Take My Nose, Please! A Defense of Plastic Surgery

Eighty-nine-year-old first-time filmmaker and journalism legend Joan Kron discusses her new film, Take My Nose...Please!

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What do you think of when you think of plastic surgery? Fish-lipped women on the Real Housewives shows? Or maybe aging Hollywood actors who look like burn victims. Michael Jackson's disappearing nose? Or Lindsay Lohan's rubberized lips? When internet slideshows of plastic surgery fails are only a click away, it's easy to think about facelifts, eye jobs, liposuction, Botox injections, and all the rest as a mark of narcissistic people who refuse to grow old as nature intended.

But that's not the only—and certainly not the best—way to think about plastic surgery, as the new documentary, Take My Nose...Please!, which will be premiering in Los Angeles and New York City this weekend, makes abundantly clear.

Directed by the nearly 90-year-old journalism legend Joan Kron, Take My Nose...Please! follows two actresses as they contemplate getting work done. Along the way, viewers learn the history of modern plastic surgery and are exposed to a powerful argument that plastic surgery is just one more way of improving ourselves, like diet, exercise, and education.

Kron's wide-ranging, funny, and suspenseful movie drives home the libertarian point that nips and tucks are about self-actualization and self-realization, not immature fears of growing old or insatiable narcissism.

If there's one thing Joan Kron knows, it's self-reinvention. Born in 1928 and raised in New York City, Kron studied costume design at Yale's graduate school (she skipped undergrad) before getting married to a Philadelphia doctor. She joined the city's Arts Council in the 1960s and soon enough brought Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground to perform at a YWHA.

She only began her journalism career at 41, writing for Philadelphia magazine. After the collapse of her marriage, she moved to New York, where she became the Wall Street Journal's first fashion writer and wrote for New York magazine in its early years. She was in her 60s when she started writing a beauty column for Allure, a slick magazine aimed at 20-something women. And in 2000, she wrote Lift: Wanting, Fearing and Having a Facelift, an account of her own experience with plastic surgery.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Kron in her art-rich Upper East Side apartment, where Warhols compete with Lichtensteins for the visitor's attention. To spend time with Kron is to be granted an audience with a woman who has blazed a unique trail through the last century of American life.

Intro video produced by Todd Krainin and written by Nick Gillespie. Interview produced by Mark McDaniel. Cameras by Kevin Alexander and Jim Epstein.