Nicole Kidman's Face

On my way to getting older, I admit to occasionally enlisting cosmetic dermatologists and dubious celebrity-endorsed face creams.  Mine is a soft-landing approach, and I am lucky to be living in relative obscurity alongside family and friends who love me however I shrivel. I toggle between struggle and making peace with the process, and everything is going along fine until Nicole Kidman comes out with a new streaming series.

In “Expats” Kidman plays a young (!?) mother trapped behind a strange frozen balloon doll mask. For me, it was unwatchable.

Of course my opinion about Ms. Kidman’s face is irrelevant. It belongs to her, and she can mess with it all she wants. What I am trying to figure out and write about here is why my reaction to her appearance is so outsized, so vitriolic.

My thought is that Nicole Kidman fronts the sell-out, caving to the conviction that a woman’s value and relevance ties to youth. It’s a reductionist lie that maddens me, and one I wholly reject, and one that some insecure corner of me worries is true.