Renee Zellweger: If She No Longer Looks Like Herself, Has She Become a Different Actress?
She looked enough like herself in the trailer not to particularly bother me. However, this is the main point he is making:
It may sound like I’m being patronizing, but if you go back and look — I mean really look — at the old Hollywood stars, who we think of as some of the most incandescent people of the 20th century, the truth is that if you forget their iconic status for a moment, a lot of them were highly idiosyncratic-looking. To name two obvious examples: Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. But more tellingly, on the actress side of things, just think of Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Fontaine, Bette Davis — radiant sensual goddesses all, but sorry, these weren’t the beauty contest winners. They looked like heightened versions of us.
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
Exactly so.
I’m thoroughly sick of most TV programs because of the faces they’ve started choosing since the 1990s. They all look like they come from the same goddammed gene pool — and an in-bred one at that. They all look like cousins. And with all the digital “enhancements” that are done in post, too many of them are beginning to look like fucking androids. Artificial people. And I’m not singling out women. It’s men too. The men can especially look like they have plastic faces. I will leave out names because singling out specific people isn’t the point.
If there’s any crisis of self-esteem in America, it’s due to this. The people on our screens no longer look like us. And this matters. This is important. We’re basically being told over and over and over and over that if we don’t look like that, we don’t matter.
And when it’s pointed out, we get a loopy rebuttal that entirely misses the damned point: Rose McGowan Pens Response to Critic of Renee Zellweger’s Face: “Vile, Damaging, Stupid and Cruel” (Guest Column)