The Art of Botox

How facial muscle paralysis insinuated itself into our emotional and creative lives.

Last spring, Botox rolled out a series of ads directed by the filmmaker Errol Morris. Styled like very short documentary films, the ads featured Botox users — a widower, a single mother, a drag performer — telling touching, sad, ultimately redemptive anecdotes. In 2019, a typical Botox commercial pitched the product as a girlboss tonic that could infuse fantasy women with pluck as they slunk from boardroom to bar stool. Now it was being recast as a kind of truth serum, a tool of deep personal introspection. The mother gazed upon nostalgic photographs. The widower recalled his husband’s eyes and wept. Though the subjects did not mention Botox, the camera regarded their restful foreheads with sympathy and implied that the procedure had a profound therapeutic effect. The tagline was: “Still you.”

Morris is known for revealing institutional delusions — of policing in “The Thin Blue Line,” and of statecraft in “The Fog of War.” Now he was filming a sentimental mirage for a pharmaceutical company. But these spots represent more than just a paycheck for Morris. They are emblematic of the insinuation of Botox into our creative consciousness, as elective muscle paralysis has been refashioned into an extension of the project of the self.

Botulinum toxin is a poison that by some macabre coincidence both causes botulism and cures wrinkles. When injected at low doses into a crinkled forehead, it blocks nerve signals to muscles and smooths the skin atop them. (It also has medical applications, including for treating migraines.) Though there are several competing brands, Botox is the Kleenex of the category. It presents the kind of bargain one might strike with a nefarious sea witch: She will grant you eternal youth, but at the price of being able to move your face.