What makes a story?

That really depends on who you ask. Pixar tells us we need characters with goals and obstacles, who go on a journey and learn new things about the world and themselves on the way. Storytelling organization The Moth agrees: “There’s the ‘you’ we met in the beginning and the ‘you’ at the end”. Even Entrepreneur has an article on how to sell—er, tell stories to help engage people and give meaning to your product. 

I don’t know if I agree with them. 

There seems to be some basic elements that everyone agrees on, but I wonder: do we really need each of these? How much of a story needs to come from the teller?

Digital storytelling and the Zettabyte Era

Storytelling has been around for as long as there have been humans. We drew on cave walls, we gathered by the fire, and we passed stories down orally from generation to generation until we were finally able to write them down. Thanks to technology, we can now move these stories into the digital realm and share them further than we ever have before. And share them we have.

In 2016, our IP traffic worldwide had reached 1.2 zettabytes (ZB). In 2020, there were 64.2 ZB of digital data created, consumed, and stored worldwide. We are officially in “The Zettabyte Era”. There is now so much digital data and internet activity that we now have to measure it in zettabytes. But how much is a zettabyte? 

It’s equivalent to one trillion gigabytes. 

For a bit of perspective, let’s pretend each gigabyte in a zettabyte is a person. We’ve only ever had about 117 billion people exist on Earth, from the original Homo sapiens, to Cleopatra, to Thomas Edison to everyone on the planet at this very moment. That’s only 11.7% of a trillion.

There is so much content being created and consumed that it would take over 5 million years to watch all the videos that cross IP networks in a single month. On YouTube alone, creators upload an average of 500 minutes of video every second.

For as long as you have been reading this, how many minutes more have been added?

Today, I will be focusing on just two of those minutes.

Supervenus

Frédéric Doazan’s 2013 short film “Supervenus” is part of the project 12 Frames Per Second, which is a collection of animated shorts from himself, Paul Rodrigues, and Sylvain Cappelleto. In two minutes, “Supervenus” critiques female beauty standards and plastic surgery by combining the beautiful and the grotesque through animation.

Using Photoshop to manipulate the images, Doazon cycles through the process of plastic surgery and beautifying women. As the video progresses, things start to fall apart—literally.

In an interview with Julia Young, Doazan says that seeing pictures of botched plastic surgery procedures was “somehow inspiring”, and led him to becoming a “virtual cosmetic surgeon” via Photoshop. 

He makes reference to the book Beauté fatale by French essayist Mona Chollet. The full title in English reads, Fatal Beauty: The new faces of female alienation.1

In the introduction, Chollet calls plastic surgery a result of “the fear of being left behind” and makes us perceive the body as “inert, disenchanted matter, malleable at will”2. I think that Doazan really leans into this idea, mutilating the body in his film to the point that it is unrecognizable. I say “the body” and “it” because that is what we are led to think—we never learn the character’s name. We only ever see her as an object for the surgeon to play with.

Does this film grain make me look fat?

The visuals of this animation are quite striking, using imagery reminiscent of old anatomy textbooks. By using over 1300 layers in his editing process, Doazan creates the look of paper cutouts, while still being able to maintain more control over the details. This makes the film memorable and stand out amongst similar Photoshop timelapses, like this one depicting weight loss or this tongue-in-cheek parody. 

Doazan’s title refers to the Roman goddess of beauty, Venus. The initial image he uses depicts a woman with softer lines, which I find reminiscent of Botticelli’s famous painting “The Birth of Venus”. In performing surgery on this similar woman, he is creating the “super” Venus referenced in the title based on current beauty standards.

The film grain and slight jitter added to video add to the overall vintage feel. In a way, this distances us from the proceedings—the things we are seeing are familiar, and yet different from what we are used to. The surrealistic nature of the visuals make it uncanny and a bit disconcerting. It also makes the surgery seem archaic, despite it being a very common operation today. The film becomes more graphic as it continues, and by the end leans into its own absurdity with the body becoming completely fried. However, throughout, Doazan depicts very real side complications, such as the ruptured breast implants. He likes “shaking up the audience” to “make them active and raise questions.” 

The sounds of… silence?

The original film didn’t have any sound, but upon completing the animation Doazan met sound designer Vandy Roc, who became the only other person to work on “Supervenus”.

There is no music, only the hum of a film projector. And of course, the symphony of scrapes and squelches as “Supervenus” undergoes surgery. It’s unnerving, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s effective. It adds to the imagery that we already find so strange and repulsive. These limitations on sound draw our attention to what is there, rather than what isn’t.

The story being told

“Supervenus” is a very obvious take on the plastic surgery industry and societal beauty standards. Using animation and sound, Doazan has conveyed a distaste for the subject. But if there is no main character or lesson being learned, can it be telling us a story?

If we take our Supervenus to be the main character, she doesn’t really change—at least, not of her own accord. As far as we know, all the procedures are being performed on her without her consent. She hasn’t chosen to look this way, but is being forced to. The surgeon’s hands do literally represent a surgeon, but also the pressure that others put on women to look a certain way.

This film relies on our own expectations and norms to convey its message, and I think in this case we as the viewer contribute just as much to the story as Doazan does. Without us and our experiences, this would simply be a clip of a woman having a lot of surgery. And yet, because of what we as the audience know, we can understand that it is more than that. We can see that Doazan critiques the cosmetic surgery industry, and more importantly the people who allow it to flourish—us. It isn’t the woman or even the surgeon who is at fault.

There is no main character in the video. There is no character development. Does that really matter if  it evokes feelings in ourselves?  “Supervenus” involves its audience, putting us in the front seat. We become characters in the story, who need to drive the narrative forward with real-world changes.