Shallow Hal and the Death of Inner Beauty
The film could never be made today, but its lesson is more relevant than ever.
American Dreaming contributor Johan Pregmo has a new piece out in Queer Majority about his journey down the gender-nonconformity rabbit hole: “NB, or Not to Be.” It’s quite good.
In the 2001 Farrelly Brothers romantic comedy “Shallow Hal”, Jack Black’s title character, a shallow man purely interested in women for their physical attractiveness, is hypnotized to see only people’s inner beauty. Through these inner-beauty goggles, Hal sees people not as they appear in reality, but as they figuratively look on the inside. A stunning model with an awful personality becomes a hideous crone to his eyes, while a kind and funny 300-pound woman transforms into a 29-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow. Obviously, they fall in love. Naturally, the hypnotic spell is broken most of the way through the film. And of course, though initially attracted to her seeming beauty, Hal ultimately falls in love with who Rosemary (Paltrow) is as a person, overcomes his shallowness, and the two go off together. Once you know the premise, every major plot point becomes not just predictable, but inevitable. Yet for all that, the film remains charming, heartwarming, funny, and inspirational. It’s a movie that could never be made today, and if it somehow were, it would be absolutely skewered.
Our self-deputized culture cops, who no longer believe in the concept of acting, wouldn’t look fondly on the “thin-privileged” Paltrow playing her 300-pound alter ego in a fat-suit. Rather, they would demand the role be played by an “actress of size.” There would be complaints about the diversity of the cast, and the ways in which disabled and queer characters were made to be the butt of jokes would certainly rub people the wrong way. Eclipsing these criticisms would be a hail of “fatphobia” charges so thick as to blot out the sun. To be sure, Shallow Hal was a product of its time, and some elements, even just 20 years later, already seem outdated. But the core theme — the liberal ideal of seeing past someone’s superficial attributes to who they are as a person — is as timeless a lesson as you’re ever going to find in fiction. To regard that message as retrograde or even bigoted shows the ways in which left wing culture wars in general, and the body positivity movement in particular, would move us backward and away from progress.
When it comes to beauty, the philosophical ideal from the before-times (prior to the “Great Awokening” of 2014) is that true beauty is on the inside. It’s the idea that there is more to someone than their appearance, and that, to an extent, their personality, sense of humor, skills, or kindness could render them more attractive than they might seem based on looks alone. Of course, no ideal can completely rewrite your attractions, but this is aspirational. It’s something we would like to be true, because we understand intuitively that life is essentially a lottery. Some people hit the jackpot, while others are dealt unfortunate hands. There’s no fairness to it, and so finding ways in which people might make up for their misfortunes seems to take some of the sting out of nature’s random cruelty. This ties directly into the broader liberal appreciation of the individual — that everyone is different and unique in their own way and cannot be judged at a glance by surface-level characteristics.
This liberal inner-beautyism, to give it a name, is fundamentally grounded in reality. It takes the world as it is (people in society generally find certain body and face types more attractive than others), and overlays an aspirational principle (other factors should matter too, and taken together, they might change your mind, so don’t be so quick to judge). As we were all told as children: It’s not how you look that matters most, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Today’s body positivity movement, by contrast, dictates that, no, it is who you are on the outside that counts, and fat is beautiful — and if you disagree, you’re a fatphobe. Unlike its liberal predecessor, body positivity asserts that fatness is not an unattractive trait that can be outshined by other factors; rather, fatness is beautiful, full stop. That all things being equal, a 300-pound woman is just as attractive as a 130-pound woman. Body positivity doesn’t deal with the world as it is, but as they believe it should be.
Shallow Hal was a story about a man who saw a fat woman’s “inner beauty.” But because that inner beauty was represented as a thin woman; because Hal wasn’t simply attracted to a morbidly obese woman right from the start; that there was anything to have to look past with the aid of hypnotism — is evidence of fatphobia. This presents several problems. Logically, for the concept of inner beauty to mean anything, there must be a sense in which one’s “outer” and “inner” beauty could misalign, allowing the inner to shine through and compensate. It’s predicated on the category distinction between the two; on the fact that there are pervasive, biologically-influenced norms around physical beauty — norms that may fluctuate slightly between place and time, but nevertheless exist within a certain range. As in other areas of left-activism, we see human attractions cast as voluntary political decisions, rather than something far deeper and more ingrained. Love is love when it’s gay people, but if a thin person is unattracted to a fat person, or a white person a black person, or a lesbian a trans woman, love is suddenly a lifestyle choice, and to choose incorrectly is to be a bigot.
Rather than tempering the shortcomings of human nature with wholesome precepts, body positivity denies them outright and demands that we rewrite our attractions to suit their ideology. The reality-denialism is bad enough, it’s the attempt at thought control, which has become all too common in left-activism, that is most disturbing. It’s not enough to treat overweight people with courtesy, kindness, and respect. It’s not enough to see people’s inner beauty. It’s not enough to develop romantic feelings for an overweight person whom you didn’t initially find attractive only after getting to know what a wonderful person they are. No — you must be aroused seeing them across the room that very first time, no less so than a Victoria’s Secret model. There’s asking too much, and then there’s being an authoritarian weirdo, and then there’s this.
This is part of a larger trend. The modern leftist approach to many of life’s unfair disparities is not to stress our common humanity, do what we can to ameliorate the worst suffering, and give people more tools to improve their lot. No, their strategy is increasingly to reject reality and excoriate anyone who still believes their own lying eyes. Obesity is healthy and beautiful. IQ is a bogus concept. Trans women are literal women in every sense of the word. No diet is healthier than any other (a notion known as “food neutrality”). For every problem this approach defines out of existence instead of actually working to improve, it conjures a multitude of new haters ripe for the scolding. That’s all it’s ever really been about. Helping people is hard; denouncing bigots is fun. There’s a Twitter bio for you.
Being overweight sucks. Asked to choose between being normal weight versus being a morbidly obese multi-millionaire, none of the 47 formerly obese respondents in an International Journal of Obesity study chose the money. Indeed, these same respondents overwhelmingly preferred deafness, being blind from birth, and even having one leg amputated over being a morbidly obese multi-millionaire. No one can deny that overweight people experience bias and prejudice as a result of their size, and that’s unacceptable. There are as many biases as there are categories of people, however, and the fact remains that fat people in America are no oppressed minority. 41.9 percent of US adults are obese, and 74 percent are overweight. For comparison, 64 percent of Americans are Christian. Cheeseburgers have overtaken Christ. The percentage of overweight people in the US is equal to the percentage of Jews in Israel. Are there anti-Semites in Israel? You bet. But call Israel an anti-Semitic country, and you can rightfully expect to be laughed out of the room.
The answer here is not to shame, insult, humiliate, disrespect, prejudge, or discriminate against anyone on the basis of their weight. Neither is it to deny reality, human nature, or science. The prevalence of obesity in the modern world is a multifaceted issue. We need better food regulations. We need better education. We need vastly better science/health journalism. Most of all, we need a culture change. And we need a little more Shallow Hal. We don’t all need to be hypnotized to judge people by the content of their character rather than the circumference of their waistline. One can be a beautiful person without having a beautiful body. It’s okay to make that distinction. It’s okay to laugh about it. Being in touch with reality is a prerequisite for a sense of humor. It’s why those detached from reality don’t get comedy and are never intentionally funny. You need to see the world as it is in order to exaggerate it in ways that make us think, feel, and laugh. Cheerlessness is a harbinger of delusion.
See also: “Performatively Troubled”
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Yep. Thanks for the sanity, Jamie. Among the blizzard of newsletter emails, yours always deserves a read. Keep going!
Really interesting insight into the movie. You might want to check out my own work as I've done something similar in my Substack.