Payton Ewalt - Supplemental Post #2

 

When I was travelling back to LA this past weekend, I watched Crazy, Stupid, Love on the airplane. It was my second attempt at finishing it, and this time I finally made it to the part where Ryan Gosling’s character makes Steve Carell’s a new man. We often talk about the female makeover in films, one of the most iconic being Julia Robert’s makeover in Pretty Woman. The female makeover in film is representative of the sentiment that women, as we are, are not enough, and the perfect us exists deep underneath layers of something holding us back – something that active participation in consumerism can reveal. Everyone wants to be given an unlimited budget to go down Rodeo Drive and tell a shop owner that they made a big mistake by not selling to them. Big. Huge. But no matter how much money I spend, I’ll never look like Julia Roberts.

But this male makeover that I watched was just as involved in participating in capitalist consumer culture; Ryan Gosling’s character dresses sharply and makes fun of brands like New Balance and the Gap, giving off the impression that his finely tailored suit and expensive sunglasses are part of the image of the perfect man that can pull any woman he wants. But in the end, he confesses, or comes to the realization that he actually doesn’t want to be a douchebag – actually, he wants to be like Steve Carell’s character before Gosling’s changed him. The male makeover interacts with consumerism to show him that he has always been the best form of himself that he can be, no matter what he wears or buys, he’ll always be a great guy. But I can’t think of a single makeover where the starlet reverted back to the original version of herself before.

Why do we associate female stars with their makeovers? Is Julia Roberts always synonymous with Pretty Woman, Anne Hathaway with The Princess Diaries, Sandra Bullock with Miss Congeniality? Is the reason we don’t associate makeovers with male stars because they can’t reproduce capitalism as successfully?

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