The target of my ire: Easy A, a teen comedy which I admit I thoroughly enjoyed. A fun premise, smart dialogue, and solid performances all deliver. What doesn’t deliver is the B.S. we’re expected to buy at the beginning. The film opens as our fraught heroine Olive Penderghast opines, “I used to be anonymous, invisible to the opposite sex. If Google Earth were a guy, he couldn’t find me if I were dressed up as a ten story building.” Cue our dowdy protagonist, who no sooner enters the frame then gets side swiped by a mean girl speeding down the corridor. Except that the ostensibly dowdy protagonist is the very attractive Emma Stone. And not Emma Stone-with-glasses-dressed-from-the-pages-of-the-Sears-husky-catalogue Emma Stone, but Emma Stone in skinny jeans with a button down barely covering her in a tight tank top. This is a girl who does not have body issues. With her flowing locks and perfect skin, she should be starring in a Noxema commercial. The losers of the world should be so lucky.
Sorry, Hollywood. Not buying it. Guys don’t see this girl?! Then I guess she must be attending Self-Assured Supermodel High, where every girl is six feet tall and puts out juuust enough so that guys dig her, but not so much that girls consider her a slut. I mean, you didn’t even have the decency to nerd her up a little. I’ve come to accept “Hollywood Ugly,” where the attractive protagonist is given glasses and a ponytail and we’re supposed to forget her magnificent bone structure until after the makeover montage (at which point we are allowed to relish such beauty that transforms the hearts and minds of those around her and sends us real women running into the comforting embraces of our psychotherapists and our pro-ana chat rooms). While I’m not exactly okay with this trend, I get it. But you guys couldn’t even put an oversized hoodie on Ms. Stone. Shame on you.
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Furthermore, I’m concerned that this may be a pattern. It’s hard to buy into the purported unattractiveness of Liz Lemon on 30 Rock or Rachel Berry on Glee and not then want to crawl into a dark cave. If these women aren’t pretty, what hope do those of us with an average cup size and occasional mid-month bloating have? But at least the anti-social, anxiety-ridden angst of Lemon and the over-the-top, type-A insufferableness of Berry cast a spell of unattractiveness over those women. Because personality matters, right? Beauty comes from the inside? Oh, wait — as women, that’s our fantasy. Perhaps the boob tube offers some escapism for us, too.
So, Hollywood, let’s just agree. You keep casting beauties as homely geeks, and I’ll look the other way. But please give them astigmatism, an overbite, an infected belly button ring, something — something that says they are one of us. Even if we only get to believe that for the first act.
So incredibly true! I thought Molly Ringwald was a pretty well-cast geek in Pretty in Pink. They just made her look very plain and normal. And she was never drop dead, airbrush gorgeous to begin with, though she was very pretty when done up. But yes, adore this article.
SHIVERS! AGAIN! keep keep writing! we need your brilliance and eloquence….adoring you even more T!
What I wondered about Emma Stone’s character in Easy A was whether or not the fact that she was too confident and too individualistic was what made her the awkward girl out. Maybe being unattractive is not the only reason why folks are singled out and rejected. Could free-thinkers also be? Then again, maybe that’s something I whipped up in my head to make sense of why this reject was so effin’ hot? Definitely did not fall in line with what I was used to seeing on the big screen.
Emma Stone is way too hot to be pretty ugly. I could buy that the character felt “invisible” though — reminds me of Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink — though in that movie they made it explicitly about wealth/class clash vs. hotness.