14 DAY TRIAL // The other day, Renee Zellweger made a rare public appearance, at the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards, and since then, people haven’t been able to stop talking about her. As you can see in the photo above, she looks different.
Not just “slightly different” as in there’s something about her face you can’t exactly put your finger on, and not different in the sense she’s changed up her hair or her makeup style: Renee looks like an entirely different woman.
The explanation is simple: she no longer has the same shape of the eyes as before, but she also appears more frozen in the face, which is considerably less mobile than ever before. The conclusion can be only one – and the Internet has already reached it by the time you’re reading this: she’s got lots of work done.
The facts, as we know them
On previous red carpet appearances, Renee looked as if she had physical trouble arranging her face into the semblance of a smile, which is the tell-tale sign of too much Botox. However, she’s also been plagued by rumors of actual plastic surgery, including a chin implant, an eyelift, rearrangement of the jawline and check implants, and of talk that she got fillers.
Deny it as she will, there is a stark difference between the way she looked a couple of years ago and the way she does now, and it can’t really be explained by losing weight or growing old. The second photo in the gallery shows a dramatic difference on two appearances within months apart.
In a statement released right after the Internet went haywire with talk of her drastically different appearance, Renee said she hadn’t had any work done, she was just living a healthier and happier life. I’ve been happy and healthy in my life too, but it’s never altered the shape of my eyes – and I’m sure you have not experienced this “side-effect” either.
The rumors
So, since she looks this different, what has happened? According to plastic surgeons who don’t know and haven’t treated Renee, she’s had a lot of work done, all it meant to maintain her youthful, wrinkle-free appearance.
Sadly, she didn’t stop soon enough and seems to have crossed into that unfortunate territory of “so much work is obvious and freaky.” This is actually what people are saying online right now, fans and celebrity bloggers and glossy magazines.
There’s also talk about how Renee started getting stuff done a while back, when the offers for big projects stopped coming in and she was faced with the realization that, as a woman in Hollywood, her “shelf life” was actually pretty short. This is a problem that many female actors, and entertainers in general, face so it’s not to Renee’s discredit that she gave in to the pressure.
If she did it, because she’s obviously not coping with having had anything done.
Why do we care?
So this brings us to the question above. Yes, Renee looks different and yes, Renee has obviously had some work done. Yes, Renee is being disingenuous when she’s trying to shrug the controversy off as malicious rumors out to get dirt where none is to be had. Yes, she’s insulting the intelligence of her fans when she’s telling them to believe her and not their eyes.
But… why do we care so much? Her name was trending on Twitter until not long, and I’ve read some of the weirdest comments on the topic, ranging from funny to nasty, to gratuitously mean and just shameful, to outraged. People are actually outraged that Renee did something, whatever it was, to her face and that she now looks different.
I think we build our celebrity idols up so we can bring them down at the slightest misstep. The higher the climb, the steeper the fall, which we make sure we provoke – the more spectacular the scandal. Our celebrity culture is a well-oiled machine that uses scandal and controversy for fuel, and it needs plenty of both to function.
By bringing our idols crashing down, we both humanize them and get to feel special about ourselves, the selves who have to work from 9 to 5, who don’t get to wear designer gowns on red carpets, who don’t get to travel the world and enjoy life at its best.
At first, this was something that the media encouraged, but we have been trained to do this on our own. Those angry tweets in response to Renee’s new face are proof of that. In all this outrage, we forget that, if she had something done, she did it because we had already set up too high expectations to her, by refusing her the right to grow old gracefully in an industry where only the young and the skinny succeed most of the time.
I also think that our celebrity culture is the best way to escape from our everyday reality, and hence this hateful reaction to Renee. By caring about her appearance, we won’t have to worry about our own problems, if only for a while.
What right do we have to shame or criticize her in any way?
We probably shouldn’t care at all, or at the very least, not to the point where we go raging on Twitter, posting profanity-laden messages and making such vile comments that we’d probably go into self-imposed isolation for a month if they were ever directed at us. To be clear, when I say “we,” I mean those people who did this.
At the end of the day, Renee’s body is her body, and she can do whatever she damn pleases with it, even if that means walking into an event and not having people recognize her. If she chose to give in to pressure, it was her choice to do so. If she had surgery because she thought she’d love herself more, it was her choice.
We can’t stop from caring and / or paying attention to these things, I know this, but we should at least respect our idols and not trash them when they do something we don’t like or approve of. We may “own” them through their work and the public behavior that’s expected of them, but we don’t own their bodies.
And we should never say something about someone(’s appearance) without first thinking how we’d feel if those words came back at us one day.
