The Hollywood Seven

Today on Spectre Collie: shameless objectification of professional actors!

Well, not really shameless; it is embarrassing to realize how much you’ve been programmed by the media, and how you’ve still got these hard-coded ideas of what’s supposed to constitute “hot,” even though they really don’t make any sense at all.

The thing that prompted this realization was watching Game Night. I mentioned that its self-aware asides felt like vestiges from the early 2000s, unnecessary in something that was already working extremely well as a contemporary screwball comedy. But I didn’t mention the part that felt even more dated, which was the sub-plot about the friend Ryan, played by Billy Magnussen.

His storyline is pretty charming. He brings a date to game night who’s supermodel hot but vapid, if not outright dim-witted. We quickly learn that none of his relationships last much longer than a week, and he’s always bringing a new woman to the party, and they’re all supermodel hot and vacuous and basically interchangeable. Eventually, he brings a coworker played by Sharon Horgan as a platonic date, to be his ringer so he can actually win a game for once. Over the course of the night, he learns that the problem with his relationships has always been that he’s trying to be the smart one, when he’s actually the pretty but dim-witted himbo.

The thing that immediately stood out to me was how old-fashioned the stereotype of “hot, dumb girlfriend” was. Superman did it with its version of Eve Teschmacher, but most of its characters deliberately have the corniness turned up to maximum, to capture the Silver Age comic book feel. And Game Night calls back to old-fashioned screwball comedies, so it feels similar there. “This is a deliberate throwback, instead of anything trying to feel contemporary.”

It felt a little jarring in Game Night, though, since it was throwing the image of “this is the kind of super hot woman a shallow guy would be attracted to” into a movie where Rachel McAdams, Kylie Bunbury, and Sharon Horgan are presented as “baseline attractive.” Not “plain,” but more that they’re so normal that it’s not worth commenting on.1

Where Game Night does comment on it is with the men. In addition to Magnussen being the “dumb, hot one,” Jason Bateman’s character is repeatedly contrasted against his brother played by Kyle Chandler, who is cooler, wealthier, and much, much hotter.2 Meanwhile, the whole storyline with Lamorne Morris’s character is that he feels insecure when he finds out his wife (Bunbury) slept with a high-profile celebrity while they were on a break.

Even though the movie trots out stereotypically hot women for effect, I didn’t pick up any sense that it was saying, “these women are so hot that you should feel bad about yourself.” Even Horgan’s character, who’s set up the most to be insulted by Billy’s not being attracted to her, doesn’t seem to care in the slightest.

My gut reaction when seeing Billy’s girlfriends was that it was odd for the movie to present these women as unusually hot when Rachel McAdams was standing right there. But thinking back on the roles McAdams has played (that I’m familiar with), she’s gone from glammed way up to way down all throughout her career. Early on, she was the stereotypical, impossibly hot blonde; she was the head of the Mean Girls. In the upcoming Send Help, she’s the frumpy office worker who gets ignored or dumped on by everyone including her terrible boss. In between, she’s been at just about every level of glamour from unattainable ideal girlfriend to relatable ideal girlfriend to femme fatale to relatable housewife and mom.

McAdams seems to treat it all as drag, which is something I think Scarlett Johansson does really well, too. Being super-glamorous movie star (like in Asteroid City) is something she can do, but she never seems all that interested in making that her whole thing.

It’s funny to me that there was so much attention paid to Avengers marketing concentrated on showing Black Widow as a sex object — and for good reason, because they totally did — but in my mind, the MCU has gone even harder in objectifying its male characters. I’m sure I’m not the only person who saw the teasers for the Thor movies, highlighting every single curve of Chris Hemsworth’s physique, and thought, “is it okay for me to be looking at this in public?!” And the actual movies famously linger on shots of Chris Evans, coming out of the Super Serum chamber or grabbing onto a helicopter, with only slightly more subtle horniness than all the shots of Grace Kelly in Rear Window.

It seems increasingly rare overall for movies to call out how hot a character is, or at least compared to how it was in my formative movie-going years. And interestingly, the examples I can think of are evenly distributed between men and women. Outside of the MCU: Emma Stone gawking over a shirtless Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Jon Hamm having an entire storyline in 30 Rock about how he’s so hot, he doesn’t have to be smart or actually good at anything. The recent movie Eternity, which had just about every single character saying repeatedly and at length how impossibly good-looking Callum Turner is.

For the ladies, I can only think of Barbie, where everyone is unusually beautiful, and still Greta Gerwig via Helen Mirren’s narrator comments on how incongruous it is to see Margot Robbie saying that she doesn’t feel pretty. And the Jumanji movies, where Karen Gillan is presented as a hyper-idealized, sexy, bad-ass video game character. Both of them feel like explicit or implicit commentary about objectification of women, and both of them also have male characters who are even more explicitly objectified. Look at how hot and ripped The Rock, Ryan Gosling, and Simu Liu are. Just look at ’em!

The one that stood out the most to me was Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow. The movie introduces her character — over and over and over again, since it’s about time loops — in mid-workout. It’s so over the top that I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear old-timey striptease music and a crowd of men cheering and hooting. And it was difficult for me to process, after decades of movies and TV explicitly presenting actors that might as well have arrows pointing at them with signs that read THIS IS HOT, to see a Real Actress™️ being shown in much the same way as the Barb Wire poster. My lizard brain was saying “you’re showing me a 9 and telling me I’m looking at a 15.”3

While I’m in the middle of a blog post about objectifying actors, I do want to stress that I’m talking about how Hollywood presents people, not my actual opinions, or to suggest that there is any objective truth in hotness ratings. Ultimately, my main point is that it’s almost entirely bullshit. And only “almost entirely,” since a big part of the entire point of those scenes was to show how much body-building prep work Blunt had done for the part.

But the part that makes Edge of Tomorrow interesting to me is that while the scenes are over-the-top, they’re not gratuitous. You learn that Blunt’s character was previously caught in the same type of time loop as our protagonist, and the experience turned her from someone who was presumably a rank-and-file soldier, into a total bad-ass super-hero. I suspect that casting Blunt against type was the whole point.

And I suspect that I’ve spent so long being trained how to “read” relative attractiveness in movies and television that I got hung up on it and missed the point entirely.

The overall impression I get is that Hollywood has very slowly, almost imperceptibly changed since the days of Weird Science. I’m purposefully ignoring a ton of trash, and pretty much every single thing on reality TV, but among the stuff that I think still has relevance to art and popular culture:

Movies and TV less often make an explicit point of how hot a character is or isn’t

When they do it to women, it’s usually to make some kind of meta-commentary

When they do it to men, it’s still the old-fashioned “wowza check out the body on that one! Hubba hubba!” style, probably because in general, for the most part, men are assumed to be competent and worthy by default. We don’t have to be as hung up over being objectified as women are.

Which seems like a kind of progress, I guess? I hope it’s obvious that I’m in no way claiming that Hollywood has Fixed All The Problems, and it’s not every bit as crass, sleazy, misogynistic, and manipulative as it’s always been. But it does feel like the bar has been slightly nudged upwards; it’s harder to get away with the same kind of objectification that was prevalent in popular movies during my teens and twenties.

And it seems rarer to have big stars who can coast on their looks. Glamor feels more like something that actors can put on or take off as they like.

As evidence for that bold claim: Ana de Armas, Florence Pugh, and Sydney Sweeney are three of the most objectively, flawlessly beautiful women I’ve ever seen. And they all have managed — by being extraordinarily talented — to take a variety of roles that depend on more than their being in full-glam mode. Contrasted to actors like Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, who had to take parts that deliberately obscured or downplayed their appearance before people seemed to take them seriously as actors, instead of just beautiful.

If my theory is true, and Hollywood is gradually getting better at not pointing at actors and screaming at the audience, this person is a 10, there’s a sinister side effect. That baseline level of “Hollywood ugly” is still active and likely will continue to be active forever, so we’re left with an unrealistic level of what constitutes a 7. If you’re casting Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman as average enough to be unremarkable, you’re perpetuating the idea that those of us who always considered ourselves average have been actually been at best a 3.

One of the most commonly seen and savagely mocked cliches from the movies of my formative years: the mousy, bookish woman who takes off her glasses and lets down her hair and… gasp!… she looks like a movie star!

It’s mocked for good reason, because it’s almost entirely the product of male filmmakers reducing women to nothing more than what men find attractive. The gross “That’s What Makes You Beautiful” syndrome. I still remember catching a scene from some movie that tried to pass off Ginnifer Goodwin as “the plain, insecure one,” and I yelled at the television, “you go straight to hell” and angrily switched it off.

But I do have to wonder how much, if any, of that cliche could get “taken back” and turned into something positive. Because if you can somehow remove the sleaze from it, and the core idea that appearance is the last, crucial, step towards actual self-worth, you’re left with an idea that we don’t see enough of.

That it is all surface bullshit, and some of the most beautiful people in media look like that only because a ton of people work hard to make them look like that, and it’s something they can put on or take off at will. Reject the bit where the male lead sees the woman take her glasses off and realizes she’s perfect for him, and just think about the bit where the glamorous movie star is only a pair of glasses away from looking like what passes for average in Hollywood.

I’m never going to look like the Kens in Barbie, but then I really enjoy never spending any time in a gym, so it feels like it comes out even. And any time I remember I’m about the same age as Jon Hamm, it’s slightly reassuring to remember that even he doesn’t look like Jon Hamm all the time. Which is less healthy than appreciating that none of it matters in the slightest if you’re not making a living based on your appearance, but I’m a fundamentally insecure person who occasionally needs a little bit of shallow pettiness to get by.

But in terms of thinking about how media works, it’s interesting to see an industry largely built on glamour having to reassess and redefine how important glamour is.

1
The only exception I can think of is when McAdams is telling a bodyguard/assassin “I have children,” and he says, “Not with that ass,” which she takes as a compliment.

2
And better hung. I really liked the line where Annie is trying to make Max feel better by saying that his brother Brooks is clearly over-compensating for something, and Max says, “No, I’ve seen his penis, and it’s pretty great.”

3
In retrospect, I guess in much the same way that Hollywood turned Jim from The Office into Jack Ryan.

1 The only exception I can think of is when McAdams is telling a bodyguard/assassin “I have children,” and he says, “Not with that ass,” which she takes as a compliment.

2 And better hung. I really liked the line where Annie is trying to make Max feel better by saying that his brother Brooks is clearly over-compensating for something, and Max says, “No, I’ve seen his penis, and it’s pretty great.”

3 In retrospect, I guess in much the same way that Hollywood turned Jim from The Office into Jack Ryan.