Published in The Washington Post [PDF]
Vail Reese is the world expert on movie characters’ skin conditions. The San Francisco dermatologist can tell you anything you want to know about scars, birthmarks, tattoos, Jon Hamm’s vitiligo and the Austin Powers adversary Fat Bastard’s extra nipples, a spoof of the same condition on Christopher Lee’s assassin in “The Man With the Golden Gun.”
For two decades, Reese’s website, Skinema, has chronicled these abnormalities, which, he argues, too often appear on villains. For instance, in the movie “Grease,” he writes, “Pretty boy Travolta . . . musically drag races . . . the extensively acne-scarred ‘Crater-face.’ ”
Reese sees how such conventions affect his own patients. “It’s not just, ‘Am I going to look pretty?’ ” he says. “It’s, ‘Are people going to judge me?’ ”
His work is a peek into how Hollywood equates classical beauty with virtue, from Disney romances to James Bond bad guys to comedians making fun of Stephen Bannon’s face. Despite some progress, movies and TV still lazily perpetuate a notion we no longer believe: that looks correlate with character. When many in Hollywood are fighting for greater diversity and against stereotypes of all kinds, should that fight include types of bodies and faces?
“It’s overdue,” says Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who wrote the 1999 book “Survival of the Prettiest.”
“Hollywood could do a lot to move us in a direction to widen our empathy and widen our notion of what is beautiful.”
Continue reading "Why does Hollywood keep equating beauty with virtue?" »