Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
The story of Rene's face
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By Jason Lim
At first, I thought it was a prank. When social media started erupting with Rene Zellweger’s before and after photos a few weeks ago, I thought it was some clever prank gone viral. Until it wasn’t.
How could this be Rene Zellweger that I watched grow up on the movie screens from ``Dazed and Fazed” and ``Jerry McGuire” to star turns as the awkward and lovable Bridget Jones? This was a totally different person. She didn’t look anything like the Rene Zellweger that I knew. This new person is attractive enough, but she’s not Zellweger. It was like a reverse possession in that some malevolent imposter took over Rene’s face instead of her soul.
Apparently, it wasn’t just me who had this reaction. It was a lot of other people as well, judging from the number of press articles and social media traffic. As the initial incredulity gave way to hesitant acceptance, I wondered why an actress’s personal choice to have cosmetic surgery would leave me with such a sense of displacement, disorientation, or, dare I say, even betrayal? Why in the world would I have such visceral emotional reaction to an actress not looking the way she used to? I don’t even know her.
Ah, but then, there is the rub. I do know her, through the stories as told in her movies. At least my brain thinks it does.
According to the latest research by Paul J. Zak, President of Ofactor, Inc., people produce oxytocin when they watched video narratives that presented compelling, human-interest stories. Oxytocin is a powerful hormone that is nicknamed the ``bonding” hormone because it’s produced in large quantities during childbirth to stimulate labor, milk production and maternal bonding. It also plays an important role in social interactions because it tends to increase cooperation and trust by instilling a sense of empathy with others.
What Zak found was that ``character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis. Further, the amount of oxytocin released by the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others; for example, donating money to a charity associated with the narrative.”
This means that watching a human-interest movie that is compelling and character-driven makes our brain release oxytocin that compels us to empathize more with the movie characters by biologically “bonding” with them. In other words, by tricking us into thinking that we actually have a personal relationship with them ― that we know them.
This tendency is even stronger with Zellweger because, as Alex Kuczynski writes in the New York Times, ``She carved out a career playing accessible characters, wholesome and fallible. In ``Dazed and Confused,” as a heartland teenager, and in “Jerry Maguire,” she was winning and approachable. As Bridget Jones, she allowed us to embrace our wine-and-heartache inner insecurities. She made the fat, boozy chain-smokers and job-losers among us feel OK about ourselves.”
As Zak also writes in Harvard Business Review, ``If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters. This explains the feeling of dominance you have after James Bond saves the world, and your motivation to work out after watching the Spartans fight in 300.”
Or swoop in and carry away Bridget Jones, after you’ve watched Bridget Jones Diary, because your brain thinks that it now knows her.
So imagine how your brain might feel when you put this total stranger in front of it and ask it to believe that she’s Bridget Jones. It’s not a matter of her looking different. It’s a matter of your brain not being able to deal with the sudden break in the cognitive narrative that it had built up around the movie characters that look like Zellweger. Your brain had this virtual relationship that it had been carrying on with characters played by Zellweger suddenly come to a screeching halt because the object of that relationship was no longer recognizable.
Mainstream pundits tended to interpret people’s reactions to Zellweger’s transformation as a condemnation of the society’s unhealthy obsession over physical beauty, especially for women. They would point to how the unrelenting pressure to look youthful would drive any woman, even actresses already known and loved for their looks, to go under the knife.
To all these, I would tend to agree in general terms. However, in this case, I think they are missing the point. People are not reacting because they are shallow purveyors of physical beauty who wanted Zellweger to never age. They are reacting because “it’s jarring when suddenly we don’t recognize the person in whom we once saw ourselves.” It’s very much like being arbitrarily dumped by a significant other with whom you thought you had a good thing going. And being dumped never feels good.
Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.