Ridiculous Opinions #215
For a long time, I’ve been trying to formulate my thoughts to describe how there are no movie stars anymore. I’m not alone in this opinion, but when I look at the current state of entertainment, there are practically no people under the age of 30 that I want to watch. Who are the “biggest” stars nowadays? Timothy Chalamet? Olivia Rodrigo? Zendaya? Harry Styles? Anja Taylor Joy? You couldn’t drag me out of bed to see any of these cats on screen or in concert.
There’s a lot to be said about how putting someone on the big screen seems to capture the true essence of who they are as a human being. It’s not a quantifiable metric by any means. You can’t measure their star power. You can’t figure out a rating for that person based upon some formula like LOOKS + SKILL + TALENT = CHARISMA. If a person has charisma, then they’ve just got it.
And charisma, itself, is hard to define. Charisma extends into real life as well. Sometimes, you find someone who attracts attention naturally; who is able to command a room, who is able to draw your gaze, who you are able to listen to without any effort. If you’ve got charisma, then you’ve got it. If you don’t, you don’t. You can’t learn charisma (despite what some might tell you). Some people are born with the gift of gravitas. Some are not. Such is the circle of life.
And that gravitas can translate into music, TV, and film. The ability of the camera to capture the charisma of a person is almost magical. Sometimes, we see someone on screen that we just want to watch. It’s inexplicable. We are attracted to that person. We feel comforted seeing or listening to that person. We just want to watch them.
But these people are few and far between, and as time has gone on, Hollywood seems to be less and less able to find them. I have theories about this. One is that Hollywood is an inbred monstrosity, full of nepo babies who are mere echoes of their famous parents skills or beauty. The other is that people in Hollywood (and the rich, in general) are decidedly lacking in adversity. Life has consistently been easy for them and thus they have never had the opportunity to build character through life experience.
But there are other reasons as well and I found an article from the Washington Post yesterday that kind of described one of those other reasons. It was absolutely fascinating to me. The article was about teeth; specifically, the teeth of famous people. Bear with me on this…
The article starts off talking about Sara Hahn, a Harvard-trained doctor specializing in cosmetic dentistry. She runs a Tik Tok account that has become super-popular, where she examines the teeth of famous people, dissecting what work they might have done in order to achieve the dental perfection that they have. My knee-jerk reaction to this was, What a horrible human being! Doesn’t she have anything better to do?
But I continued reading, trying to parse what the author of the article (and the doctor) was actually saying. Basically, the article is an examination of the pitfalls of the “perfection” that gets shoved down our throats every day. It spoke of how terrible it is that we are held to such high beauty standards when those beauty standards don’t exist in the real world and are clearly unattainable.
But the article was also a celebration of the beauty of imperfection. The imperfections that exist within us are what makes each of us unique. My teeth are slightly crooked. My hair is practically non-existent. My beard is fourteen different colors. These are the things that make me who I am!
And it is these imperfections that should be celebrated (which was the thrust of the article). You may look different, but isn’t that a good thing? Because the alternative is the notion that we all look alike, and that’s a terrible notion.
Which leads to what I was talking about in the beginning of this whole thing, which is the notion that no one in Hollywood is unique anymore. They’re all getting the same teeth! They’re all going to the same doctors who are going to fix their flaws in the same way so that, eventually, they will all look the same! And when everyone looks the same, where is the fun in the world?
Without unique people, then we no longer have movie stars. Without unique people, we have no one with any charisma. And what a boring world it is when that happens.
But that’s what is happening. The truth is that we should all celebrate our imperfections. We should enjoy our crooked teeth. We should accept our weird eyebrows and receding hairlines. We should be showing our fatty thighs to the world by wearing super-short shorts and we should accept the crinkles around our eyes caused by our cheeks that can actually move.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m perfect.
