And YET, there also seems to be something deeper at work. The villains co-opt religion and conservative values to cheat and get ahead. The Japanese family is off-putting not solely because they speak with an accent, but because they’re so completely sold on this jingoistic John Wayne version of the American dream that they’d rather adopt a mediocre white girl who speaks perfect English than invest in their biological daughter who speaks Japanese. The cheerleader appears to be in a genuinely loving relationship with her boyfriend and the trailer trash mom not only really cares for her daughter but is emotionally stable enough to forge deep friend relationships. The girl with the eating disorder has been chewed up and spit-out by this small town’s vision of what success should look like for a teenage girl. Pun not intended. The intellectually disabled character, uh, probably shouldn’t be in the director’s cut.
And I think that’s what the important thing here is. We can’t control how the nuts and bolts comedic execution will age — Cracked continued to drop hard r-words over a decade after this film released, for example — but we can control the target. Drop Dead Gorgeous isn’t only mocking these women or this town, it’s mocking beauty pageants and, more broadly, the societal pressures placed on young women to look and behave a certain way — maybe even the way it affects men who both perpetuate this pressure and are indirectly shaped by it (i.e. the movie’s resident pedophile). Even the villain becomes so obsessed with winning the pageant she is literally driven to murder and eventually dies herself. Spoiler alert, this is all still a problem in 2021. People STILL murder each other at beauty pageants. It’s true. Don’t look it up.
Can Movie Comedies Age Well?
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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