In scenes from Youth Knows No Pain, filmmaker Mitch McCabe covers her grays, and McCabe’s late father shows off his breast pillow.
Over the course of two years, McCabe spent time with a 54-year-old California man who had surgery to look like Jack Nicholson; a 53-year-old Texan whose extensive face and body work have left her depressed; and a host of doctors, some of whom couldn’t resist pointing out McCabe’s supposed shortcomings. “You have a little bit of a forward mandible,” says Houston plastic surgeon Franklin Rose, fingering McCabe’s chin. “Some people might object.” McCabe, whose late father was, not coincidentally, a plastic surgeon, says she didn’t take such comments to heart. “I was just like, You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says.
In the end, McCabe insists, she was careful not to take sides on whether the antiaging industry is a boon or a bane for society. “I never like documentaries that say, ‘This is what the filmmaker wants you to think.’” But watching as a twentysomething subjects her lineless face to needle after needle, yelping in pain and leaving a pool of sweat in the doctor’s chair, it’s hard not to wonder whether there isn’t something to be said for aging gracefully.
