How the Ugly Truth Breaks Art's Mirror

Talking to some high school teachers recently, I’ve discovered why all pop culture and all art is doomed to obscurity. What these teachers told me was that they had a hard time getting students interested in old movies not only because of the stagy acting and the inferior or absent sound, and so on, but because the actors just weren’t very attractive. Standards of beauty have changed so drastically over the decades that the stars of old come up short every time.

So that means the stars of today, no matter how realistic the acting or exceptional the set designs and special effects, still won’t appeal to the students of tomorrow. Brad Pitt will be the late 21st century equivalent of Harold Lloyd, or maybe James Dean. (I never can quite place Pitt.). Tom Hanks will be nothing more than a revamped Jimmy Stewart while the attractiveness of Julia Roberts becomes as much a mystery as that of Katherine Hepburn. (And even I can’t imagine a time when Humphrey Bogart could ever have been attractive.)

Maybe this thought makes you smile. What a shallow point of view, you’re thinking. People look at films as works of art, not as beauty pageants. But in art, looks and style are everything, dah-ling.

I mean, many fans would argue that films now are better than films of olde simply because the special effects are far superior. After all, what we see in Metropolis is clearly transcended in a film like The Matrix, right? What did Fritz Lang try to recreate? Electricity and a robot. Ooooh. Funky. But The Matrix gives us those great slow motion, multiple-angle shots of combatants in mid-air. It recreates whole worlds. There’s no comparison. For some viewers, that is the only way to measure a science fiction film’s success – the beauty of its effects.

Meanwhile, sometimes an entire technology comes along and changes the nature of the performer. That’s what happened with music videos and the types of singers and musicians that could be successfully marketed to the video audience. You have to look good to be a video star – although that doesn’t explain Rick Ocasek of The Cars. It’s just the way things are. But one look at the video stars of the early 80’s vs. the stars of today and you can already see the shifts in aesthetics. Cindy Lauper couldn’t make it in pop music today, but then maybe we’ll say the same thing about Pink tomorrow.

And every other art must often become fashion’s bitch. In poetry, for example, one of the most common forms for the last few decades has been the slim, anorexic shape, with one or three words per line. In another time, this form would have seemed hideous, but now it is the Kate Moss of the poetry world. (I mean the poems are unnaturally skinny, by the way, and not that they are smuggling drugs.) And if you teach poetry in the classroom you will soon understand that one of the things your students will most remember about you is not what you said about what William Carlos Williams meant by that red wheelbarrow, but how you often would wear one shirt cuff rolled up higher than the other and that one hair on one of your eyebrows tended to curl up toward your forehead. (That’s how I console teachers who worry about what their students are learning. I just tell them to be respectful and to make sure they are well groomed with as few boogers as possible hanging from their nose per term.)

I know from my experience working in television that the things I say may be deemed important by my producer, but of equal and, I suspect greater importance is that I have a very good complexion and hardly need any makeup at all. My choice of clothes, though, is another thing. Golf shirts bad, suit jackets good. I apparently often fail to project a sufficient degree of authority based on my wardrobe alone. This is a lesson I hope to have learned when I go back to the rough and tumble world of speed dating where researchers, I’ve heard, have determined that the most accurate predictor of whether or not one participant is attracted to another is not their sense of humour or the ease with which they speak or the excitement they have for their work, but the way they look and the timbre of their voice. We dream of deep emotional attachment, but we hunt according to surfaces. The person wearing clothes and a hairstyle that are twenty years out of date can have all the love and tenderness in the world, but they’re going home alone.


Could it be that Oscar Wilde was right all along – that “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing” with the corollary that “Fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable we are compelled to alter it every six months”? These were observations of a truth he sometimes despaired of and which his own work often contradicts. There we can find love and compassion as well as forms of truth other than fashion. Perhaps the best art transcends fashion. Or it might be in fashion but not of the fashion. There are some positive signs here and there. I mean, young stars like Scarlett Johansson almost seem to have an Old Hollywood air about them, as if she could have been in films alongside Irene Dunn, while other stars of the past still seem beautiful today. For instance, if you teach film and you have students who say that Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn are not beautiful, you send them on over to me. I’ll be the guy with one sleeve rolled up higher than the other, just ready to go to work on these young minds waiting to be refashioned.