Beauty and the Movies

As Ezra Klein points out, this sped-up video of the transformation from plain model to glamorous billboard superbeauty is rather amazing. I’ve seen this sort of thing before and, as an occasional graphics designer, done similar work (though never this drastic), but it's still kind of stunning to see. Klein, ever concerned with equality, thinks this sort of thing has a “weirdly democratizing” effect, which I’m not sure I agree with—after all, how many people have time and access to the cadre of professionals it takes to accomplish this, and how many of those that do can afford the time and expense it takes to get so done up every day? But I have to say I think Klein is correct when he makes a similar point about the way television and movies distort beauty standards:

More pernicious, at least to my eyes, are movies and television, which rely on some of the same trickery, but mainly "cheat" by hiring outliers on the beauty scale and then placing them in shows and scenes that retain the atmospherics of normality. By skimming actresses from the 99.999th percentile of attractiveness and then using them in apparent representations of reality, they create an ideal and expectation that, while theoretically more achievable than the photoshopped model from the video, is actually far less realizable.

Klein zeroes in on something that has bothered me for a long time, namely the way movies and TV shows tend to cast only women (and mostly men) from an incredibly thin pool of impossibly beautiful candidates in a very specific zone of age and looks—and then tends to make things worse by giving these people unbelievable homes and clothes. How many ultra attractive 28 year olds making six figures can there be in the world, and what’s the likelihood that any office or group of friends will be made up entirely of people in this category? The only milieu in which that might be probable is … the cast of a television show.

I think this tends to be far worse on TV than in movies. The movie world is made up of stars, people that society has generally recognized to be especially more attractive than most and publicly bestowed with massive riches as a result. It’s more often clear in the movies that these people are of a different class—a fantasy class—that simply can’t be a reality for most. Television, on the other hand, is a little more insidious, because it takes performers we don’t recognize and puts them in situations that tend to have a more familiar feel (workplaces, homes, etc). Plus, it gives us long-term regular exposure to these performers—in effect desensitizing us to their beauty. Television does far more to propagate the myth of an all-super hottie society than do movies.

Addendum: In the comments, Pstonie makes the point that there's not exactly a conscious plot among TV show producers to undermine America's self-image, and I agree. It's not exactly a plot, or certainly not a dark and seedy one anyway. Casting directors and producers tend to cast performers who will attract attention -- and, well, that means attractive people. But whatever the intention behind it, the result is the same, and it leads to both body-image misperceptions and a bland, overwhelming sameness to the types of figures and faces we see on most network shows.