YOU WOULD think that the residents of Miami faced enough everyday dangers to life — hurricanes, alligators, mosquitos the size of doughnuts, doughnuts the size of truck tyres, voters who don’t know how to complete a ballot paper, timeshare salesmen who would throw in their wife if that’s what it took to clinch a deal, timeshare salesmen who would throw their wife into the Everglades if that’s what it took to clinch a deal — without going out of their way to find new ways to disfigure themselves or even, in some tragic cases, to kill themselves.
The irony is that the disfigurements and the deaths are by-products of Florida’s obsession with beauty. Some people in Florida have had so much cosmetic surgery on their eyes, neck, nose, breasts, tummy, thighs, that their multiple scalpel scars must make their skin look as scored as a butcher’s chopping board. Some Floridians have undergone so many lifts and tucks that their surgeon has to tell them that the only possible way left for them to improve their appearance further is to wear a paper bag over their head when they walk out in public.
Holidaymakers in the state who ask a local how they might best get a feel for Miami life are told either to undergo radical cosmetic surgery that will leave them with a face that looks as lifelike as that of a Brancusi bust, or else to ransack the boot of a vacation rental car.
As if facelifts carried out by qualified doctors in antiseptic operating theatres didn’t carry sufficient risks, people in Florida have raised the stakes by frequenting backstreet plastic surgeons who have the sort of medical diplomas you design for yourself in your local photocopyshop in a lunch hour. Many conduct their operations on kitchen tables, in the back of your car, or in offices, with implements you wouldn’t want a grill-chef to flip your burger with.
One self-appointed cosmetic surgeon in Death by Silicone (Channel 4) was shown stuffing a female breast implant into an ageing, inadequately-sedated bodybuilder with what looked like a cake slice. The bodybuilder left looking not like a man with enhanced pecs, as he’d been promised, but like a transexual halfway through his sexual odyssey.
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Police trying to track down this “surgeon” — Reinaldo Silvestre, also known as the Butcher of South Beach — rated it the worst thing they had ever seen done to a still-living body. The reason the police were able to witness this butchery was that Silvestre had proudly filmed his handiwork. Why? As promotional videos? Unlikely. The police would ask him; only he’s done a runner.
Silvestre’s victims were, like him, part of Miami’s huge Hispanic community. Many couldn’t speak English, were poorly educated, were wary of running to the police. A Cuban woman who had breast implants inserted by Silvestre found not only that she could mould them at will, as if she had two irregular lumps of children’s craft putty under her nipples, but also that the implants were not tethered to her own tissue, allowing them to meander about her torso: this might have been an entertaining party trick, but wasn’t going to help her pursue her ambition of securing more modelling work.
“Miami is probably one of the vainest places on earth,” says the malpractice lawyer Spencer Aronfeld. “People want to look their best.” But does that make it their fault if they suffer horrifically, or even die, as a result of a backstreet butcher? Or is the backstreet butcher still responsible for their disfigurement, or death, even if they were asking for it? That turned out to be the question facing the jury who had to decide — apparently, in the first such case in the world — if a middle-aged Miami woman who was found dead with litres of industrial-grade silicone in her body had been murdered, or was a victim of her own vanity.
If you could stomach the mortuary slab photographs of this woman — a churchgoing mother-of-two — you would have seen that her hips and backside had been distended by silicone injections, presumably in search of a Jennifer Lopez-style behind. It was as if two watermelons had been implanted in her buttocks. The silicone was decanted into the woman at an underground “pumping party”. These are like Tupperware parties, only they sell you plastic that you put inside yourself, rather than plastic that you put things inside. Cosmetic surgery is now a recreational pasttime in Miami, the first place in the world that has a police unit devoted to tracking down rogue plastic surgeons. The jury? They decided that guilt lay with the culprit, not the victim.
The two cosmetic surgeons around whose Miami practice Nip/Tuck (Channel 4) revolves are fully qualified, though you might need an ethics professor to locate the frontier between the goings-on in this fiction and the real-life events of Death by Silicone. The episode began with one of the surgeons trying to repair the damage inflicted by his son’s DIY circumcision, which the boy had carried out to make his penis look prettier for his cheerleader girlfriend.
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It ended with a depressed young woman the size of Imelda Marcos’s shoe closet coming to terms with being plain in a society whose role models are not MIT professors with big brains but MTAs (models-turned-actresses) with big breasts. She came to terms with it by killing herself. You thought Nip/Tuck was supposed to be satire, and it turns out to be a documentary.