Have you ever been so obsessed with something that it takes over your every waking thought, sometimes even your dreams?
For some reason, Nicole Kidman has been haunting me recently. Maybe it is the requisite Oscar buzz circulating around her this year for her indie film "Margot at the Wedding" or the release of her new mainstream fantasy flick "The Golden Compass." Or maybe it is the fact that I'm a gay man and she is Nicole Kidman.
There was a time when I was quick, like many other film fans, to grant Kidman legendary status on the basis of "Moulin Rouge!" (2001) and "The Hours" (2002), the two performances that garnered her back-to-back Oscar nods and a win.
But perhaps we were all too eager to find in Kidman the equivalent of mythic old-Hollywood actress icons like Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. She has rarely delivered on her 2001 promise to dazzle us, and when she has, the memory of it is erased by other horrible roles.
Kidman has always seemed a decidedly insecure actress. Obviously, this is nothing new for Hollywood, where deep insecurities often masquerade as icy bitchiness or coquettish shyness offscreen: Garbo and Marilyn Monroe come to mind. I can abide by her almost obnoxiously "coy" off-screen persona, but I cannot forgive the utter train-wreck above her neck.
She has truly ruined her face. And I'm not simply speaking of her legendary affection for needles filled with Botox, but more specifically, that mop of white-blonde, dry, dead hair and those impossibly plumped, almost grotesquely overdone lips. Look at pictures of her from 2001: She's impossibly cute. That smile made her.
Now, it looks as if her lips will burst at any moment. In a world where Keira Knightley and Angelina Jolie are getting magazine attention and movie roles that Kidman once got, I understand the urge to self-improve.
But when your lips start to look like Donald Trump's and your profile laughably like a trout, you are beginning to venture into Meg Ryan territory from which there is no escape. If the Redgrave clan can get away with thin lips, why can't she?
And that hair! Why Kidman and other Hollywood redheads like Lindsay Lohan have abandoned the one thing that made them stand out among a sea of bleached-blonde, fake-tanned actresses is beyond me, especially when it does not suit them at all.
Thankfully, Kidman has stayed true to her pale-skinned roots, but her hair is as powdery white as her skin. The vibrant red of her early days, as well as the curls that made her a desirable teenage model in Australia, have been replaced by what looks demonstrably close to a pallet of straw.
I say this all out of love. She hasn't been to the Oscars since 2002, and I want to see her return; I want to see her back in a role that combines artistry with intellectual nuance with mass market appeal.
Her movie choices - and cosmetic enhancements - over the past few years seem like a misguided attempt at a banal mainstream career, when obviously her destiny is prestige projects, literary adaptations and period pieces.
Her acting has become mechanic, wooden and icy, matching the unrecognizable ghost she has become.
Someday, when she gets the courage to abandon the peroxide, the Botox and the collagen, she will hopefully become the legend her genes and her talent (and I) want her to be.
Billy DeGregorio is a senior majoring in English and Spanish with a minor in communications and media studies. Contact him at william.degregorio@tufts.edu.
