Are Angelina Jolie’s lips influencing the economy?

Making the Cut

How Cosmetic Surgery Is Transforming Our Lives

Anthony Elliott

Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press: 160 pp., $19.95 paper

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If YOU think the plastic-surgery boom is just another sign that our culture is shallow, death-denying and youth-obsessed, think again. Because according to sociologist Anthony Elliott, a “mommy job” is not just shorthand for the breast augmentation/tummy tuck many women choose to have after giving birth, it’s a toxic side effect of globalization, rampant consumerism, the electronic economy and, perhaps, a worldwide epidemic of good old melancholia.

Elliott is chairman of the Sociology department at Flinders University in Australia. His book is called “Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery Is Transforming Our Lives.” So you can’t say you weren’t warned. His purpose, and really at times it feels more like a quest, is to examine how cosmetic surgery is at once a driving force and a result of the new, international, techno-speedy, obsolescence-included economy -- an almost perfect model of how capitalism not only meets consumer needs but creates them as well.

Quoting experts as disparate as Pamela Anderson and Sigmund Freud (surely this is a first), citing cultural events as diverse as reality television and various corporate scandals, Elliott makes the case that millions of people are getting cosmetic surgery not because they are narcissists but because they are afraid. Not just of losing a job to a younger colleague or a spouse to a younger competitor, but of losing the chance to engage in what has become the hottest hobby in America: reinvention.

The replacement of humans with ever-refined robots is a staple of science fiction, but reading “Making the Cut,” one can’t help but wonder if we all aren’t just a few saline implants away from becoming Cylons.

Elliott argues that people, at least the old definition of people, i.e. creatures whose bodies go through a predictable set of changes called “aging,” are increasingly perceived as not only a drag on the new capitalism, with its enjoyment of downsizing and corporate shake-ups (the former CEO with the bags under his eyes is probably tired, the woman with the pooching belly might have children who require her at home some of the time), but also a sign of woefully limited imagination.

Why be reactive when you can be proactive?

Elliott seems particularly disturbed by the young people who seem to view cosmetic surgery as an accessory, something to be purchased, used for a season and upgraded (the pages about surgical tourism are particularly hilarious, in a horrifying way).

“For better or worse,” Elliott writes, “globalization has given rise to the 24/7 society, in which continual self-actualization and dramatic self-reinvention have become all the rage.”

Now, I must warn you that this is one of the more conversational sentences to be found in “Making the Cut.” That Elliott is an academic is never in question; only an academic could, or would, make a statement like: “The thesis of para-social interaction takes us some distance in grasping the ubiquity of cosmetic surgical culture in our age of global communications networks.”

See, I don’t even know what that means. And unfortunately “Making the Cut” is littered with those kind of sentences. Which makes it pretty slow going for a book about plastic surgery.

And that’s too bad because Elliott makes a lot of interesting points and connections between the “desires” of the individual and the needs of the global economy (newer, thinner, faster) and how those things are being carved into our flesh.

Indeed, while reading it, you can’t but think you are watching the birth of an “expert” -- if nothing else arises from “Making the Cut,” Elliott can expect to be interviewed by any journalist writing about plastic surgery, so I hope he has a good calling plan.

By the time you get to his climactic point -- that cosmetic surgery is a symptom of social melancholia in the strictest Freudian terms (brief overview of Freudian psychology included), you do wonder if he is just so overcome by the limitless tentacles of the field that he can’t quite focus, or if he is just throwing things wildly to see what will stick.

When, at the very end (the text is less than 200 pages, though I regret to say it reads much longer), Elliott tries to argue that the same forces behind the plastic-surgery mania are also behind the brutal London death of a 2-year-old, allegedly at the hands of her corporately stressed father, he has clearly gone too far.

Yes, possibly we are all in some way “debased by this soulless surgical culture,” but it’s a long road from liposuction to infanticide, and one I don’t think the public is prepared to take.

Still cosmetic surgery is, undeniably, a powerful cultural force, and it’s good to have the sociologists on the case. Elliott’s writing may be stiff, but his mind works in intriguing ways. It’s fun to contemplate the relationship between Angelina Jolie’s lips and the world’s economy or figure out the cultural intersection between face-lifts and Enron, and Elliott’s point that the latter both involve “a sense of self that is orientated to the short term” certainly works for me.

Though it would have been nice if he had used some word other than “orientated.”

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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com