One of my favorite bloggers, Jim Emerson, gives Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells a virtual bitchslap for a recent post Wells made on his favorite topic: how he doesn't believe guys who look "normal" (i.e., to him, fat and ugly) really score with beautiful women. In a post last month titled "Eclipse of the Hunk," Wells starts off by talking about the opening of the Judd Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall, then goes on to mourn the loss of sexy, buff leading men and the success of Judd Apatow's films, in which dorky guys like Seth Rogen and Jason Segel get the hot chicks. Emerson excerpts my favorite quote from Wells piece:
"Taking their place are guys who look like real guys, which means almost never slender or buffed, and frequently chunky, overweight or obese. And usually with roundish faces with half-hearted beard growth, hair on their backs, man-boobs with tit hairs, blemishes, and always horribly dressed -- open-collared plaid dress shirts, low-thread-count T-shirts with lame-ass slogans or promotions on the chest, long shorts and sandals (or flip-flops), monkey feet, unpedicured toenails."
This made me laugh out loud when I first read it, and it hasn't lost any of its hilarity since. Wells has an obsession about feet -- he's written before about actors who wear sandals or flip-flops (he apparently considers the wearing of flip-flops to be the footwear equivalent of wearning a burlap sack, and thinks that men's feet should always be covered up because they're ugly.) With the "unpedicured toenails" bit, I now have a mental picture of Wells ensconced in a massage chair in a West Hollywood nail salon, wearing a facial masque and getting his toenails done by a tiny Asian woman who clucks her tongue as she digs the gunk out from under his hideous man-nails and jokes to her co-workers about his calloused monkey feet.
One of the commenters on Emerson's piece noted that while, thanks largely to Apatow, we are seeing a proliferation of films where normal-looking, dorky guys get the girl, we aren't seeing the same from the other side of the spectrum. "
"In real life you sometimes see very pretty women with average guys, but then you also see a fair number of really fat women with tall, good-looking guys. You ever see the latter couple in a movie?
No, me neither."
Well, good point, but in real life you also see a lot of chunky older couples schlepping around in matching madras shorts and socks-with-Birkenstocks, and Hollywood's not making a lot of films about them, either. Hollywood is largely controlled by men, and men like to see their fantasies on screen, period. And while there may be a lot of average-looking Jewish guys who were dorks in their teen years and who are now rich and married to hot women (or who wish they were), there probably aren't a lot of men greenlighting studio pics who are standing in line for their frothy beverage at Starbucks looking at the size-18 female ass in front of them and thinking, "Man, I wish I could get me some of that." Sorry, but that's the reality.
Fat women are generally portrayed as the butt of jokes (no pun intended) in Hollywood, period, from Norbit to Heckler (which ends with Jamie Kennedy burning a box full of bad reviews with a couple of very large women in bikinis -- and I can guarantee you no one in the audience was looking at those women and thinking, "Hey, I bet those women are really nice people, I'd sure like to get to know them!")
Hollywood revolves around male fantasies, from busty blonds in microshorts to CGI wet dreams of action figures coming to life, to war movies with many big guns and hopefully a lot of blood. Every now and again a chick flick comes down the pike that appeals to the women out there, but even in those, the range of "normal" beauty for the female characters is still skewed toward the "pretty" side of the scale.
I don't think we'll ever see a lot of films where an average-looking, overweight woman scores a hot guy, because, frankly, men -- and most women -- won't pay to see that. A lot of women, in their heart-of-hearts, like to think they'd rather be with a nice guy who treats them well and wants to be with them than a Greek God who thinks the world revolves around him, and so Apatow's films appeal both to women with nice-guy fantasies and guys with scoring-with-hot-chicks fantasies. A lot of men, in their heart-of-hearts, may love their wives, but they still look at their wives' post-childbirth bodies and wish like hell that she looked like Katherine Heigl or Jessica Alba. It's a double-standard, yes, but since when has Hollywood (or, hell, society in general) not been about the double-standard?
Be honest, folks. Let's engage in a little mental exercise here: say a big Hollywood studio actually made a film that revolved around a female character who weighed in at, say, 200 pounds. Heck, just for fun, let's pretend that 27 Dresses, which starred the very attractive Heigl, had starred instead some 200-pound, size-18 actress. For good measure, let's replace Heigl's size-zero, supermodel sister with a sister who's a beautiful plus-size model. Let's envision the film opening up with a scene of our heroine getting ready for work in the morning, showing plenty of closeups of her dimpled ass and thighs ala the Apatow films' tendency to show back hair and man boobs to establish the "normalcy" of the dorky male lead.
Now let's pretend that it was shot exactly like such a film with a "sexy" actress would be shot -- plenty of shots of her sassy ass swinging back and forth as she walked down the street in a short skirt and high heels, and of course, some obligatory shots from above of her ample cleavage. And that the plot was otherwise the same -- that an attractive male character pined after her, that men looked at her model sister with lust and that heads turned everywhere she went. And that both women end up with very sexy, rich guys who consider themselves lucky to be with such an intelligent, attractive woman. Would you buy that?
I'm not asking if such couples exist in real life, or if you yourself are in such a relationship. Just, would you buy that in a movie? I'm betting not. Hollywood studios often make very crappy movies (particularly in the action, comedy and horror genres) because people will shell out many millions of dollars in ticket sales to see them. They make movies with very beautiful female characters for the same reason -- because the likelihood that millions of dollars in ticket sales would result from a film in which an overweight, unattractive (I'm talking by Hollywood standards here, not "real people" standards) woman is the romantic lead is simply non-existant.
I guess the real question is: do societal standards dictate what we see out of Hollywood? Or does Hollywood by its male-fantasy-centric nature set that standard, forever relegating the fat or average-looking girls, if we see them at all, to the role of "funny sidekick," never to land a sexy, rich guy? Probably a little of both, but that's not likely to change, is it?