The .Plan

Keira Knightley, who played Guinevere in King Arthur, said her normal breasts were blown out of all proportion and looked droopy on the advert to promote the film.

‘Those things certainly weren’t mine,’ she told a US magazine yesterday. ‘I remember we had an interesting discussion when they said, “We want to make them slightly larger and you’ll get approval” and I was like, “OK, fine. ‘I honestly don’t give a s***.”

…She then went on to say the incident was certainly not the first time she has had her chest digitally enhanced.

She explained: ‘I did one magazine and found out you’re not actually allowed to be on a cover in the US without at least a C cup because it turns people off. ‘Apparently they have done market research and found that women want to see no less than a C cup on other women. Isn’t that crazy? ‘So they made my t*** bigger for that as well.’
–Katie Hampson, “My Flat Chest is a Turn Off, Says Keira”, Daily Mail (UK), July 19, 2006

Harvey Blume interviews my psychiatrist-hero, Arthur Kleinman:

KLEINMAN: There are key psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression, but I’m very concerned about people who have ordinary unhappiness, or have experienced a catastrophe, or just bad luck, and are renamed depressed or having an anxiety disorder. That’s happening in a big way right now. I’m concerned about taking ordinary life, stripping it of its moral content, and making it over into a disease.

IDEAS: Are you still a practicing psychiatrist?

KLEINMAN: I stopped practicing about six years ago. But I had 25 years of practice and saw thousands of cases. I saw many people in psychotherapy and also used psychopharmacology. It’s precisely because I believe in the seriousness of mental illness that I’ve been concerned about medicalization, remaking the normal into the abnormal.

IDEAS: Why is this happening?

KLEINMAN: There’s a hyping not just of psychiatry, but all of medicine. This has come out of the medical-industrial complex, and the need to get medicine the resources and support it needs, for research, among other things. I’m all for medical research-but not the hyping. The other day I received a solicitation from a medical foundation, and was surprised by the first sentence, which said: ‘‘Imagine a world free of disease.’’ That’s inhuman! There can’t be a world free of disease. Disease is part of what life is about.

Sometimes an actress will ask for a body double because she’s not comfortable flashing her parts on camera. Mandy Moore requested a professional booty during the filming of Chasing Liberty, as did Sarah Michelle Gellar when she starred in Scooby Doo. But most of the time, it’s the director or the producers who call in the ringers: “The director made that decision not to use my butt,” says Owen Wilson. “I don’t know how to interpret that.”
–Daniel Engber, “I Want a Butt Double”, Slate, July 24, 2006