Nicole Kidman is Driving Me Crazy

It's a very bad idea for an essay.

Image of Nicole Kidman courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

This is the lie I tell myself before I fall asleep:

By tomorrow, I won’t want to write about Nicole Kidman. After I have a good night’s sleep, I will think of something else. I will write about an Important Topic, a Meaningful Thought. I won’t think of Nicole Kidman tomorrow.

I wake up thinking about Nicole Kidman, and I’m mad as hell. She is driving me nuts. I do not want to write about her, but I can’t help it.

Of course I’m not really mad at her. I don’t know her. Furthermore, she’s done nothing to merit my outrage.

I’m angry with myself. I don’t want to be that woman who criticizes other women. If wishes were fishes, because I am indeed a terrible person and a bad feminist.

She enrages me. There is something in Nicole Kidman which is in me, and I don’t want her to be like me. I want her to be free from what I’ve got.

I’d like to think with one of the most successful careers in the world, an Oscar, producing credits and chops, being exceptionally beautiful…I’d like to think insecurity about your looks would not be a thing. Because if Nicole Kidman is this afraid of aging, what’s that say about the rest of us?

Damnit all to hell. Don’t women ever get a break?

I blame Expats for the fix in which I find myself. I watched the torturous show yesterday, to get away from my own torturous feelings about my own life. It was a very bad idea, because now I’m obsessed.

It’s happened before. Thoughts of writing about Nicole Kidman have drifted through my head, but I’ve been able to dismiss them. I did think of writing something called The Coats of Nicole Kidman, but that’s because I kept rewatching The Undoing. I was enthralled with her wardrobe.

Where did she find room in her apartment to hang all those crushed velvet coats? How many did she have? Did she really think it was a wise idea to go to her husband’s trial wearing a coat that would cost a juror at least a month’s salary? Did her husband’s top lawyer not speak to her about toning down the wardrobe?

I know it’s a bad idea to write about her. But when I started this weekly project, I became very clear about one thing: I needed to write about what I really thought, not what I think people want to hear, and not what I think I’m supposed to think.

And I can be a real dick.

It’s a dick move to criticize an actress about something I see in her that is really, of course, a reflection of myself. I’m mad at Nicole Kidman because I’m aging, and I don’t like it. And her relentless perfectionism of face and body get in the way of her acting. It makes me furious with her.

But guess what I did yesterday? Guess what I did before I watched Expats? I googled the cost of some “corrective” surgery I want to get.

I am not against plastic surgery. I used to be, but not anymore. I am all for doing whatever makes you feel good. Life is tough enough without criticizing ourselves for wanting to look good.

My change about plastic surgery occurred last year, when a friend of mine let is slip she was having a lower-half face lift.

I was appalled. Appalled. My friend is only a couple of years older than I, and she is exquisitely beautiful. I felt devastated she was unhappy about how she looked, because if she was, the rest of us don’t stand a chance in hell.

But I genuinely love her and didn’t want to be a jackass about it. Plus, I appreciated she trusted me enough to take me into her confidence. I wrote back something like,

If it’s important to you, I’m glad you’re doing it.

Then she had the surgery. I was completely prepared for what I was certain would be a painful and inevitable outcome: she’d wind up looking like someone who is trying to look younger than she is.

I was wrong.

She looks fantastic. She does not look like she’s trying to look younger, she looks like herself, but better, which I didn’t think was possible. And although I could see no need for the surgery beforehand, afterwards I understood.

Gravity sucks. It pulls skin down. You can take perfect care of yourself, and gravity will still find a way to screw you, every time.

Her experience changed how I thought of plastic surgery. Because she only had a lower face lift, her face is still hers. There are still a few gentle lines. I was blown away at how successful the surgery was.

Then I wanted one.

Except I’ve a problem with getting surgery I don’t need, and the problem is painkillers. A facelift is painful. I must be super careful about surgery because every time I get one my life is on the line. One extra painkiller, one secret thought about them which I neglect to share, and I can be back on dope in a flash.

What’s the solution? If you answered self-acceptance, you are incorrect.

I’ve lost over 60 pounds, and I feel great. But tragically, my skin is…still there. My fat skin has not bounced back. I despise this word, but it’s the truth: I have jowls.

I do not want jowls. I want them to go away. I want to look in the mirror and be reasonably happy with my face, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask. I lost all that weight; I don’t deserve to be punished with jowls as a result.

But this is why I’m mad at Nicole Kidman. I want her to stop being so physically perfect. I cannot stand it. She has a self-consciousness about her which drives me up the wall because it’s unnecessary. It pains me to see such a beautiful woman make her looks so important.

Because they’re not.

If you are confused by what I’m saying, it’s not an accident. I’m confused by what I’m saying. I am contradicting myself. I don’t even know what I’m arguing.

But I have a feeling somehow in my obsession with Nicole Kidman’s icy beauty, and her perfectly slim body, and that flawless face, and why-doesn’t-she-have-a-single-sunspot skin, I’m grieving something about my mother.

My mother’s perfectionism stopped her from living well.

She transferred this perfectionism to me, because that’s what humans do. We pass our characteristics onto our children whether we want to or not.

It was painful for me to watch my mother criticize herself. She couldn’t do anything without telling me why it wasn’t perfect, and if it wasn’t perfect, she couldn’t enjoy it.

Twenty years ago, she did a drawing in oil pastels of my husband’s two sons. She never gave it to him, because she said it wasn’t right, she needed to fix it.

After she died last month, I found it and gave it to him. The first thing he said was,

“Wow. She really captured them, didn’t she?”

I thought of my mother’s insistence the painting wasn’t right. I so wish she’d given it to him herself, so she could hear his words. So she could see how beautiful her work was, reflected on his appreciative face.

She couldn’t give herself that chance. Perfectionism stopped her.

I only know a few women without a perfectionism problem. I am not one of them.

When I stream shows on Netflix obsessively, it’s usually because I am writing something painful and need a break from it. Yesterday I was trying to finish something that might be an additional chapter in my book.

But I could only write a few paragraphs at a time. I’d write, then need to move away from it.

I remembered Expats. I started watching when it first dropped, then forgot about it. In between paragraphs, I’d watch an episode.

My rage at Nicole Kidman grew and grew with every hour. In retrospect, writing about my past is perhaps not best mitigated by watching an actress whose obsession with her looks are impeding her craft.

It’s a terrible thing to say about her, but it’s what I believe. She reminds me of my mother. The superhuman control. The self-consciousness. The eternal watching of the self, on guard for anything which isn’t unimpeachable.

Her work is my mother’s painting in reverse. Her work, her face, her emotional life is so perfect it’s hollow.

Stop it, I silently say to her. What’s in you is so much bigger than how you look on screen.

I think Stephen Daldry was wise to give her a prosthetic nose in The Hours. I once inexplicably found myself sitting next to him at Florent one night for dinner, right around the time The Hours was getting big Oscar buzz. I was almost paralyzed with how imperfect I was, how unlike I was to Nicole Kidman, what a failure I was as an actress, what a nobody I am, how charitable it was of his wife to invite me to dinner. I sat there knowing full well I was no Nicole Kidman.

I felt so…unimportant is not a strong enough word. I felt I would never be a serious artist. I felt a total, insecure fraud.

I was so hyper-critical of my looks back then. At my most beautiful, I hated myself. I felt like nothing. I wouldn’t send out to casting directors because I always needed to be five pounds lighter. Once I hit a certain weight, I’d be blessed with self-acceptance and confidence.

I never got there. This is a headshot of me around this time:

Headshot of author by Hoebermann Studios.

I used to look at this headshot and pretend I really looked like that. I used to think to myself that sending out the headshot was a misrepresentation of me, because I was not this beautiful. Not really. If they could see all the rejected photos, they’d know what I really looked like: not good enough.

This was a lifetime ago. I don’t know if I went back in time without my self-hatred what life would be like. But it wouldn’t be my life, because my self-hatred is a huge part of who I am.

And I don’t want to see Nicole Kidman hating herself. She probably knows this already, but there is no safety in perfect beauty. We can’t protect ourselves with it.

My mother was a beautiful woman, but if you told her that, she’d tell you several reasons why she was not. She could never just say,

“Thank you.”

She had to tell you how wrong you were about her.

In The Hours, Nicole Kidman had the room to be herself, to bring her true self to Virginia Woolf. The prosthetic nose relieved her from the responsibility of physical perfection. There are certain scenes I remember from the film, and I recall them occasionally. They just pop into my head.

That’s not a terrible legacy, to win an Oscar for a film about a writer, and over twenty years later, scenes from it pop into a random writer’s head.

What I loved about her performance was the honesty on her face. The lack of control. The room to be imprecise.

Woolf wrote every woman needs a room of her own. It seems like the room Nicole Kidman needs is room away from the prison of her perfect face.

I tell Secret Service I am enraged by her and am going to end up writing about it, and what a terrible idea it is. He says,

“I think she’s a good actress.”

“She is!” I bark. “This is why I’m so mad at her.”

“Are you as mad at her as you are at the other blonde actress?”

“Oh my god, no, that’s Gwyneth Paltrow. No. She’s insufferable but she’s not acting anymore. She just did a little acting on her way to being a lifestyle mogul.”

“A what?” he asks. I can’t explain lifestyle moguls to him this early in the day.

Road to hell, good intentions, and all that.

Yesterday started innocently enough. I worked on my book. Then I got the idea that maybe there was some surgery I could get to rid myself of the jowls and the unfortunate extra skin on my arms. I did some research and was delighted to find I could get a neck lift with just two small little scars. I could probably handle that much pain. And I can get the arm surgery for only $4,000.00. Wonderful! I don’t have 4K for surgery, but I might one day.

Then I watched Expats, and it was all downhill from there.

Look at her, in those perfect going to the morgue clothes. Look at her, casual, but perfect to a fault. Look at her, eyes brimming with tears. Insufferable.

And then, near the end, I saw a wrinkle. Finally.

Her face wrinkles occasionally because I saw it with my own two eyes.

Oh, Nicole Kidman. I want you free from your face, as I google how to fix my arms.

My mother at 18, with perfect arms. This is what mine should look like. Author photo.