So I’ve just seen Amy Schumer’s new film, I Feel Pretty, and I’m confused. What message am I supposed to draw from it?
Daisy, by email
Glad you asked, Daisy, because there are many lessons to take from I Feel Pretty, but not one of them is the message that the movie itself is promoting. Let’s look at this film, briefly. Schumer plays a woman, Renee, who feels ugly and is treated like an absolute troll by everyone around her, because that is how Hollywood thinks people who look like Schumer should be treated. She then whacks her head on a giant piece of Convenient Plot Device and is so brain-damaged that when she wakes up she thinks she looks beautiful because, Christ, you’d basically have to knock out all your grey matter to think Schumer, an A-list actress, is attractive, right? The film proceeds to laugh at her for the next two or whatever hours as she goes around town acting deranged because she thinks she’s gorgeous, which is definitely how grown women behave. She also ditches her friends because she feels too beautiful for them, which is also how women behave, and all of this is a searing exploration of the beauty standards for women or something something blah blah blah feminist lite word salad feminist lite word salad. Anyway, the film ends with Renee realising she’s not pretty, but is, like, on the inside, and she then makes a super-inspirational speech about the importance of inner beauty while selling makeup to other women the film considers equally trollish. Because inner beauty is great but, let’s be honest, gals, it has its limits.
Schumer has spent much of the past few months insisting this film is all about helping women’s self-esteem, which suggests she hasn’t actually seen it. Because what it is actually saying is that women who don’t look like Emily Ratajkowski, who also appears in the film, are public laughing stocks who, at best, might learn to style it out. Well, I can’t really blame Schumer for giving it a miss because it’s absolute garbage and I’d rather eat my hands than have to sit through it again.
What I am interested in is not what beauty does or doesn’t do to women, but what Hollywood has done to Schumer. There is a fascinating disjunct between the stuff Schumer made for TV and the stuff she is making for the movies. Her sketch show, Inside Amy Schumer, was uneven, like all sketch shows, but when it was good it was excellent, skewering standards for female beauty and the expectations society puts on women and women put on themselves. Yet her films, namely Trainwreck and I Feel Pretty, do precisely the opposite. In Trainwreck, which Schumer wrote, her character had to prove she was worth some tedious sports doctor, and to do this she had to quit her job, become a cheerleader and be physically humiliated. I Feel Pretty is one long sneer at Schumer and anyone who doesn’t look like Ratajkowski, a woman whose real-life career, as far as I can tell, is Instagramming her cleavage. Now, we can argue all day about whether photographing your boobs is a feminist pursuit or not (spoiler: it’s not), but any film that posits someone who does this as the physical ideal is not a film that can seriously claim it is fighting against the narrowness of beauty standards for women.
Schumer is not the first woman whose brilliance on TV has been bleached out of her in the movies – Tina Fey has been here before her, as was Gilda Radner before that. But there is something extra dismaying about seeing Schumer make – and defend! – this egregious woman-hating garbage, when she used to be smarter than this. So the conclusion to draw, Daisy, is that Hollywood is the Sunken Place for smart women, where their souls and brains are cut out of them as they find themselves serving, zombie-like, the oppressors they once abhorred. It’s too late to save Schumer, but can we all just promise not to let Mindy Kaling, Jessica Williams and Kristen Schaal go the same way, too? Because, honestly, I don’t think my heart could take it.
