You don’t know you’re beautiful (that’s what makes you beautiful)

Insecurity in “Babygirl” and “The Substance”

The ancient poets of One Direction had a hit song called “What Makes You Beautiful,” back in 2011, that was often stuck in my head despite the fact that I found its premise troubling. Actually, it was their debut single, like, ever, which I just found out while googling the lyrics. Indulge me with a glance, won’t you?

You're insecure, don't know what for
You're turning heads when you walk through the door
Don't need make up to cover up
Being the way that you are is enough
Everyone else in the room can see it, everyone else but you
…If only you saw what I can see
You'll understand why I want you so desperately
Right now I'm looking at you and I can't believe you don't know
You don't know you're beautiful
That's what makes you beautiful

It sounds sweet at first, I guess, although the trope of men telling women they “don’t need” to wear makeup is so icky to me (really what you don’t want to see is evidence of effort or artifice– wait until you find out what goes into our no-makeup makeup looks!). But then they get to the crux of the message: “You don’t know you’re beautiful– that’s what makes you beautiful.”

This girl’s insecurity is the point– if she had walked into the room feeling like hot shit in addition to looking like hot shit, well, that wouldn’t have had the same effect on these lads at all!

I thought about this dumbass catchy song while seated in a crowded movie theater in Brooklyn this week with a bunch of horned-up thirty-somethings on dates trying to maintain their seriousness next to giggling groups of friends. The trailer for “Babygirl” made quite a splash online and in my cohort; people were counting down the days until this sexy, subversive-seeming movie came out. Nicole Kidman playing a boss bitch exploring power dynamics with her hot intern? The internet was ready with preemptive Oscars!

Better writers than I have already dissected the ways this movie was a disappointment when it comes to the kinks that the trailer makes you think it will explore; read the brilliant Jen “are the ‘dark thoughts’ in the room with us right now?” Winston for a perfect articulation of why.

What fewer folks seem to be talking about is the thing that stuck most in my craw. The first time Kidman’s character takes off her clothes in front of her new man, she presents him with a literally flawless body. “You’re so beautiful,” he says appreciatively, to which she demurs, “No I’m not.” I’m paraphrasing here, but they have this whole ludicrous exchange where she acts like she doesn’t look like Nicole Kidman while standing there looking like… Nicole Kidman.

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All women have insecurities, sure. That’s a sad universal truth I can accept for a premise. But earlier scenes in “Babygirl” showed us her character going through all the body maintenance that it takes to look the way she does, down to the cryotherapy and Botox (which she doesn’t even need numbing cream for, because she is just that #hardcore.) She swans around her office in perfectly tailored Girl Boss attire looking like Melania Trump in pussy bow blouses, tight pencil skirts, and stilettos. Even in the privacy of her own home, she’s artfully draped in silk camisoles, not a sweatshirt in sight.

This woman is never, ever off-duty in her performance of the successful CEO– and this woman knows she is beautiful. Sorry, she may have insecurities about other things– would still really love to know what those dark thoughts were!!-– but they ain’t her appearance. This woman works very, very, hard to embody the role of sexpot executive (sexecutive? forgive me). The naked body we see in the movie– statuesque, perky, all toned limbs and ripped abs– could belong to a 20 year-old swimsuit model. At least in this movie the labor involved in looking like that isn’t invisibilized– but that’s part of the reason I just can’t accept this supposed insecurity about her looks.

“The Substance,” a movie that caused a similar amount of commotion earlier this year, did a better job illustrating how an objectively gorgeous older woman can lose her confidence in our youth-obsessed culture. There’s a great, painful scene where Demi Moore gets all dressed up for a date, only to stare at herself in the mirror long enough to convince herself she’s actually a monster, unworthy of the desire she’s already inspired in the man who asked her out. Of course, by the end of the movie she’s turned into the actual old hag of her nightmares. What she wouldn’t give to go back to looking the way she did before she started taking “the Substance”!

It’s like when you see a photo of yourself from a while ago and think how great you looked and how you were self-conscious at the time but you’d kill to look like that again so you could enjoy it properly. Every woman knows this feeling.

Whether you blame Moore’s character for failing to appreciate what she had, or a patriarchal capitalist culture built around selling women solutions to kick the can down the road just a little bit further when it comes to insecurities it instilled in us in the first place… well, that’s up to you. In a world that has framed “preventative” Botox as an empowering act of self-care, the quest to fight the inevitable is neverending because, of course, time comes for us all. We’re marching in formation like obedient little soldiers investing our resources in our own inexorable declines. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, all that jazz.

“Our cultural fixation on youthfulness as the defining quality of beauty makes aging so much more daunting by contrast,” wrote beauty writer Sable Yong when “The Substance” came out. “Chasing youth will always backfire in a society that reviles and stigmatizes visible signs of aging nearly as much as any evidence of cosmetic intervention to obscure it.” Go off, Sable!! I wanted to write about this movie at the time but felt she had already done it so well there was no point. But after seeing “Babygirl” I’m once again ruminating on the dubious brand of feminism Hollywood is currently peddling.

I felt much sorrier for Demi Moore’s character than Nicole Kidman’s because no amount of exercise and starving herself to look “good for her age” could stop her from being replaced by a younger woman in her job, which appeared to be “being Jane Fonda.” But I can’t stop thinking about why those two actresses were chosen to tell these particular stories. They are both women who have held onto their status as sex symbols in Hollywood for decades. At 57 (Kidman) and 61 (Moore), they remain a triumph of zero percent body fat and glossy hair and smooth skin. How much more powerful would these parables be if they featured people who weren’t the product of a lifetime of energy devoted to cultivating physical perfection? How brave is it really to bare all when you have, objectively, nothing to hide? Kidman’s naked body in that scene may theoretically be unadorned, but actually it is sculpted by a lifetime of priorities optimizing for rigid beauty standards. She and Moore still represent an unattainable ideal for most women.

Women will continue to bring red carpet photos of celebrities to their injectors/trainers/hair dressers/stylists because beauty is a conduit to power and even the most beautiful among us can’t stay young forever and there will always be something to sell to make you feel “better” about your “flaws” or at least like you are taking action against them. This is when we are at our most attractive, boy banders and Hollywood can still agree– adhering to every beauty standard and still not feeling good enough. Now that’s a good girl.