Hollywood pushes ugly stereotypes
When making films, inner beauty really just skin deep
Vail Reese is the world expert on movie characters’ skin conditions. The San Francisco dermatologist can tell you anything you want to know about scars, birthmarks, tattoos, Jon Hamm’s vitiligo and the Austin Powers’ adversary Fat Bastard’s extra nipples, a spoof of the same condition on Christopher Lee’s assassin in The Man With the Golden Gun.
For two decades, Reese’s website, Skinema, has chronicled these abnormalities, which, he argues, too often appear on villains. For instance, in the movie Grease, he writes, “Pretty boy Travolta ... musically drag races ... the extensively acne-scarred ‘Crater-face.’”
Reese sees how such conventions affect his own patients. “It’s not just, ‘Am I going to look pretty?’” he says. “It’s, ‘Are people going to judge me?’”
His work is a peek into how Hollywood equates classical beauty with virtue, from Disney romances to James Bond bad guys to comedians making fun of Stephen Bannon’s face.
Despite progress, movies and TV still lazily perpetuate a notion we no longer believe: looks correlate with character. When many in Hollywood are fighting for greater diversity and against stereotypes of all kinds, should that fight include types of bodies and faces?
“It’s overdue,” says Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who wrote the 1999 book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (Random House Canada, 2011).
“Hollywood could do a lot to move us in a direction to widen our empathy and widen our notion of what is beautiful.”
A recent study in JAMA Dermatology found six of the American Film Institute’s top-10 villains of all time have dermatologic issues, from Hannibal Lecter’s androgenic alopecia (hair loss), to the Wicked Witch of the West’s verruca vulgaris (wart).
Reese points out good characters turn evil after they get blemishes, like Two-Face, the district attorney who becomes a Batman Forever nemesis after an acid attack. Sure, scars can cause people to feel alienated, the doctor says, but “I’ve never met the serial killer who said, ‘I didn’t want to kill anybody but because I got this bad skin rash ...’”
“Beauty equals good” is an age-old trope in entertainment, points out Doris Bazzini, a professor of social psychology at Appalachian State University.
In a 1999 study she co-authored, a panel watched 20 of the top-grossing movies in each decade from 1940 to 1989, rating characters by attractiveness and other traits. They found the stereotype held true across all decades and genres. She discovered the same thing in a 2010 study on human characters in 21 Disney animated movies.
“Attractive characters displayed higher intelligence, lower aggressiveness and greater moral virtue,” the study said. Even animal characters show similar patterns, Bazzini points out: The villain in The Lion King is literally named Scar and has one across his eye. “Evil as plain as the scar on his face,” says one song in The Lion King II.
Reese does acknowledge that it has improved. The sympathetic Deadpool (played by Ryan Reynolds), has severe scarring under his mask, for instance.
The trope finds its way into comedy, where political cartoons exaggerate a nose, chin or mouth to imply someone is silly or sinister. And late-night comedians poke fun at their targets’ looks all the time. As Seth Meyers said recently, “Pollen, thanks to you, I am so stuffed up, my face feels the way Steve Bannon’s face looks.” Donald Trump’s skin tone has prompted many variations on the insult “Cheeto.”
But Trump reportedly takes medication for rosacea, a condition marked by redness that affects 16 million Americans.
Such jokes aren’t just targeted at politicians — they imply a broader attitude about what faces mean. Shouldn’t we avoid spreading the stigma of any perceived appearance quirk, regardless of how detestable that person may be?
Hollywood activism on this issue could be impractical, and it might appear ridiculous, even dangerous, to try to relate it to gender and race, which are deeper aspects of identity.
Still, Etcoff argues, all types of diversity onscreen should be part of the same fight.
“It does come back to ... where am I in this culture? Why does no one (on screen), look like me? Is it because I’m short? Because I’m above average weight? Because of my skin tone? Maybe I have some sort of disability.
“It makes it feel like those (traits), are being hidden in some way, or devalued.”