we’ve outgrown the Ugly Duckling Transformation

[Music] hello my beautiful doves or should i say beautiful swans i thought today we could do a fun little chitchat video on a very common movie trope in a lot of chick flick movies if you're like me and i assume a lot of people are like me because this was a very common trope at least in the 90s and 2000s you probably find a lot of satisfaction from the makeover montage scene in a lot of movies even if you don't currently i'm willing to bet that you did at some point in your childhood or teenage hood and if you're a little lost i'm talking about the montage scene where an ugly duckling usually a girl transforms into a beautiful swan with the help of her friends makeup a new haircut and a new wardrobe some movies have a full montage sequence those are the best while others just simply do this before and after comparison but either way the girl changing her look is a major plot point we see this again and again and again someone or some people up there in hollywood clearly know what audiences want to see in their chick flicks but why is this transformation so appealing even though the term glow up was definitely popularized over social media our obsession with transforming ugliness or mediocrity into beauty is not a new phenomenon cinderella is arguably the oldest and still popular glow up story in history with variations in numerous cultures the first alleged variant of cinderella is called rotipis hopefully that was pronounced correctly but it originated in ancient greece and tells the story of a greek slave girl who marries the king of egypt another popular related fairy tale puts a heavier focus on the physical glow up the ugly duckling was published by hans christian anderson in the 1840s and tells the story of well an ugly duckling who was bullied by other animals for his ugliness but then finds acceptance when he grows up to become a beautiful swan the oldest film i've seen with this ugly duckling transformation trope is now voyager which came out in 1942 betty davis plays the main character charlotte vale who is described as an unconfident spinster she is of course wearing glasses has bushy eyebrows and is quite the opposite vision of hollywood glamour because if she was beautiful she wouldn't be a spinster right after going to rehab she blossoms into this beautiful glamorous woman because having good mental health means getting contact lenses right the glow up definitely stems from our desire to be beautiful and we can pin that desire down to friedrichsen and robert's objectification theory the objectification theory proposes that girls and women more so than boys and men are socialized from a young age to view their bodies from an observer perspective this is an act known as self-objectification the impacts of self-objectification include negative body image anxiety around physical appearance eating disorders impaired physical and mental capabilities i'm sure none of this is new to any of you now if that's not bad enough the media has constantly bombarded us with propaganda on how to change our appearance um to fuel this further obsession and healthy obsession with our bodies as early as the 1920s there was a recorded epidemic of eating disorder cases among girls and young women which strongly correlates with the way that magazines start to push this very slim silhouette but advertising is not the only devil at work here i was thinking about this a lot lately over the past several weeks and honestly the makeover montage is just straight-up glamorized propaganda the makeover montage is all about changing your appearance and becoming your most beautiful self it's basically the act of glowing up compounded into a two-minute sequence one of the reasons why we love a good makeover montage is because it's in part a wish fulfillment i just talked about how the glow up appeals to young woman so it makes sense that if we feel like we relate to a certain character we would want that character to undergo a glow up there's also the added layer that in most of these movies the mc is a nice person but is bullied or ignored because of her looks josie right mikasa that is so sad i know like five chickens had to die just so she could look that stupid josie in the 1970s karen dion and her colleagues conducted a study on the link between positive perceptions and attractive people her results show that people assume that prettier people stay single for a short amount of time and overall live better more fulfilling lives with that in mind it makes sense that we would want the best for our protagonists and seeing her transform into this beautiful swan gives us the comfort and reassurance that she's going to live a happy life or get her happy ending the movie glow up is also accessible rarely do we see these characters undergo cosmetic surgery in their montages they're just doing simple things like dyeing their hair or plucking their eyebrows or putting on lipstick and suddenly they look so much better the media packages these transformations to be a series of actions that really anyone can do like you see a character straighten their hair and you think oh i can straighten my hair and i can look better if i straighten my hair this accessible glow up is a lot more gratifying than i think if we had seen the character get a 10 000 cosmetic surgery but of course there are problems with this trope for one if we think about it the makeover montage upholds the same socially constructed idea of physical beauty over and over again most of the time the character starts off looking a little messy she has poor fashion sense she wears glasses she has curly hair etc her glowed up version in contrast has straight hair contact lenses designer clothing and an overall more feminine appearance it's pretty much always the same recipe on the flip side how many characters can we think of go from contacts to glasses or feminine to masculine i can't think of any we've all been conditioned since childhood to view certain traits as more beautiful than others that's no surprise this is why when a character transforms to embody these certain social ingrained beautiful traits it's easy for our brains to immediately go hey she looks so much better than before rather than just thinking what objectively happened oh she looks a little different there's a theory called the cultivation theory which states that the more people get exposed to unattainable beauty images the more likely they are to adopt this unrealistic standard of beauty as reality unfortunately when all these transformations go the same exact way the makeover montage becomes a tool that the media uses to emphasize this very rigid one singular form of beauty they're saying you either have these treats or you're not beautiful another issue is technically a narrative flaw but male validation is often tied into this cinema glow-up notice the focus on the shocked men in these scenes rather than the narrative focusing on how the woman feels which would have been better it goes straight to the men and their reactions i feel like these kinds of sequences get into young girls heads you know whispering to them like hey don't you wish you were her hey if you looked like her boys would turn their heads for you too i mean there are literally so many examples of girls going through the transformation sequence just to literally get a boyfriend the physical transformation is also used as this necessary means to gaining confidence grace is honestly the worst offender of this trope that i can think of because sandy changes herself completely for dany and it's totally romanticized with a musical number which is honestly kind of bop but that's besides the [Music] are point listen to me they're fleas on rats worse than that there are memes on fleas on rats before anyone comes for me for coming for clueless i do give the movie some credit because the makeover is ultimately portrayed as a bad idea i was like why am i even listening to to begin with you're a virgin who can't drive tai becomes bitchier and more shallow after cher is done with her and she does recognize that by the end of the movie look i have been in agony the past week and i can't even believe that i went off the way i did however she doesn't revert to her old self aesthetically which i think is still a problem the makeover transformation in these examples is like a one-way ticket you become beautiful and then it's your responsibility to wield that beauty to wield that power responsibly but the power of being unconventionally attractive or dressing in a non-feminine way is rarely ever celebrated sometimes this trope can manifest in a classist way as well there's a pretty uncomfortable imbalance of power in these movies with usually the man being the wealthy one modifying the appearance and lifestyle of the less wealthy girl take pretty women julia roberts plays vivian ward a sex worker who lands a very wealthy client edward lewis who lives in the beverly hills they eventually fall in love and yes while i love this movie tremendously it did not age well at all and the idea that sex workers need to be saved by rich men is a super patriarchal harmful trope anyways vivian goes through a makeover scene to basically make herself classy again problematic implications but she goes shopping for new expensive clothes on rodeo drive and learns dining etiquette from the hotel manager who's kind of weirdly invested in her the sales associates at this one boutique initially treat vivian poorly assuming that she doesn't have any money i don't think we have anything for you you're obviously in the wrong place please leave the aha moment though when she comes back in during her shopping adventure wearing newer expensive clothing is not really as powerful as they were trying to make it seem you work on commission right uh yes big mistake big huge i have to go shopping now it's kind of fighting classism with classism the movie is like saying oh well they should have treated her better because she actually had money this whole time don't judge a book by its cover which is kind of like a shitty message the real lesson should have been treat people with respect regardless of their income level her makeover is considered to be a major improvement from her previous lifestyle which is honestly super demeaning to real life sex workers and i would i would pretend i was a princess trapped in the tower by a wicked queen and then suddenly this night on a white horse with these colors flying would come charging up and draw his sword and i would wave and he would climb up the tower it just leaves an unsavory taste in my mouth uh to see the men in this movie kind of congratulating themselves and being like oh i saved the squirrel from the street rewatching this movie as an adult the makeover montage is really just like about stripping vivian's agency and speaking of agency in so many of these films the main girl isn't even the one who initially wants the makeover usually it's kind of just forced upon her by more powerful people the last problem i'm going to talk about is the incendiary take that femininity is the only way to grow up or to become a real woman i've taken a woman without a discernible smidgen of estrogen and transformed her into a lady miss congeniality is the perfect example of this miss congeniality is about an fbi agent gracie hart who enters a beauty pageant undercover to catch a killer targeting the pageant now i hadn't seen this movie since middle school and yet like i still remember so vividly the makeover montage sheen specifically the bikini wax scene it just stays in your head you know bikini wax um the one thing that i didn't remember though was like the glorification of workplace harassment which was a big yikes come on look you do a few butt shaping exercises you tighten this up you can pull this off [Music] [Applause] [Music] 2000's humor you know anyways this movie is very fun and it does have some good commentary on female friendships but there are some troubling themes at hand here gracie is a fully capable super intelligent woman and even though she loves her job and is good at it she's single and doesn't have any outside of work friends these are quote-unquote problems that the movie associates with her quote-unquote tomboyishness but is that enough have you no pride in yourself and you're in your presentation you know what i'm an fbi agent all right i'm not a performing monkey in heels you're also a person and an incomplete one at that in place of friends and relationships you have sarcasm and a gun i am the job and i'm okay with that i mean you're the job right yeah i'm the job what are the job you're the job so then what's wrong with me i date i go on dates i know i know everyone thinks i haven't had a date in about 10 years is that what you think oh i think you date damn right i do because you know both times it was totally screwed up her male co-worker love interest also treats her differently based on how she presents herself before the makeover he makes jokes about how she's not a real woman what is it like a woman thing don't kid yourself nobody thinks you that way and after the makeover he starts to consider her someone worth dating the movie tries to make it seem like he always liked her but we all know that's debatable by the end she embraces femininity more and there's like a yay girly girls can be strong too kind of moment the problem is that there shouldn't be an issue with women wanting to embrace masculinity like it's okay to strictly be a girly girl or strictly be a tomboy and i would argue that women who embrace masculine traits are actually more ostracized in society than women who embrace their feminine traits and i think it would have been a more powerful statement for gracie to hold true to herself and to go against the mainstream but apparently according to the director or the writers or whoever was responsible for this mess it's more important for gracie to embrace being a real woman and learning how to appropriately balance her manly interests with a hot feminine body it's also interesting how even though we can assume she's successful by her job title we don't see her succeed in any mission or get any respect from the men she works with until she puts on a dress and while she does leave the pageantry behind to go back to her job that she loves she goes back to it wearing makeup and styling her hair it just puts this wrong idea out there that masculine women are not deserving of respect or they're just not developed enough i just i just don't like that of course not every single makeover montage is problematic there are examples of movies subverting the ugly duckling transformation in favor of like you know high school coming of age and female friendships like mean girls and john tucker must die in mean girls katie transforms into a plastic first as a part of her friend janice's revenge plot but becomes sucked into their toxic pink world by the end of the movie katie goes back to being who she was at the beginning and so the makeover in this movie is not a one-way turning point the makeover rather than being representative of her best self actually signifies her losing her sense of self so why are you still messing with regina katie i'll tell you why because you are a mean girl you're a [ __ ] in john tucker must die kate gradually transforms into john tucker's dream girl with the help of his three ex-girlfriends with the intention of breaking his heart of course and teaching him a lesson movie is less about her transformation as it's only a ploy to seek revenge and more about female friendship it's also worth noting that even though we see kate's friends picking out her clothes there's not a huge emphasis on physical improvements the makeover montage has also been subverted to emphasize career development in movies that target older slightly older demographics such as legally blonde and the devil wears prada elle woods's makeover montage and legally blonde is completely intellectual and follows her path studying taking notes and trying her best at harvard law school andy from the devil wears prada gets a designer makeover only because she wants to be taken seriously at her job are you wearing this the chanel boots yeah i am you look good however she also realizes that the job is actually not for her later on and subsequently scales down her look yeah the thing is i have all these clothes from paris and i don't have any place to wear them so i was wondering if you could take them off my hands similar to katie's and mean girls the makeover is not the be all and all [Music] in any case i hope we continue to see chick flicks embrace uniqueness and individuality and who celebrate change in terms of personal development over physical appearance and honestly i'm not trying to blame and shame anyone who does like the movies that i've covered today like i really enjoy all the movies or most of the movies that i've talked about today i just think that the ugly duckling transformation is a popular trope that hasn't aged well and if hollywood can't figure out ways to continue to subvert it then they should just retire it completely anyways thank you so much for watching listening to me rant for however many minutes and i hope you all have a magnificent week i'll see you all next time [Music] you

Channel: Mina Le

Views: 648,959

Rating: 4.9685798 out of 5

Keywords: film analysis, video essay, video analysis, film commentary, movie commentary, ugly duckling, transformation, movie makeover, makeover montage, chick flicks, chick flick, mina le, miss congeniality, pretty woman, netflix, legally blonde, mean girls, john tucker must die, the devil wears prada, clueless

Id: Aa4bR5ZO3dM

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020