#2 - vampire facials (pt.1)

On the 11th of March 2013, Kim Kardashian published a selfie post-vampire facial treatment. This was also the day before my 13th birthday. As I look at this image 9 years later, I think how much it has aged well in the aesthetic sense of beauty and art’s ‘grotesque’ entering the mainstream, over the past few years. This image was on my mind due to its presence on a Pinterest board I recently witnessed. A seemingly raw selfie by Kardashian standards, the image itself is confrontational. Kim gives her audience direct eye contact, which may be nothing out of the ordinary, yet her frozen hand gently keeping her hair in place by the nape of her neck demands a deeper discomfort. The dark circles around her gaze lock her audience in, an ability of many of her images, like a ring-leader at a circus she commands us to take our seats with an acknowledgement that the performance is about to begin. Her bloodied towel in the foreground, just to make clear (if it wasn’t already) the fresh transaction of the procedure. Kim is giving intentional endurance for the experience, and no doubt content, as she takes the pain. 

My visceral reaction, and reignition of my memory of this moment, seemed to tell me more about my relationship to the image than perhaps the image itself. Without context, it is simply an image of Kim Kardashian with a bloody face. Looking at this image, I felt sad. Simultaneously, I was thinking about how beautiful she looks, and knowing many misogynists and fascists would think the same for different reasons (see: Male Fantasies by Klaus Theweleit).

In an article by allure in 2018, subtitled “No more bloody selfies” like a protest or quote taken from a song by The Cranberries, she confesses her regret, and I believe her. In this selfie, I can feel her awkwardness as she poses for the documentation of her facilitated pain. At the time of having the treatment she was pregnant with North West, and as a result, no numbing cream or pain killer was prescribed. At the time of the article, Kim had given birth to three of her four children, and still decided to declare vampire facials as “the most painful thing ever!”

There is a part of me that wished more of her selfies were like this. In The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo discusses Bakhtin’s grotesque realism concerning carnivalesque body politic, denoting carnival as not only a place of spectacle but also a refusal to surrender the critical and cultural tools of the dominant class. The grotesque body at the carnival’s centre is “the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change...the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.” Bakhtin also finds his concept of the grotesque encapsulated in the Kerch terracotta figurines of senile, pregnant hags. Russo continues by expanding the loaded connotations of the pregnant hags, with “fear and loathing around the biological processes of reproduction and of ageing”. Acknowledging the notion of the Female Grotesque remaining in all directions repressed and undeveloped, perhaps it is in this image Kim is also the representation of motherhood and ageing- a confrontation of the invisible.

Although I could write much more about the omnipresence of Kim Kardashian’s effect on society, I am both a fan and hater which I think is exactly what they intended, for which a congratulations is in order. Nevertheless, I am sticking to the specifics of this image, because it is not the Kardashians that are important here. This image acts as another example of what as Russo describes, the phrase we are all too familiar with, “She [the other woman] is making a spectacle of herself.” However, the present day leads me to believe that this could be a similar case for us all (outside of the female context): we, the puppets in the carnival. Social media has become our cause and answer for anxiety, answering our gaze aversion, only to be fed an onslaught cycle of dead babies and brand deals on our daily feeds. It hosts us whilst concurrently pulling our strings to perform a level of bourgeois individualism.

[to be continued I wrote this on the train]