"The Beauty Myth" and its Presence in Movies

This weekend I found myself at the movie theater with one of my best friends on a rainy Saturday afternoon. We decided to see The Hunger Games, not because either of us had read any of the books or had an obsession with the franchise (as many girls our age seem to), but rather because it was rainy, we were bored, and the movie was playing.

I knew close to nothing about the plot and the movie in general as we entered the theatre, armed with a bucket of large popcorn and monstrous Diet Cokes. However, what I was shocked to witness was that the Beauty Myth, as Naomi Wolf describes it, actually manifests itself in movies quite glaringly.

To start, I think that to any viewer, regardless of their gender and whether or not they are familiar with The Hunger Games, will agree that Jennifer Lawrence, the actress playing the starring role Katniss is stunningly beautiful. The cast as a whole is comprised of handsome, muscular male characters and gorgeous females. This isn't unusual of a movie geared towards a teenage audience, yet viewers are still complaining. One major complaint that people have is the producer's choice to have Lawrence star as Katniss, lamenting that she is "too fat" to play someone coming from a province that is supposed to be in a state of poverty, constantly starving. This is horrendous. Not only is Lawrence far from overweight, she is thin. In one scene in the movie, she is wearing a sort of leather jumpsuit and her waist is so tiny that it appears as though you could fit two hands around it. People complain about models being too skinny, yet when a healthy, slender girl is selected for a movie, people are still not satisfied.

This brought me back to an argument that Wolf makes in the Work chapter, where she mentions the Professional Beauty Qualification. Wolf defines the Professional Beauty Qualification (PBQ) as "a parody of the [bona fide occupational qualification]" and says that "beauty is being categorized, in professions and trades further and further afield from the original display professions..." (Wolf 27).

The double standard that women are held to also applies to this situation. Wolf puts it quite eloquently:

"The most emblematic women working in the West could be visible if they were "beautiful," even if they were bad at their work; they could be good at their work and "beautiful" and therefore visible, but get no credit or merit; or they could be good and "unbeautiful" and therefore invisible, so their merit did them no good" (Wolf 35). 

This is what we see with Lawrence and her critics that she is too plump for Katniss - probably from the same people criticizing models for being too thin for the runway.

Additionally, the film mocks the influence that advertisers have on our lives. Katniss, although a tough and far from "girly" girl, must go through a serious of female tortures such as waxing in order to be camera-ready and get sponsors for her appearance in the Hunger Games, which is not a beauty contest but rather a fight to the death. "Women are kept "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male," Wolf says, and this certainly holds true in The Hunger Games, as the boy's preparation focuses solely on their strength, tactics and skill, not their physical appearance (Wolf 59).