I finished watching Miss Congeniality last night which lead me to think about the genre of "Ugly Duckling" pictures and their relation to chick flicks.
Ugly Duckling stories feature a socially inept/poorly presented or otherwise physically disadvantaged main character. This character undergoes a transformation over the course of the movie and learns a lesson.
In Miss Congeniality Sandra Bullock starts out as a mannish FBI agent. So mannish that she wears sensible shoes and doesn't wear any makeup. She wrestles with a male co worker and there is no sexual innuendo because they all think of her as a male. As you are probably aware she is assigned the task of going undercover at a beauty pageant. In this arena she makes friends with women, learns to care about the way she looks and ends up dating the aforementioned co worker.
Why do I have a problem with this story? Hard to pinpoint. I am the first to admit that having valuable friendships with other women is important so it's not that. They go out of their way to show that the competitors in the pageant are smart (the winner is studying physics in University) so it's not a dumb model stereotype. Maybe it's the whole "conform to the accepted beauty ideal and your life will be better" message.
At the start she may be wearing a man's suit with food down the front but it's stil Sandra Bullock, right? She's still gorgeous. In the course of the transformation she wears her hair out more (long straight hair = more beautiful)*, wears the required evening gowns and swimwear for the pageant (dressing feminine is important), learns about makeup (although not till right at the very end, as mostly it's done for her). She becomes more co ordinated at dancing and giving the correct beauty queen answers to questions. True she retains her basic core values, but she is presenting them in a different way.
In the end she is rewarded by attaining a boyfriend which gives us the message that if we conform to the ideal American stereotype of a beautiful woman (epitomized in Miss United States) we too can land a man!
...BTW I really liked this movie. I just believe it's important to name things you are uncomfortable with and make them visible. Then they lose their power over you.
*Long straight hair means beauty is something I learned from Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman. It's the book Mean Girls was based on and is very very good.
Posted by jenni at May 24, 2005 02:31 PM