The Leading Lady, and her 3 disgusting types

THE LEADING LADY (Female)

Playing age 21 – 35

Height: Any

Obviously this character needs to have the looks and star charisma of a leading lady. We need to believe that she would have been cast opposite REPLACED NAME OF IDENTIFIABLY HANDSOME CELEBRITY. It says in the script that she is dressed as ‘an adventuress’. She needs to have good comedic improvisational skills as the scripts might be developed further in the next few weeks. Also, she needs to be A List beautiful as the bar is being set rather high on her looks.

There are several ways we might go with this : she could be the Megan Fox type – staggering beautiful but poisonously dumb, she could be the Penelope Cruz or Eva Green type – fiery, bright and a bit foreign. It would also be good to have some more ethnic variety in the submissions particularly asian or even eurasian actresses.

Please give this your best ideas – very fun part for the right actress.

This is a casting call for an advert. An advert for quite a big company, and with quite a big star, so this wasn’t written by an amateur, this was- NO FUCK IT I’M FUCKING FURIOUS!

I was going to try to remain calm and composed about this like a real journalist or something but sometimes you’ve got to get mad don’t you?

Role model.

Where to start? Somewhere in this cacophony of flakey shit there must be a place to start right? Personally  I’ve always despised the categorisation of people, types of men types of women, that whole thing makes me feel like I’ve just drank battery acid, but for casting purposes I can to a certain extent see the usefulness in it, if only to link actors together. Children have to be the right age for the part etc. fine, I can be persuaded of that, but here are the three categories of “leading women” according to the advert.

“she could be the Megan Fox type – staggering beautiful but poisonously dumb” [sic]

Poisonously dumb is actually a selling point for our leading male. The script doesn’t call for her to be poisonously dumb, oh no, I read it to make sure. But if she’s staggeringly beautiful she’d better be thick as frogspawn to go along. Hot.

Now, I don’t like Megan Fox.  Nor am I attracted to her. In fact I don’t really know any men who are, she seems to be the epitome of the kind of person that people fancy because they’re told they do. And there’s plenty of crap to say about her, but stupid? Her presence in films is almost universally decorative but her characters are never stupid. In Transformers she’s the tough one, she’s the one who knows about cars when our hero doesn’t, she’s the smart one, or at least the Transformers’ universes version of the smart one, and that’s in a film so disgustingly misogynist that the audition process she went through was to let him film her washing his car.

But now we have this, a legitimate casting call, which have deemed her to be stupid SPECIFICALLY because she’s pretty, and then labelled that as a selling point. This advert which is encouraging women to get in touch and be part of something, which is in itself more sexist than Michael Bay, a man whose view of women resembles that of a serial killer.

This genuine advert is also an artists rendition of what Michael Bay sees when he closes his eyes.

“She could be the Penelope Cruz or Eva Green type – fiery, bright but a bit foreign”

If she’s going to be fiery and bright, she’d better have something to balance it out, like being foreign. She’d better be just exotic and mysterious enough that we’ll put up with her having a soul.

“It would also be good to have some more ethnic variety in the submissions particularly asian or even eurasian actresses.”

Or EVEN Eurasian! Maybe even them! Those ones!

I’ve said before, but it’s worth saying again, that I’m not saying I’m immune to this sort of stuff, I like pretty women a lot. I have a healthy appreciation for pretty women and in the past, I’ve even had an extremely unhealthy one, so I don’t want to feel like I’m above it all or shaming people who do fancy Megan Fox, but come on… can’t we all get together on this? On there being more than two types of women that REPLACED NAME OF IDENTIFIABLY HANDSOME CELEBRITY would be interested in?

If you are an actress and have ever had to read one of these adverts and then actually apply, please, please make yourself known to me so I can apologise. It was nothing to do with me, but I just want to be able to sleep at night.

“Please give this your best ideas – very fun part for the right actress.”

 

DISCLAIMER: If you want to stop reading here you can do, I think that’s a suitable ending to an angry article. On the other hand, if you’re actually interested in the sociological trends of attraction and how this defines how the media portrays women, then you are my kind of person, and should read on.

So there’s always been an extent to which the media, or popular opinion defined what we deem as attractive. It used to just be based on the hardest thing to achieve. In times of famine, the fat people were the sexiest, in times of glutton, the average says the opposite. But there’s an interesting phenomenon occurring at the moment which is changing the shape of the way we define women, and the different “types” of leading lady. In my opinion, it’s pretty much as disgusting as the old way, in fact I might argue more so. No… I WILL argue more so!

Regular readers might remember the theorem I wrote on proprioception and its effects on a simultanagnostic model for attraction. Upon writing it, I did a lot of research into dating websites, particularly ones which allowed for someone to be rated on attractiveness. Now, I despise people who refer to women as numbers, to the extent that during a congratulatory drink upon being hired, I told my boss he was being a vicious arsehole for doing so. I’m still employed by him, but only just. Unfortunately though this was quantitative research and so numbers had to be devised somehow.

In the past there has been a pretty solid correlation between score on attractiveness, and the amount of messages that women were sent, which makes sense. This is no longer the case. The women who got the most messages sent to them were the ones for whom there was the most difference of opinion. You were more likely to be contacted if some people gave you a 2 and some gave you a 10, than if everyone gave you a 9.

This is because in the past, it’s all been about competition. TV says this is the kind of woman who is pretty, if I can get with her then I’ve beaten all the other guys, and men would buy into it because they felt like they were supposed to. The amount of times I’ve met people who have taken out their phones and shown me pictures of naked women, only to shoot me the most terrified hopeless look when I tell them I don’t care. “You… you don’t care? Am I not doing it right? THIS IS HOW MEN TALK?! RIGHT!?!?”

Please high five me or my years of training in male bonding will be wasted.

But no, that’s no longer the case. Now, it’s not about that, it’s about “who do I like, who I think nobody else will like?”

Some people interpret this as being simply practical, you just have more chance of achieving fruition with someone who only you like. But I disagree. Practicality has never come into it before, if practicality was an issue we wouldn’t fancy celebrities at all. No this isn’t about that, it’s about smugness.

It’s about who you fancy because you’re better than everyone else, you’re different, you can see what they can’t see. And therein lies the new breed of leading lady.

“She could be a little bit kooky, a little off centre but pretty in her own way. Above all else, she should be adorable.”

And here is where we get Zooey Deschanel, who isn’t the only person to be doing this but she’s the one who spells her name as though it’s ZOoooOoOOOeeey so she’s the one I’m going to pick on.

There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s perfectly fine at what she does, I asked around before I wrote this to get people’s opinions of her and it’s pretty solidly agreed that she’s a good actress, who’s had some good roles, and some terrible ones.

No, I’m not mad at her. I’m mad at you, man who fancies her. YOU!

Above all else, she should be adorable. She should in no way challenge the leading man. She shouldn’t be witty, or clever, she should instead be delightfully odd in a way that only you, the intelligent and refined male viewer, can see though, because you’re open minded. The rise of kooky leading women is just as much about making a woman an appendage to the man as the decorative heights of Megan Fox, except that you’re also showing off about how tolerant you are of such oddities.

Look at those men who try to change her to make her more attractive to the people in the show! Not like you, YOU like her just the way she is! A fucking IQ score stapled to your massive forehead full of brains.

Isn’t that good of you?

Of course, this is a simplified view of it. Hope is not lost, there are plenty of great leading ladies, and obviously characters on film are not just there so that members of hte opposite sex can be attracted to them. But with casting calls like that one at the top there promoting it that heavily and that offensively, it’s easy to feel like it’s a system based on who people want to fuck. If that’s the case then that’s terrifying, but only as terrifying as the actual choices we seem to be making about who that is.

Grim.

~ by Sandy Nicholson on August 19, 2011.