UGLIES

The Uglies was one of my favorite Young Adult book series growing up, and in 2006 20th Century Fox bought the rights to a movie adaptation, where it languished in production limbo until recently. In September of 2020 Netflix announced that they had the film rights with actress Joey King (THE KISSING BOOTH) on board as both executive producer and actress.

The Uglies was part of the YA boom of the 2000s about a future “utopian” society that is divided into two castes, the “uglies” and the “pretties.” Everyone under the age of 16 is deemed an “Ugly” and described as having asymmetrical faces or imperfect skin, things that are perfectly normal to growing teens going through puberty. Upon their 16th birthday, though, teens are given mandatory cosmetic surgery to become a “Pretty” and the ability to live a manufactured party life free from responsibilities (similar to a social media Influencer!)

There always seems to be a disconnect between dystopian fiction and their Hollywood film adaptations. Darker themes may be present, but get watered down to their most benign and consumable versions. What’s more, Hollywood seems unwilling or incapable of allowing their lead actresses to look less than perfect.

In another 2000s YA novel that had a Hollywood adaptation, Mortal Engines, the main character is described as having a “scar which cut her face from forehead to jaw, a wrenched mouth, a stump nose, and a single eye.” When it came to casting this movie the director, Christian Rivers, chose to downplay these physical characteristics, saying in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “It’s fine in the book for Hester to be described to be ugly, hideous, and have lost a nose ‘cause, even that, you reimagine it in your own mind as, ‘Okay, yeah, she’s ugly, but she’s not really ugly.’ Tom falls in love with her…and film is a visual medium. With a book you can take what you want and reimagine it in your head and put together your own picture. But when you put it on film, you are literalizing it. You are making a literal thing, so it was just finding a balance where we need to believe that Tom and Hester fall in love. And her scar does need to be disfiguring enough that she thinks she’s ugly – it can’t just be a little scratch – and I think we’ve struck a good balance of it.”

Fans were rightfully upset about this. While sexual attraction is not the end-all-be-all of what it means to be loved, it is important for people to be able to see themselves in characters played onscreen. It’s as if people with scars or disfigurements are ugly and can’t have people fall in love with them. And as if hundreds of horny housewives don’t want to fuck The Phantom of the Opera.

Beauty standards always fluctuate. Trends tell us one year that a characteristic is ugly and then the next year a celebrity has that characteristic and it becomes a new beauty standard, the cycle repeating itself. The rise of social media and influencers inspires people to covertly use filters and photo editing apps to beautify their appearance beyond what is humanly possible. When we surround ourselves with this kind of imagery it can be easy to fall into the trap of seeing anyone who doesn’t follow these trends or edit their photos as unattractive (or worse, inhuman) when that is what we are used to seeing.

We need stories like The Uglies to examine how this affects our identities and relationships to beauty. And we need these stories told honestly, sincerely. What we don’t need is another Hollywood cash grab with a perfectly conventionally-attractive actress as our lead and being told for 90 minutes that, actually, she is ugly.