Ariana Grande’s face, lie detector tests, and believing what we see
In my early twenties I thought I knew everything. I knew what was right and what was wrong; I knew which professors I believed and which ones were full of shit, I knew how “good friends” acted and what “bad people” were. I knew my home, and I knew what wasn’t my business—how an espresso machine works, microeconomics. It felt good to be so sure of everything, and it made it easy to write (a professor once told me that to write an essay, you tell the truth and then tell the truth again). I had a lot to say and I knew how to say it and I wanted to say it loudly.
But lately, I’ve struggled with the truth. They say that true wisdom is knowing what you don’t know; but that sounds a lot more like ignorance to me, and I feel more ignorant than ever. I’m not in school, an environment I’ve inhabited for about twenty of my twenty-eight years on this Earth. I live in Brooklyn, I’ve worked as a barista, I took a micro econ class for a math credit. Certainty fades with experience, and I’ve been wrong enough to know now that I’m probably wrong about everything.
So when Ariana Grande, face shaved and plumped and tuned, strapped herself into the Vanity Fair lie detector and claimed innocently that she’d never had any plastic surgery done, I was drawn in and spit out, Ariana’s cheerful exclamation when given the opportunity to “finally prove” that she had never had serious work done—she confesses to fillers and botox—wedged itself into the well of uncertainty that’s been building in me since I hit about 25. In the sole writing class I took in college, the professor taught us about “ideal audiences”—the imagined way that someone reading your text will follow along with your story, will buy your misdirections and allusions, ultimately to feel relieved and surprised when your story reaches its climax. I watched the interview and felt myself falling into someone else’s agenda: I stopped scrolling; I watched the clip; I felt skeptical. I went to the comments to see if other people felt the same way, to seek some other, even more “real” truth because the one I was given didn’t feel quite right; I read comments where people claimed that lie detector tests are notoriously inaccurate, where people picked apart the format of the question, the editing. I felt half-satisfied that I had reached some kind of internal consensus that Ariana had, indeed, gotten significant work done, despite what the test said. I moved on, and didn’t think too hard about how the consensus I had reached was exactly what I had already believed going into the video.
I’ve always had a vague fascination with the Vanity Fair lie detector interview, as much as anyone can with any celebrity interview, in that the lie detector seems to point to the very nature of celebrity as performed and, theoretically, undermines it. All late nite TV and YouTube and Instagram interviews are about getting insights into the world of the rich and famous; the idea of these formats is that we consume the celebrity’s performance, their movie or film or album, and then in an interview get to see their true selves discuss that performance. But there’s also become a kind of self-awareness that the “true self” that a celebrity shows in an interview is also performance, mediated through publicist-fed talking points and careful editing. The lie detector test, then, points to this performance and claims to use “scientifically backed” techniques to uncover the even-more-real reality that a regular interview can’t reach.
So when an actress, who’s paid to pretend to be somebody else, and in turn pays a lot of money to craft a physical image that meets contemporary beauty standards, straps into a lie detector and claims she hasn’t had work done, one has to wonder. I spent some time dissecting the comments I read about lie detector accuracy, I thought through how the video’s editing could have allowed for falsified readings, how Ariana acted surprised to receive the question despite in all probability having read and rehearsed the interview in advance of filming. But ultimately, even in all my doubt and debunking, I still felt like I was participating in something rather than resisting it.
Are we supposed to think that the lie detector detects the truth? Or are we supposed to watch because it promises something that could be truth, just like anything else we see online could be true—the infographics, the influencer bodies, the political ads? I grew up being told not to trust the things I read online, but then I was told that some online sources were okay, and then I was told that some of those sources had “bias,” and then I read Foucault and learned that power operates through the construction of knowledge, and then I didn’t believe in anything anymore but also believed in whatever felt the most right. All I did in grad school was read books that very smart, very qualified people spent a very long time working on and dissected all the ways that their argument failed. I’m haunted by the memory of a New York Times Magazine piece I read in high school about a psych professor who falsified the results of all of his studies, undetected until his mentees exposed him. Maybe the mentees were lying, too. Maybe I’m misremembering the article, and none of them were real at all.
We’re in the “information age” but also kind of the misinformation age. Everyone’s obsessed with misinformation—Trump caught our attention by calling it “fake news,” and liberal media loves to be outraged by his flagrant and deliberate lies, but we all kind of know he’s not the only one. I remember being in the gym and hearing a man say, “I’m voting for Trump ‘cause I’d rather have a crook in the White House than a liar,” and I wondered what the difference was, but knew that Kamala also lies about things. It’s kind of a politician’s job to lie, just like it’s Ariana’s job to say she’s never had work done.
I’m wondering what it does to me to watch videos of plastic women say to a lie detector technician that they’ve never had work done. I don’t really expect truth from the Internet, but I rarely get information from anywhere else. I don’t know Ariana Grande personally—she could be fake, for all I know—and nobody knows what Ariana Grande’s face would look like if she hadn’t become famous, which is really the question that the interview is asking: would you look like this if you hadn’t done anything to your face at all? She says yes, but she knows as much as we do that the answer is: I don’t know, nobody knows. This is the face I have, and I have done what I’ve done.
Baudrillard talks about the hyper-real. What he’s saying is that when something that is fake is presented to us over and over again, even more often than the real thing, we start to confuse the two. When I see a woman with a lot of plastic surgery in the physical world, my brain struggles to place her—I feel recognition, because I see faces like that all the time, but almost entirely on a phone screen. And when I see those same faces on a phone screen, part of me knows that those faces don’t actually look that beautiful—that Kylie Jenner has laugh lines, and Kendall has acne, and fillers make your lips look awkward. Everything is suspended in a half-real space where I believe nothing that I see but I see it all the time.
I’m worried about what happens when the stakes are higher. A friend posted on Instagram the other day about a PBS documentary they watched about the Holocaust. They said that what struck them is how many experts described the impossibility of believing the scope of the Holocaust’s inhumanity—the scale of cruelty and destruction was hard for those outside of it, reading the news or hearing reports, to truly digest. Susan Sontag writes that war imagery is a useful propagandistic tool because it flattens argument: see this destruction? We must act. But Sontag was writing when war imagery was mediated through news channels and papers, when what was seen was decided by panels and politicians. Now, we see images of destruction and death in the same place that we see “found footage” fistfights made by influencers and “expert reviews” of diet supplements. I see videos every day of mutilated bodies, of bombs falling, of atrocities that I can’t understand or name. And I feel the pull to engage with what I’m seeing, to doubt if it’s real, to debate and consume and then continue to scroll.
What is it doing to us to see so many things that are fake that insist on their reality? What does it do when we see things that are urgent, that need to be believed, when belief can’t be tied to what we see? The mass democratization of information has made the genocide in Gaza more visible than perhaps any previous global crisis of this scale, and yet the very on-the-ground reporting that has garnered public attention halfway across the world is readily dismissed by anyone that doesn’t want to believe what they’re seeing. When the truth is destabilized, it’s easiest to believe what you already did going into what you’re consuming than it is to digest new information, no matter how credible the source, no matter what you’re seeing with your own eyes.
Every so often I remember a conversation I had with a guy in my grad program who focused on conspiracy theorists. I asked what the center of his work was and he said that conspiracy theories flourish in isolation—that the people who dedicate their lives to “uncovering the real truth” are usually people who are lonely, discontent, and want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. So they engage with the world like they’re watching a movie and trying to guess the ending, like everything they see is crafted for their own pleasure and excitement. In another segment of the lie detector interview, Ariana is asked if she believes the moon landing was fake and the test picks up “some deception” when she exclaims “of course not!” Hilarity ensues as she tries to prove that she’s not a conspiracy theorist: she responds to a follow-up question about the flat Earth theory with a concerned, “what kind of person do you think I am?” But later on in the interview, despite claiming that she’s not a conspiracy theorist, she asks why there aren’t more videos of other moon landings, why, if we’ve truly been to the moon, there’s just that one. She, too, plays the game, watches footage like it’s a movie, lives life like it’s crafted for her to pick apart—maybe because her life is presented to others as entertainment, full of smoke and mirrors. But we can’t afford to feel that way all the time, about everything. The people whose lives are being wrenched apart in Gaza, the amount of imagery, the scale of it—it’s too much to believe, but far too much to dismiss.
Around the same time that Ariana was doing the lie detector test, Charli XCX released her Brat remix album. Ariana, crooning on “Sympathy is a Knife,” sang: “it’s a knife when you’re so pretty / they think it must be fake,” doubling down on the assertion that she does, in fact, look “like that”—that the disbelief we carry about her beauty is just because of how very beautiful she is, that she’s more beautiful than we can wrap our heads around. Some things are about facts, urgently: the bombs, the lives they take, the money that funds them. But when we consume the urgent material secondhand, mediated through machines motivated by data-harvesting and engagement-baiting, how are we to believe what we’re seeing? It’s too easy to consume and dismiss, just like we do with Ariana. I don’t know what the answer is, which I guess is part of the point. I don’t know what’s real, but I do know what matters, and if half-right is as close as I’ll ever get then I guess I’d rather be decent and half-right than cold, cynical, or naïve. But I’d like to know what’s true, and I’d like to feel it deeply, and I’d like for it to be so obvious that we can’t ignore it.
References:
Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Beaudrillard
Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag
“The US and the Holocaust” - Ken Burns via PBS
