Pretty to Plain, Just Add Glasses

"She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me" - Mr Darcy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Sorry to state the obvious, but novels are not a visual medium. When a character is described as unattractive, we take their word for it, and create a picture of them in our minds with that in consideration. Because beauty is a personal and subjective thing, many people will have differing ideas on what is unattractive. Not to mention, if not a lot of detail is given, you can interpret 'unattractive' to mean anything from not conventionally attractive in the time period the novel is set in, to utterly repulsive. But what happens when a novel is adapted into a film? Casting directors need to cast the beautiful characters, which should be easy enough with Hollywood's abundance of gorgeous stars. But what to do about the plain women and the unappealing men? Will they cast an unattractive actor? Perhaps a plain, or less conventionally attractive actor? Unsurprisingly, they will often opt for an attractive actor, and they may or may not go to lengths to hide their good looks, depending on how important the character's appearance is to the plot. But expect the character to still look beautiful, as a quote from The Simpsons of all places puts it quite well, they will be "TV-ugly, not ugly-ugly".

It always bothers me when a character in a book is described, sometimes even at great length, as unattractive, at least conventionally so, and yet they are played by a beautiful actor. One example that perfectly illustrates my point is Keira Knightley as Eliza Bennet in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. It was a stupid casting choice because Knightley is not only a very attractive woman, she probably would have been considered very attractive in the era in which the film is set, so you can't even justify it with the differing standards of the time periods. The casting of Jennifer Ehle in the 1995 BBC adaptation was, I felt, much more fitting. Although by no means an unattractive actress, I would believe that, with her rounder face and softer features, Ehle would not have been considered very pretty by the standards of the time period, while her sister Jane, played by Susannah Harker, had the more desirable long face shape and sharper, more striking features.

It is very common for films to have roles of supposedly unattractive characters played by attractive actors, simply because... um... actually I don't know why. Are film makers afraid that we as viewers won't watch a film if it has realistic or ugly characters in them? If we could handle Lon Chaney's hideous makeup in the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, we can handle a genuinely plain person every now and then. Anyway, for whatever reason, beautiful people are cast in these roles, usually 'de-prettified' in some way by dressing them in less flattering clothes, giving them bad hair or by adding glasses. Admittedly, giving an attractive actor unflattering clothes is a fairly good trick, but it doesn't really work because a beautiful actor is still beautiful with messy hair and a baggy argyle jumper.

Now, there is something that I must address, because if I don't it is sure to come back and bite me in a less than pleasant place. Here I am going on about characters having makeovers in film adaptations, when I thoroughly enjoyed the film adaptation of Louis Sachar's Holes, despite the fact that this film is guilty of just that. In the book, the protagonist, Stanley Yelnats, is an awkward teenager who is frequently teased for his weight, and later given the nickname Caveman because of his size, and also because a fossil that he finds. In the film, Stanley is played by Shia Labeouf, a tall, thin, lanky actor who is, let's face it, very attractive. Having watched some of the film's extras, they do explain that they had considered casting a chubby or overweight actor, but because in the book the character becomes slimmer and fitter over a long period of time, which would have been very difficult to show in a film, they had to remove that aspect of the character. They also mention that chubby teenage actors are hard to find, although I doubt that very much. True, this casting choice did mean that the whole bullying thing had to be swept under the rug, and the Caveman nickname didn't work quite as well, but I understand why they made this decision, and at least they put some thought into it and didn't just think "well, we can't cast an actual fat person, our characters all need to be attractive!" and I thought the film worked well despite this, so I will let it slide because I just love that film.

Back on the subject of glasses, I have to say that something I always take issue with is this persisting idea that glasses are supposed to be unattractive. It seems that, in movie land, people can't see Julia Robert's face behind a pair of glasses; maybe they are magical or something. Adding glasses works somewhat in older films because glasses were not particularly stylish, and they didn't come in very many differing or fashionable designs, so in these cases I will let it slide, albeit reluctantly. But the problem is that it is still used as a 'de-beautifying' technique to this day, and as a glasses wearer, I can't help but feel offended at the implication that my choice to not stick my fingers in my eyes every morning or spend hundreds of pounds to be shot in the eyes with a laser makes me 'frumpy'. On top of all of that, it is just lazy. Some films utilise makeup and prosthetics to make their actors look less conventionally attractive, but some just feel that throwing on a pair of glasses will do just as well. Don't expect us to see a pair of glasses and automatically see the character as unattractive. Christopher Reeve was still Christopher Reeve, even with his Clark Kent glasses on. Now, I know that Superman wore glasses as a disguise and not as something to make him look less attractive, but my point is that, even when he wore large, thick-framed glasses, he was still a good looking man.

At least the idea of the 'brainy specs' makes a little bit of sense, considering short-sightedness is related to reading a lot of books, even if the reason for this isn't fully understood, so I can accept that it is somewhat grounded in logic. Also, at the very least it is a somewhat flattering trope, even if it does have a somewhat patronising feel to it, as if to say, "Hey, you four-eyed kids may not be good looking, but at least you're smart!" although I suppose it is to separate the 'brains' from the 'beauty' for the sake of balance.

Incidentally, many people now consider glasses to look very attractive, so suck on that, Hollywood.

Unreliable Narrators

WARNING: This post contains possible spoilers for the following books: Frankenstein, The Woman in White and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Proceed with caution.

"Since you have preserved my narration... I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity." - Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

There are a number of texts which touch on the idea of unreliable narrators. They could be biased, they may not have all the information, they may be recounting events which they never witnessed, and are therefore only speculating. In some cases, narrators have a completely different view on events, as in the case of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in which the narrator is autistic and reports on the events around him quite differently, with very specific details on things which other narrators would likely pass by. There is also the possibility of the work itself being tampered with if, for instance, the frame of the story is that of a diary or a series of letters, they could have been altered by another character within the story. When studying Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, my English teacher encouraged us to question the validity of Marian's recount through diary extracts as, at the end of her entries, the villain, Count Fosco, writes in her diary. We were led to suspect that her diary had been altered, possibly with entire passages removed by Fosco in order to protect him from being exposed for the crimes he committed.

When characters recount events in which much dialogue takes place, I have always been sceptical as to whether or not the narrator would really be able to take in all the information at the time and report it back perfectly, word for word. If I were to write down a conversation that took place several hours before, I probably wouldn't use quotations and instead use flimsy phrases like 'he said it was a bad idea' because I would be unable to remember his exact wording. Then again, people in real life rarely have the ability to speak so eloquently and with such rich subtext as many novels will have you believe, so some suspension of disbelief is required. Referring back to The Woman in White, Marian's recounts through her diary entries are somewhat justified in having the dialogue flawlessly replicated by her natural gift of a photographic memory, but many other texts seem to imply that characters just remember exactly how every event happened. Apparently they were that impacting and memorable. Or perhaps I'm going prematurely senile.

When reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein I started to wonder, as the story progressed, how reliable this narration was, as these events were being recounted by more and more narrators. To clarify, at one point in the story, the monster is telling Frankenstein his tale, which Frankenstein dictated to Walton, who was writing the tale in the form of a letter to his sister. Then later, during the monster's tale, he begins retelling the tale of Felix and Safie. I reached the point where it just started to seem ridiculous. I couldn't know at this point if any of the narrative would be accurate as I was reading it, because it had been through three different narrators before it got to Walton's letter, which I was supposedly reading. My suspension of disbelief was strained at best. Then I read a passage in the last chapter in which Walton explains how Frankenstein amended his account, to fix any mistakes, to ensure that the correct story would go down in history. Despite it not being a particularly pressing concern, this did make it seem more believable. Luckily Shelley is a good enough writer that it didn't bother me enough for me to be distracted all through the novel.

So next time you're reading a book, think about what it is that you're actually reading. How reliable do you think your narrator is? Is it a first-person narrative, in the form of a recount, or a third-person narrative, from the point of view of a seemingly omnipotent observer? Perhaps it is told from a random onlooker's perspective, and we only see their interpretation of the events. Or maybe the narrator really is that good at remembering the tiniest detail of every person they encounter. Mind you, some characters seem striking enough to leave enough of an impression that you could never forget that subtle birthmark just above his full, shapely lips, surrounded by just a touch of stubble on his strong, chiselled jaw.

But don't take my word for it, I just escaped from a mental asylum. And I'm a compulsive liar.