Too ugly for Hollywood?
Kylie Klein-Nixon talks ‘sexy scars’ and the beautiful people
When I met screen writer Philippa Boyens to talk about Mortal Engines, there was one question I was dying to ask, woman to woman.
Who am I kidding, there were about 5000 questions. Along with Sir Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, Boyens is one-third of the screen writing Ateam that changed New Zealand’s relationship with film forever – but at the top of the list there was a key one, specific to Engines.
The books’ heroine is Hester Shaw, a strongwilled, driven young woman, who also happens to be significantly disfigured.
Author Philip Reeve describes her in the novels as ‘‘a portrait that had been furiously crossed out... Her nose was a smashed stump, and her single eye stared at him out of the wreckage, as grey and chill as a winter sea’’.
As a lead in a genre story, Hester is almost alone in her unflinching female ugliness. For fans, she’s a beacon of acceptance and inclusiveness in young adult fiction.
In the film version, however, not so much. There, she is played by the very lovely Hera Hilmar, whose two steely eyes and unmashed nose are only enhanced by what Slash Film described as a ‘‘sexy scar’’ on her cheek and chin.
So what I wanted to ask Boyens was why? Why, when they had the chance to make possibly the first big-budget film to have not only a disfigured action lead, but a disfigured female action lead, that rarest of cinematic unicorns, did it seem like they’d wimped out?
As it happened, Boyens didn’t have to be asked, she got right to it.
‘‘We wanted our main character, our leading lady, one of the first in the history of film to be that disfigured, to carry that scar and what it did to her, and how it affected her and what it represents, but we also knew it was a very dark piece of storytelling to show someone attacking a child,’’ Boyens said.
‘‘If we’d done the scar the way it was described in the book, you would literally have [to see] a man holding a child down and attacking her with a knife and we were never going to do that.’’
That’s actually pretty reasonable, considering the tone of the film is more action-adventure romp than gritty nightmare. Add to that the more pragmatic aspects – Hilmar is in almost every scene in the film so the makeup and CGI would be a massive time and budget commitment – and it all seems less cop-out than business first.
Still, it’s a pity. When the first look at movie Hester appeared online, folks were as unimpressed as only folks on the internet can be. With Hester, they complained, Reeve was deliberately trying to upend misconceptions that fiction has laboured under since the Greeks first wrote plays – that beauty equals goodness, that women must be beautiful to deserve love.
‘‘I decided right from the start to make Hester ugly,’’ Reeve told a Mortal Engines fansite. ‘‘I liked the idea that the hero would slowly fall in love with her anyway, which is far more interesting than having two gorgeous people seeing each other across a crowded room and falling in love.’’
That good work was undone, the fans felt, with one 30-second clip.
Director Christian Rivers, possibly caught off guard by the anger, said they had to make her more photogenic so she’d be pretty enough to fall in love with, which had roughly the same effect as dousing himself and everyone around him in petrol and lighting a giant flaming metaphor.
Like book Hester, Rivers’ reply isn’t pretty, but I have no trouble believing it’s honest.
Hollywood has always had a phobia about ugly female characters in romantic or heroic roles. Hell, it doesn’t even have much time for ‘‘plain’’ women in those roles, let alone the actively eye-popping.
Remember Frankie and Johnny? On Broadway, the dumpy, frumpy, deeply troubled waitress was played by Kathy Bates. When the play made its way to Hollywood, Oscar-winning Bates had transmogrified into renowned frumpster Michelle Pfeiffer.
More recently there was Artemis/Samantha from Ready Player One, whose unsightly red-wine birthmark was so severe it had crippled her selfesteem. In the film, it’s a smallish blemish on Olivia Cooke’s silky-skinned cheek.
It is a gender thing, too. As The Mary Sue website points out, women fall in love with monsters in movies all the time: Beauty and the Beast, Hellboy, The Shape of Water.
In genre fiction, male ugliness can mean evil, but it can also be shorthand for pain and suffering, or unruly power yearning to be tamed. In movie love, an unattractive guy can be a misunderstood sweetheart. An unattractive girl with romantic feelings is, well... the point is, she isn’t.
To be fair to Hester and the Mortal Engines film, her looks and her scar are the least crucial part of what makes her such a great character.
Still, as a card-carrying member of the Ugly Girl Club (Chubby Auxilliary) myself, I like the idea of escaping into a fantasy where looking like you’ve been boiled isn’t an impediment to pashing the hero. You know, the same way Captain America, or Spider-Man, or any number of male power fantasies let you imagine a world where weedy losers are just a science experiment or spider bite away from the kind of power and attractiveness that makes girls googley-eyed with lust.
I don’t need it to be every single film – they don’t call good looks ‘‘easy on the eye’’ for nothing – but just once would be nice.
Mortal Engines opens on Thursday.