The Desert Mermaid

 

I believe this photo sums up pretty much every reason I want to see Little Miss Sunshine.

 

I would like to say that I am sure that the four girls along the sides are very sweet girls, but the truth is that my brain immediately puts them into the gross stereotype of Spoiled Little Twerp. I would be pleasantly surprised to discover otherwise.

 

The truth is that what the magazines consider to be Beautiful People, be they sexed-up children or sexed-up adults, often give me the creeps.  I don’t think this is a rare phenomenon, either. Yes, we say that they look shallow and they reinforce harmful ideals of beauty and they are disgustingly sexiful and those have to be fake and all that, but the plain truth is that somehow they just look wrong to me.  Their faces are too symmetrical, the artfully ‘subtle’ makeup blazes like a neon sign, they’re always either smiling like they’re trying to sell you something* or some sort of pouty glower that always makes me think they’re drooling.  I get nervous looking at their lips because they look balloony and I fear balloons. My brain’s left hemisphere always complains that the poses are contrived and unnatural. And have you noticed that they airbrush out the veins in people’s eyeballs? It’s just … off-putting.

 

I don’t think I’m the only person who thinks this way. I often wonder if this exact trait is in fact what keeps the Beautiful People industries going—after all, everybody always bitches about how superficial those magazines are, and yet they do booming business. It’s a little like why people read Stephen King novels or pay such attention to sordid tales of crime and corruption—the Train Wreck phenomenon. It’s horrible, but you’re sort of fascinated.

 

I myself have a sort of arbitrary standard of beauty which could be described as ‘individual’ and ‘arbitrary.’ I get more interested in otherwise-ordinary faces that have some sort of indefinable character to them than the faces of your dime-a-dozen beauty queens. I think this is also shared … how many of us have been fascinated by a supposedly ‘ugly’ face?  I think ‘ugly’ is a really silly term, because everything is relative, and while I do base a lot of my initial judgments on looks—who doesn’t?—I have very strange criteria for what I like and what I don’t.  Even I couldn’t explain my standards.

 

Probably this is not so rare, either. I think our perception of people is a lot more complex than the magazines would have us believe.

 

Maybe that’s what unnerves me—the simplicity of the magazines’ point of view.

 

Whatever it is, I want to see this movie more than ever.

 

 

*Fun Movie Trivia: The producers of Aliens said that they had a real deuce of a time auditioning the role of Newt, the traumatized seven-year-old who spends the entire movie getting menaced by nightmarish monsters. The problem was that the child actors they auditioned all had worked primarily in commercials, and so after every sentence they’d deliver a Dazzledent Smile.  This is not the sort of thing you are going for when you are auditioning to be a traumatized half-feral kid who has spent weeks, or maybe months, as the only survivor on a hideous planet full of hostile aliens. Finally they had to go with Carrie Henn, who had never acted in anything before and as far as I know has never acted in anything since, and it was an awesome choice.