost unrecognizable.
As an anthropologist who has been analyzing the social implications of plastic surgery for over 15 years, I was impressed by The Weeknd’s use of this medical practice.
What, I wondered, was he trying to say?
Initially, I assumed that bruises and bandages were a metaphor for The Weeknd’s fight against drug addiction, a topic he explored for a long time in his music. He noted that, when writing his music videos for “After Hours”, he was inspired by the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, in which the writer Hunter S. Thompson, played by Johnny Depp, often has hallucinations or spirals out of control .
However, another key appears in the videos of the album “After Hours”. In all the videos, people are constantly watching him, be it the crowd of hard, masked fans in the “Save Your Tears” video clip or the frantic crowd stretching to grab him as he tries to escape at the end of “Until I Bleeding. “
In both cases, he appears to be comparing the fandom to a disturbing loss of privacy, in which his own security is at stake. It’s not that he fears that his fans will hurt him. It’s just another comment on how your celebrity status makes you vulnerable to a curious look all the time.
In his most violent video so far – for the song “Too Late” – the themes of plastic surgery and fandom collide. Two wealthy white women with bandaged heads find his severed head and pass out on it, before deciding to murder a black stripper so they can put The Weeknd’s head on that muscular body.
The video’s racial dynamics are hard to miss: women seem to exoticize blackness and reduce the body parts of two black men to objects that give them pleasure.
People love musical performances – or art in general – because it is pleasurable to immerse yourself in the talented work of others.
In the celebrity culture of late capitalism, however, artists are finding it increasingly difficult to separate from their art: the show continues after the work has been published or the performance has been completed. Fans feel entitled to access all aspects of their personal lives – even their bodies.
Communication scholar P. David Marshall wrote about the ways in which the public assumes that celebrities are automatically open to – or deserve – scrutiny thanks to their fame. When your privacy is invaded, it is simply dismissed as something that comes with the territory.
Some celebrities, like the Kardashians, are inclined to do this. They are willing to expose themselves in increasingly invasive ways – whether through social media or reality television – because they want to explore the symbiotic relationship between media exposure, wealth and power.
But other celebrities, like Lady Gaga, were outspoken about the ways in which fame damaged their mental health. Musicians like Sia and Daft Punk did everything to hide their faces and protect their privacy, making this part of their show.
By using bandages and prosthetics to hide his face, perhaps The Weeknd is also telling us that parts of his life are off-limits – and they should remain that way.
Weeknd also seems to be recognizing the immense pressures that celebrities feel to conform to unrealistic standards of beauty. Celebrity journalism can be particularly cruel when famous people aren’t up to par, with paparazzi making a fortune with photos that show celebrities as vulnerable or imperfect.
[Insight, in your inbox each day. Get The Conversation’s newsletter.]
Feminist and literary scholar Virginia Blum wrote about how celebrities are admired for their ability to transform and beautify themselves, but they also become canvases for severe criticism when they seem to have gone too far with plastic surgery or have aged unpleasantly.
For celebrities, it can sometimes seem that there is no one to please. By making these concerns about superficial beauty part of his art, The Weeknd seems to throw that mirror back at his listeners, asking them to reflect on the irrelevance of his appearance to his craft.
This article was republished from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Alvaro Jarrin, College of the Holy Cross.
Read More:
Alvaro Jarrin’s research in plastic surgery was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Originally published