'Pretty' dumb, Amy
Looks-first film no feminist triumph
H ERE’S the premise of Amy Schumer’s new movie: This woman is so demented she actually thinks she’s beautiful.
Per usual, Schumer’s character is a horrible person, the kind of entitled millennial would-be feminist also perfected, in life and art, by Lena Dunham. This relatively new archetype, The Aggressively Unlikable Woman, is somehow meant to be a mark of gender equality.
How are Schumer and Dunham the most prominent female voices of their generation? How are they considered feminists? Both traffic in a troubling strain of female comedy, one predicated almost solely on their looks and weight, self-flagellation in the public square while shouting at us to stop looking and quit judging — because who are we to say they’re not beautiful? And why, they simultaneously demand, is beauty the only metric that matters?
“I Feel Pretty” is the exhausting, depressing nadir of such confused thinking. When the film’s trailer debuted to backlash on social media and in fashion magazines — Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan among them — Schumer doubled down, insisting her film is about female empowerment.
“[Feeling bad about the way you look] disables you — you want to hide, it doesn’t let you live up to your potential,” she told Katie Couric in February. “And that’s what we want the most from women right now: ‘You have so much potential, you can do anything. We need you to lead.’ And they feel held back.”
But in Schumer’s worldview, women aren’t held back by gender discrimination or wage gaps or sexual harassment or bearing the brunt of housework and child care while balancing careers. No: it’s all down to looks.
“I Feel Pretty” kicks off with Schumer’s Renee, a sad sack who punishes herself by working for a cosmetics conglomerate, attending her first Soul Cycle class. She has her health, her friends, an apartment in New York City and a steady income, yet she is deeply unhappy for one reason: She wants to be beautiful.
So here she is at spin class, surrounded by paragons of fit- ness and beauty, so fat she practically breaks a bike and hits her head, knocking herself unconscious.
And when she comes to, Renee sees herself in the mirror, suffering — as the movie frames it — the ultimate delusion.
“LOOK AT ME!” she screams, vibrating with joy. “I’M BEAUTIFUL!”
This is meant to be a punch line — traumatic brain injury the only way a woman like Renee, and by extension Schumer, could truly believe such a thing.
What is Amy Schumer doing? Does she even know? Is she mocking herself ? Is she daring us to laugh at her? Is she conceding empirical standards of beauty? Is she pushing against them? If it’s the latter, how can she credibly do so?
Schumer is thin and attractive enough to star in big-budget Hollywood films — this is her third. She is blonde, rich, white, an author and stand-up comic, a voice in the culture. Why is she using her power, at this moment especially, to star in a movie that uses “confidence” as a fig leaf to promote female self-loathing? Why would she be OK with the studio’s aggressive pursuit of a PG-13 rating, ensuring tween and teenage girls can absorb this message?
If and when film critics debate Schumer’s own looks in the context of “I Feel Pretty” — which is only fair, and which she is clearly inviting — she, as Dunham so often does, will no doubt blame the patriarchy or misogyny or the trolls and the haters. She will claim to love herself as she is, even while playing a pa- thetic narcissist with superficial values whose persona tracks pretty close to her own: Renee often calls to mind Gross Amy, Drunk Amy, Feel-Sorry-for-Me-Amy-but-Don’t-Feel-Sorry-for-Me-Because-I-Am-Awesome Amy.
“I’m probably, like, 160 pounds right now, and I can catch a d--k whenever I want,” Schumer said upon accepting Glamour magazine’s Trailblazer Award in 2015. (Really, who asked?) She went on to slam the bulk of women’s magazines — many of which she’s appeared in, styled and shot like any other beautiful movie star — for making women “feel bad just for being born with a p---y.”
No scene in “I Feel Pretty” is worse than the moment Schumer’s Renee impulsively joins a bikini competition. Here she is, stripping half-naked and dousing herself in water, strutting around with the confidence — but really, lunacy — that she is a supermodel. She is desperate for a roomful of under-employed, unattractive day drinkers to find her hot, and when she loses, she insists it’s OK.
“I know I look good,” Renee says. “I don’t need some room full of drunk guys to confirm that.”
But she just tried to get that confirmation. How stupid do the filmmakers think we are?
Renee's self-esteem, even as she advances at work, remains tethered only to her looks. Lauren Hutton is wasted here — playing, much like herself, an older woman, a great beauty in her youth who could speak to the fragility of looks, of the moment every woman ages out and becomes invisible to men and society.
After Schumer’s character sees herself as she really is, thanks to yet another head injury, she goes on to promote cheap makeup to “regular” women by telling them they don’t need it — but, to self-actualize, they need it.
This is the film’s triumphant endnote.
Feminism deserves better. It deserves more than the likes of Sc hume rand Dunham navelgazing at their conventionally-imperfect- but really-totally-perfect bodies, then telling other women how to feel and think. To quote a great American female jurist: Beauty fades. Dumb is forever.