Vanity meets violence in “The Beauty”

The most poignant moment in the first episode of Ryan Murphy’s new FX show, “The Beauty,” comes after Jeremy (Jaquel Spivey/Jeremy Pope), a young man from New Jersey who has journeyed to a strip mall in Indianapolis to see a plastic surgeon (Jon Jon Briones) who promises to turn him from an incel to a Chad, ventures into a bar with his spiffy new face. His cheekbones are ski slopes and his newly cleft chin juts out, but he is no more comfortable with himself than before. Things look up when he’s invited to drink with a trio of hotties and spends an hour or two making them laugh; but after a trip to the men’s room to boot and rally, he realizes that the women have split and left him with a bloated bar tab.

A bewildered Jeremy struggles to make this make sense: How has his investment in a whole new face not paid dividends? Is he not a newly minted Chad? Did the surgeon lie to him? Locking eyes with the bartender, he lets out an angry bleat: “But I look good!” It’s a wounded cry that echoes beyond the TV screen into the cellars where looksmaxxers — including adolescent and preadolescent boys — have built a fortress of data. It’s a combination of video-game terminology, incel ideology and good old-fashioned phrenology, and they use it to crack the code of physical self-optimization they have been told is critical to gain love, sex and success.

That’s right: at long last, gender equality is here. Men are just as likely to grow up under the thumb of victims of the beauty-industrial complex. They’re subject to the same white, Eurocentric ideals of beauty and youth as women; they’re encouraged and pressured to spend as much time and money maintaining both as women do; and they’re more vulnerable than ever to body dysmorphia. Congratulations, everyone, we finally did it. We’re all under the thumb of the beauty-industrial complex now.

Ryan Murphy’s latest show, “The Beauty,” is a full-tilt, balls-to-the-wall affair that feels like a full-circle moment, given that his 2003 FX debut, “Nip/Tuck,” was also about the extremes to which people go in search of physical perfection. The place, the time and the tools have changed in the 25 years between “Nip/Tuck,” and “The Beauty,” but each pushes the boundaries of small-screen body horror in their respective times with squelching viscera and copious fluids. (Both also feature many long, lingering shots of perfect butts, but that’s standard operating procedure in the Murphyverse.)

That said, “The Beauty” is probably less likely to be described in reviews, as “Nip/Tuck” once was, with words like “vile,” “upsetting,” and “far more repellent than anything on ‘E.R.’” What was shocking to see portrayed so starkly is now well-trod territory. Cosmetic surgery and body horror are now available 24/7 on streaming platforms, and that’s before factoring in the myriad advertisements for pills and creams and teeth-brightening systems. (USA Today’s review of “The Beauty” ended with what I thought was a still from the show but was, in fact, an ad for the weight-loss drug Zepbound. (“Tirzepatide wins for weight loss — only $119/month!”)

But also, cosmetic surgery — gender-affirming care, if you will — is more common, more accessible and far less stigmatized than it was in 2003. With the rise of noninvasive procedures like Botox, CoolSculpting, and an array of fillers, the injectable serum of “The Beauty”’s title, which reshapes bodies and faces as the most flawless versions of themselves, seems less like the premise of a sci-fi drama than a foregone conclusion. (Dial back the exorcism vibes of the miracle serum’s transformation process and Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson will be investing immediately.)

“The Beauty” is about the physical perfection we’re primed to desire, but just as 2024’s equally gooey “The Substance” reflected the cold-eyed calculations of women’s market value, “The Beauty” surveys the changing optics of male power. Kutcher’s Byron Forst is as determined to preserve his young, virile image as he is to make bank on The Beauty’s IPO; he also, notably, wants to stay a few steps ahead of the common folk. The version of the serum, stolen by a lab tech, that’s being sold on the black market (and, oh yeah, also sexually transmitted) was one he was saving for himself. Of the three male characters in pursuit of the serum — the FBI agent (Evan Peters) racing against the clock to locate its source, the fixer (Anthony Ramos) keeping the drug’s secrets by any means necessary, and Forst — the latter’s success is the only one directly tied to his appearance, making him as monomaniacal and insecure as any aspiring Chad.

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For the young men of Gen Z and Alpha, the real science fiction might be the concept that conventional attractiveness is not everyone’s first priority. Growing up largely on the internet, they’ve been shaped by heavily gender-siloed spaces, communicating in memes and sh*tposts. Looksmaxxing turns normative youthful insecurity and awkwardness into a team sport. In theory, this could be as positive and empathy building as an actual team sport. In practice, it is deeply anti-social: A teen might drop into a Reddit forum for skincare tips and leave convinced that unless he can do something about his midface ratio and negative canthal tilt, he’ll never be more than a mid-tier normie.

Women remain the majority of cosmetic surgery patients, but the number of men choosing procedures like eyelifts and ab tucks has risen steadily since the early 2000s; the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported that in 2024, 1.6 million cosmetic surgeries were performed on men, a 4% rise over 2022 numbers. What concerns professionals about the rise of looksmaxxing is that its monomaniacal focus on the importance of looking a particular way, these spaces drive them toward extreme interventions: leg-lengthening surgery, chin extension, jaw implants and more. (Patrick Bateman — yes, that one — is the unofficial patron saint of looksmaxxers, in case you were wondering whether media literacy is part of the problem.) The brutal logic is that if you aren’t genetically blessed, you either get extensive surgery or, as they frequently advise each other, you kill yourself.

Jeremy’s arc in “The Beauty” suggests a third option that seems all too plausible: After striking out at the bar, Jeremy returns to the surgery clinic, this time with a gun, and kills the staff as he makes his way to the doctor who promised him Chadness and didn’t deliver. As a Black man, Jeremy isn’t in the demographic most likely to commit a mass shooting. But the scene immediately brought to mind Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 murdered six people and wounded 13 more before turning his gun on himself. Rodger’s killing spree was the result of his own “but I look good!” disbelief that his objectively handsome face alone didn’t entitle him to attention from women, and of his fury at being denied what he believed he was owed.

There is absolutely nothing subtle about “The Beauty,” and though that’s true of many a Murphy joint, its on-the-nose-ness seems particularly well timed. We are currently seeing an attempted ethnic cleansing in real time by a presidential administration whose platform begins and ends with the idea that America should be a white ethnostate imposing its will on other nations whenever and wherever it wants. We’re currently watching as masked goons disappear individuals and families who might have been born here but do not, according to this administration, belong here. Every day, we’re seeing the effects of a powerful man’s belief in political looksmaxxing — the merciless squeezing and cutting and shaping a nation until it conforms to a narrow, exclusive set of aesthetic preferences. Every day, we hear him insist, like Jeremy, like Elliot Rodger, that being conventionally good-looking and being attractive to others are the same thing — and if they aren’t, he can weaponize his fury and punish those who don’t flatter and kowtow to him.

It’s entirely possible that the young men who have made self-optimization their identity are too young to understand that its tenets are Eurocentric, racist, eugenicist and pseudoscientific. The equally plausible and far more disturbing flip side is that they do know, and that it is part of the allure. But even here, the virus is always mutating. On his podcast, White supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes recently waxed poetic, alongside a looksmaxxing influencer whose nom de maxx is Clavicular, over the good looks of California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. They hate his policies. They hate what he stands for. But he is unequivocally a Chad. They believe that in 2028, Newsom will face off against JD Vance for the presidency and win because, as Clavicular told another podcaster, “JD Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom mogs.” (He also approvingly noted that Newsom “kind of looks like Patrick Bateman.”)

It would be great if the sheer force of skin-deep worship punted Vance off the national stage forever, of course. But validating the looksmaxxer’s belief that genetics is destiny and that bone structure is the only metric necessary to qualify as high-value keeps us all laid out with the same virus that’s plagued humanity for centuries, and the ugly new mutations developing every day.