She's not ugly enough!

For those of you in 4347/5347 who may be following this blog, note that the following post has no redeeming academic merit whatsoever--you may, in fact, lose IQ points if you read on. (Really--stick to Bolter and his ideas on refashioned dialogues for now.) It is simply a kind of warm-up for me to segue into writing something of more "substance" later on.

I have personally never seen "Ugly Betty", but I know enough about the show to get the gist--a young woman who, by some prefabricated, presumably Western, standard of beauty has been defined as conventionally unattractive (unconventionally attractive?) has a series of misadventures and somehow, even though our star is ugly, mind you, winds up with several friends and love interests. I'm bored thinking about it, because wasn't the ugly duckling dead horse already beaten to smithereens in the 80s with movies like Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful? But my point is not really to whine about how the idea behind of the show is not new...

Rather, my point is that someone picked up on the fact that ugly Betty is not ugly at all, and is quite miffed about it. "Ugly Betty," is, in their eyes, quite pulchritudinous after all (look it up, people). That someone is China. See, China has its own version of Ugly Betty, and apparently (here is the one aspect of this post that marginally relates to MultiMedia Media) the web has been taken by storm with young girls angrily shouting (and yes, I think shouting is possible on the web) that the eponymous character is "not ugly enough" and "is an insult to ugly girls everywhere." I agree, as I have always felt that "ugliness" in contemporary cinema or t.v. entertainment was shoved into uncomfortably simplistic categories by people who have no real interest in ugliness at all and are quite loathe and, at best, ill equipped to handle the myriad cultural ramifications the subject brings up. So, here's the breakdown (and note that males seem to be completely exnominated from the whole ugliness dilemma--I mean, where's the companion show, "Hideous Fred?") But I digress.

Here's the thing--"ugliness" for women/girls in Western society and film seems to come down to about four common denominators: glasses, bad clothes, weight, and, sometimes, braces. Note also that three of those four things have nothing at all to do with the actual body of the person--glasses can be removed, braces eventually come off, and one can, apparently through some sort of aggressive intervention and humiliation on national television (think "What Not to Wear"), develop better taste in clothes. Those things are, simply, prosthetic devices to give an illusion of "ugly" that really has more to do with ugliness as physically constructed rather than innate.

There's a great scene in "Not Another Teen Movie" where the token "good looking guy," when faced with the prospect of going out with the token "ugly girl," exclaims, in complete horror, "Janey? I can't go out with her! She's got......glasses! And a...pony tail!" It's one of those great self-referential moments (even though the rest of the film is pretty base in its appeal to a Gen X audience) that kind of encapsulates what I've just claimed.

So, I concur with China, and I would go one step further to say that not only is Ugly Betty not ugly enough, she is not ugly period.