Let me begin by saying I didn’t find the trailer at all funny. All of the jokes were fat jokes. As for there being some “moral message”, please. This is a Farrelly Brothers film. The words “message movie” do not apply to these filmmakers. Their shtick is to take some potentially offensive comedic subject and go way overboard with it. Sometimes it works. I don’t think it does here, but you cannot always judge a movie by it’s trailer.
I do have a slightly different take on the trailer, though. It is established early on in the trailer that Black sees fat women as ugly and thin ones as attractive. After the Anthony Robbins character enables him to see “inner beauty” as physical beauty, we get to see two views: the “real” version, which is what the other characters see, and what Black sees. So when we see inner beauty as thin, and inner ugliness as fat, this makes sense because this is how the Black character sees women. That is, inner beauty is translated into his perception of physical beauty, and inner ugliness is translated into his perception of ugly, which is fat. This tells us about the character’s perceptions, which are meant to be offensive.
However, once he falls for the Paltrow character, the main “joke” is that slender Paltrow becomes the but of the movies fat jokes. The juxtaposition is supposed to be funny, but this doesn’t change the fact that these are just a bunch of fat jokes made about a fat person. It’s still offensive.
I also have a slightly different take on “The Truth About Cats and Dogs”. I found the Jeanine Garofalo character more attractive than Uma Thurmund. But I think the photographer did also. The only reason he was even remotely interested in Uma was that he thought she was the smart, sweet, funny woman he talked to on the phone. I saw it as being about how the Jeanine Garofalo character had bought into the stereotypical image of beauty that she couldn’t see that she was every bit as attractive as Uma, and that this great guy thought so, too. None of the important characters except Jeanine think she’s not attractive. I thought the movie was more perceptive than it’s given credit for.
Last, on the subject of what people find physically attractive. I don’t think it is possible to entirely seperate physical beauty from inner beauty once you know someone. Part of the reason most people find the Garofalo character more physically attractive in “Cats and Dogs” is that she has a more attractive personality. We tend to see people we like as more physically attractive. I, however, am immune to this phenomenon. My fiancee is, in fact, the most strikingly beautiful woman who ever set foot on the planet Earth, and my saying so has nothing to do with my being head-over-heels in love with her.
In terms of pure physical attractiveness, anthropologists have identified two features of feminine beauty that seem to be universal to men of all cultures. Not necessarily to all men in any given culture, but as a general feature in every culture studied. The first is a symmetrical face. The second is a high hip to waist ratio. Neither of these have anything to do with weight, indeed in some cultures being heavy is considered more attractive (India for example). Weight, breast size, height, skin tone, hair color, texture, length; all of these are cultural standards of beauty.
Being thin happens to be one of the percieved standards of physical beauty in American culture, one that has been taken to extremes by Hollywood.
