That Carrie post reminded me of my biggest and oldest pet peeve: adaptations taking a character who's supposed to be ugly, or at least not beautiful, and casting someone perfect-looking. A lot of the time this is simple misogyny, but the inability to allow ugly people to exist also extends to men and boys, and I remember how pissed I was when I started understanding this at around the age of eight.
Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.
Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.
Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.
Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.
The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.
Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.
A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!
And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)
Btw this is why "everyone is beautiful" type body-positivity does nothing for me, and why I'm hyper-sensitive to how people discuss ugliness in reality and in fiction. For example, I love the Just King Things and the Shelved by Genre podcasts, but I think they struggle to see the value of written descriptions of ugliness. They interpret Steven King's descriptions of Carrie as cruel, they interpret Tiptree's description of P. Burke in The Girl who was Plugged In as cruel and fatphobic. Sure, I don't want to give King kudos for all his depictions of women, but he did get it right that time, and Tiptree absolutely did. Describing a character, especially a woman as ugly, genuinely ugly, no not secretly beautiful, actually ugly, and then telling her story, a story about existing in the world as an ugly woman, is really really fucking important. And people keep shying away from it, oh, it's cruel to call anyone ugly, let's pretend that ugly people don't exist instead.
My hated example is the Mortal engines movie, where Christian Rivers and Peter Jackson discuss how Hester Shaw, the lead female character, having canon accurate facial disfigurement would be "too distracting" and make her having a romantic relationship difficult to believe, and how obvious when we read books about ugly characters we IMAGINE they're pretty so doing that on film is obviously the way forward.
Hester having this intense scar isn't distracting from her character, it's extremely fundamental to it! She was disfigured in a traumatizing attack as a child, she's so used to being perceived as hideous and rejected that it has become internalised as her personality. She has trust issues, abandonment issues, is bitter and violent and.... The other main character! Who does wind up loved and happy, even as her issues lead her to never fully feel anything other than ugly inside and out. She's an amazing, complex character, and the way these two spoke about her appearance is still so infuriating.
Her appearance in the book:
Movie:
