The Uglies ( A review)
I made the mistake of reading the reviews of the movie ‘Uglies’ that I saw on Netflix and was shocked to come across hugely negitive ones. It was disheartening. How could we miss out on the deeply layered message that was meant to safeguard us from the soon to be incorporated doom into our lives?
Doesn’t the movie talk about the essential sense of ugliness that we inherit from our collective unconscious and the environment that locks us into feeling that way about us. I was a “pretty” kid and grown up but never really knew that I was, and had a serious lack of self esteem because of that. So if the director here has chosen Joey King as the protagonist who sees herself as ugly, what makes it so difficult to miss that point that is being conveyed here? In a society where even the so-called good looking are infected with the virus, what to talk of those who are not so, so-called-endowed externally?
Uglies (based on the popular dystopian young adult novel by Scott Westerfeld) is set in a futuristic world where everyone undergoes extreme cosmetic surgery at the age of 16 to become "Pretties." This surgery enhances their physical features to a standard of flawless beauty, following the society's rigid ideals. Before the surgery, individuals are addressed "Uglies" and live in designated areas away from the perfect "Pretties."
This society values conformity and beauty above all, seeing physical imperfections as something to be fixed, even at the cost of individual identity and freedom.
The story follows Tally Youngblood, a teenage girl who is eagerly awaiting her own transformation and how she eventually undergoes the paradigm shift.
In the movie we see that the moment people undergo these “procedures” they are shown as having been rendered desensitized, which to me is such a profound metaphor. I wonder if that has been missed out on by most of the people who care to put out their scathing criticism, without using the faculty of correct critical thinking! Don't we see that happening around us all the time? The class consciousness that we all have; the superiority and inferiority thing that hounds us all our lives for all these factors: money; beauty; intelligence; talent…everything here is a resource to climb the social ladder to prove that we are somebody…the traps that are laid all around us and the propensity with which we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by them. And how this blind clinging to such ideas is so depriving us of the real sensitivity towards life and our fellow mates that we miss out on totally.
A few months after my young, intelligent and “pretty” elder daughter had flown to the US for her further studies, one of the pictures that she shared, I was a little crestfallen to see her resembling the newbies: that blondish adapted look: with those golden streaks in her hair. A look that had filled me with a sense of despondency to the choices that mostly we the female gender were making inadvertently to offer ourselves as the most well packaged and glamorous consumable items. The latest and most dreadful casualty in the growing trend of new age consumerism.
My younger one had fallen into the trap in a more alarming way.Tall, intelligent and “beautiful”, yet having acquired the need to push the envelope further into some unrealistic standards of beauty, disseminated by the nasty fashion and cosmetic industry (which is far more lethal than it looks). After trying all the possible ways, we as parents were watching with muffled breaths her gradual but adamant steps into the precarious precipice of size zero mold. She could have fallen on the other side from that ledge any time… Can’t be thankful enough to the universe for having visited her brain with a sharp lightning like streak of wisdom, one fine day when she fell unconscious due to prolonged deprivation of food. With none of us at home, she having to deal with that situation on her own geting to confront what she was doing to herself, somehow propelled her into a conclusive clarity of the havoc this was doing to her system. She decided to take a u turn from there, for it was now or never as i believe she saw it then.
Then there was this show I saw recently on Netflex: The Perfect Couple; wherein the famous and talented actress Nocole Kidman is such a manicured mannequin version of herself. Throughout the show there's not a single place we see her beam a full smile (which i wonder is more a demand of the character or the botox that she has in the lips and the chin, with a compulsive pout pasted on them most disquietingly. Why? For it is imposing those fake ideals upon the more impressionable minds, to buy these as the standards of real beauty, when actually it is the farthest cry from being authentic/ beautiful) It scares me to imagine the world we are heading…Hardly any of the actresses out there who have not been a victim to this going under the scapell to come back with a synthetic look that they compel themselves to believe is a better version of themselves!
To me it is against this backdrop that this movie comes as a bolt of fresh whiff of replenishing oxygen. There are certain sane voices that are ranting the truth away at most affordable and nominal prices in this noisy bazaar of the overbearing false and the fake, masquerading as the true! Irony is that we opt for the fake and more exorbitantly priced alternatives. I feel very inspired by the likes of Julia Roberts’ who I am sure is managing without botox and beams that widest of the smiles most unabashedly, which is what I believe makes her more beautiful than what is seen as beautiful.
Scott Westerfield in his novel ‘Uglies’, talks about these very developments through a poignantly impactful metaphor.
I recall that around the 1990’s corrective teeth procedures were already quite an in thing. My teeth which were in that category needed that, but my father didn't see it as important. I spent a lifetime staying quite conscious of my teeths slight protrusion. Another cousin of mine who was quite pretty otherwise had her teeth definitely demanding the corrective procedure, more than mine, but missed out on hers as her parents couldn’t afford it, and we were still in the middle middle class upbringing where things like these weren't and couldn’t have been a priority. I always felt it was so unfair on that girl to have been left the way she was and not been awarded the procedure so she could be such an amazing version of herself. Now put all these real life examples of the likes of us: such ordinary mortals who are stuck with one or the other body part being way out of their acceptance levels. I am sure the data shall prove to be nearly 100%. Now if I had the clarity of the facade not being as important as we have been made to believe it is, I wouldn’t have spent a lifetime seeing myself as anything lesser than anybody else around me.
In today's society when almost 50-80 % of our bodies are alterable, is it sane to go for it or know that the buck never stops! It shall be a never ending ordeal, once trapped inside the bubble that promises the utopian possibility to one’s vulnerable mind. Those doll-like superimposed thick lips pasted hanging upon old ones is a most deplorable replication of God’s expertise. And the escapism that it sneakily offers to the scared mindsets, who want to prolong their innings here are being the most ruthlessly exploited by the new age consumerism that is most voraciously feeding upon them. As long as we are falling victim to the hands of that science which has always been thoroughly misused to play God, we shall be the most pathetic guinea pigs in the race to sustain that which is universally most fleeting: the idea of external beauty; young age.
It may be easier to intellectualize upon it than to avoid the temptation of going for it if one has the means to, like Dr Faustus asking for the extension of 25 years of young age with all the extreme pleasures at his disposal in exchange of his soul! People needed to get the multi layered metaphor to go back satiated from a wonderful piece of art like this. We need some evolution at the hands of literature. No wonder I always felt that exposure to classic literature was as imperative as the daily food that we need to consume for the upkeep of our bodies. For a healthy body cannot be shielded for long with a mind not up to safeguarding itself against wrong influences.
