When Sony introduced the original version of the Walkman in 1979, it was a compact brick of cool, a piece of the future you could hold in your hand, a million times sexier than its closest competitor in the domain of portable high-tech wizardry, the calculator.
Compared to today’s sensuously contoured, candy-hued digital accessories, however, the original Walkman looks clunky, generic, under-designed, as hopelessly utilitarian as a power-surge protector. The same phenomenon holds true for cell phones, laptops, vacuum cleaners, heavy-metal drummers, blue jeans, newscasters, Christmas-tree lights, porn stars—everything today is infinitely more beautiful and streamlined than it was just 20 years ago.
Indeed, even the past is more beautiful than it once was—the latest Hollywood trend is to perform plastic surgery on history, or at least give it a really rejuvenating facial. Take Roland Emmerich’s current box-office hit, the prehistoric (and pre-soap) soap opera 10,000 BC. Just about every member of the Yagahl, a primitive tribe of nomadic hunters on the verge of extinction, boasts the carefully sculpted abs of a Men’s Health centerfold model. Under a light patina of artfully applied grime, their flawless café au lait complexions look scrupulously pore-refined and moisturized. Their ample dreadlocks lend a hairy cave-bro vibe, and yet their arms, back, chest and legs are as smooth as a mint-condition Barbie doll’s crotch. They are incredibly fast walkers, in a desert one minute, on a snow-capped mountain the next, but not because the plot demands it. Instead, Emmerich simply wants new exotic backdrops to complement the exotic beauty of his human props. It’s cinema—and history—as oversized Taschen wall calendar.
In last year’s loincloth blockbuster 300, the warriors of Sparta possessed physiques that suggested a diet of extra-lean beef, raw carrots and steamed steroids. They strutted their stuff in skintight hot pants, bronze go-go boots and luxurious vermilion capes. Between the extravagant fashions, the engorged torsos and the chiaroscuro lighting that seemed hijacked from a 1990s ad for Obsession perfume, the movie presented a genuine historical event—the Battle of Thermopylae—as a UFC cage match choreographed by Jean Paul Gaultier.
A generation ago, when caveman pics such as 1981’s Quest for Fire and 1986’s Clan of the Cave Bear portrayed prehistoric man in all his slouchy, hirsute, prelingual beastliness, we could at least take solace in our relative status on the beauty chain: We may not have measured up to the finest contemporary examples of homo sapien magnificence like, say, Phoebe Cates or Rob Lowe, but if you threw us back in time with those grungy Cro-Magnon knuckle-draggers, we were all runway material.
Now, thanks to movies like 10,000 BC and 300, even the past no longer offers refuge from beauty inflation! And so we do what we can to keep up with fastidiously tweezed hunter-gatherers and bellicose Spartan soldiers who could decimate the fashion-industry hopefuls on Project Runway just as surely as they decimated those hordes of Persian invaders. More and more men are spending upward of $10,000 to have fake pecs installed in their torsos. In Manhattan, a pair of doctors have pioneered the business of impulse plastic surgery: In less time than it takes to have a pizza delivered, you can get a Botox injection at a clinic in a retail storefront just a block away from Bloomingdale’s, no appointment necessary.
Last year, Americans opted for approximately 11.7 million cosmetic surgical and nonsurgical procedures. Over the last decade, the annual total of such procedures has risen 457 percent. Even the world’s most self-satisfied human being, American Idol judge Simon Cowell, resorts to regular applications of Botox to maintain his physical splendor. “To me, [it’s] no more unusual than toothpaste,” he recently told the U.K. edition of Glamour.
Ultimately, though, does it really matter what kind of skin-tightening regimens we maintain, or how many antioxidant nutricosmetics we consume, or how fashionably we dress? At this point, the beauty of the objects that we furnish our lives with has become so great and so ubiquitous that, except for the most genetically gifted and tasteful among us, we’re all human Walkmen headed toward aesthetic obsolescence, not sexy enough for our high-tech gizmos, not sexy enough for our limited-edition designer sneakers, not even sexy enough for our Method dishwashing soap. In our hands, an impossibly sleek Prada cell phone looks as out of place as a Colgate smile on a Hollywood caveman. We’re just not that highly evolved.