I’ve watched about six seconds of Ugly Betty, which apart from one huge problem seems pretty harmless.
The problem, of course, is that IRL America Ferrera is quite an attractive woman whom they have to go to great lengths to “ugly”-up.
http://www.celebopedia.com/america-ferrera/images/america-ferrera.jpg
She might be a bit curvy or “ethnic” for mainstream beauty queen standards, but she’s basically a cute Latina chick that most regular guys would readily consider dating.
I’ve been thrown into mild and periodic conniptions by this stuff at least since Racheal Leigh Cook’s turn in She’s All That (I, uh, saw it on a plane).
Tagline: “A high school jock makes a bet that he can turn an unattractive girl into the school’s prom queen.”
Now, RLC is many things, but “unattractive” is just mind-boggling. “Totally hittable” would be nearer the mark:
Latest Stills - IMDb http://www.douglass.co.uk/webpromote/celebs/ (NSFW! -Rico)
That movie may have been the inspiration for the Not Another Teen Movie moment where they very cleverly sent up this whole phenomenon by having the “ugly” girl transformed not by the usual “we need a montage” that at least implies some time and difficulty need to be invested – instead, they said “Wait!” and took her glasses off, and that was it. In the case of RLC, I think her “ugliness” consisted of wearing glasses, having a ponytail, and slumping around in sweatshirts because she was an “artist” – even then, she was obviously beautiful.
The notion of Anne Hathaway (http://www.douglass.co.uk/webpromote/celebs/ – NSFW!) as anything but hot was also part of what annoyed me so much about The Devil Wears Prada.
I’m sure you can come up with other examples. Yet even after the NATM satire, this stuff is still viewed as great, not preposterous. I think there’s a little bit of pandering to dorky guys that someone like RLC might really be lurking out there, on the shelf, unnoticed, because “nobody saw her true beauty.” IRL, attractive or potentially attractive young women are a very liquid and sought-after commodity. The market doesn’t miss much.
I suppose though these stories are mainly pandering to less than attractive women who hope they can similarly be magically transformed, with not much difficulty. So I guess it isn’t the existence of adult fairy-tales that bothers me so much (well, maybe it is) as when I read some magazine article, or see some interview, saying, in effect, this show is great because it helps show that you don’t have to be beautiful to be happy and successful, so it’s very empowering, sends a good message to girls, etc. I’ve seen a few of those for UB.
Wrong! You do have to be beautiful to be the heroine of those types of story. So it’s not teaching any lesson at all, except what we knew, which is that the stars of Hollywood vehicles are generally quite attractive as opposed to ugly, and being ugly thereby limits your options in life to some extent.
While I’m not one to run around looking for new forms of victimhood to trumpet, I will acknowledge that what’s clunkily been called “lookism” is a reality in our society (all societies). It may be hard-wired. I’ve probably “suffered” from it at least to the extent that my profession has a lot of men in it, so any attractive female candidate is going to stick out like a sore thumb and probably enjoy an unconscious edge over me when being interviewed by a bunch of guys.
There are thus interesting questions to be raised on the touchy issue of why unattractive people have it worse than attractive people, what we can do about it as a society, what they can do about it as individuals. But these kind of stories aren’t really addressing those issues, and it’s irritating when they claim they are. But I guess there would not be much of a female audience for a drama that posed the question, “What can a truly unattractive woman do to become a beautiful princess?” and answered it (as any realistic narrative would) “Probably not a whole lot.”
I don’t know enough about the UB narrative to know how it plays out – does she eventually get glam, or is she supposed to stay fake-ugly through the whole storyline? If the latter why not hire a really ugly girl? In any of the other versions abroad, did they use actually-fugly girls? The only example I can think of of a truly not-very-cute girl being used in an ugly/geeky girl role is Welcome To The Dollhouse. That girl, while not hideous, would probably be classified, even today, as “not beautiful in a conventional sense.”
I admire Solondz for doing that, but then he is hardly a peddler of happy fairy tales (more Brothers Grimm).
