America the Beautiful

America the Beautiful

“America the Beautiful” is a documentary that doesn’t yell or scream at us or try to scare us. Darryl Roberts, its director and narrator, talks in a calm, low voice much of the time. But the movie seethes with anger, and by the end, I shared it. It’s about a culture “saturated with the perfect,” in which women are taught to seek an impossible physical ideal, and men to worship it.

The movie begins by showing us a pretty girl named Gerren Taylor, who looks great in the skimpiest of bikinis and earns applause at a topless pool party although she keeps her top on. She is 12 years old. Her life as a fashion model began when a woman handed her a card for a modeling agency. She is tall and has good figure and “walk” like that of many models, and an ambitious mother named Michelle.

Roberts will follow her career from Chicago in this film which is also a general look at media-driven worship of women who most average women can never resemble (or should have no desire to). To establish the world into which Gerren enters, he calmly provides facts: (1) “Three minutes of looking at a fashion magazine makes 90 percent of women of all ages feel depressed, guilty and shameful,” (2) three years after television was introduced to Fiji Island society there had been zero cases reported but now they show 11% increase among their teenagers suffering from bulimia nervosa every year since then;

(3) six-foot-tall weighing only one hundred thirty pounds must lose fifteen more according some experts’ opinions if they want be considered healthy enough weight size; (4) those ads for Dove soap products featuring average-looking women became average only after several layers makeup applied followed by hours spent adjusting appearance using special software program designed make person look different than what they actually do look like before those ads were created.

Roberts watches as Gerren becomes a sensational success for one season. The main thing that makes her so appealing is how young she is; celebrity magazines can’t get enough of a 12-year-old who models adult fashions, and she takes New York Fashion Week by storm. But then the next year comes around and nobody wants anything to do with her anymore the same casting directors who picked her before now turn her away so after being told in Milan that her hips are “too wide,” she and Michelle head off to find work in London and Paris. After becoming a cover girl and overnight sensation, Gerren and her mother, who seem to live modestly, are virtually penniless. She does get paid while she’s in London: Her salary is the clothes she wears.

Their pursuit of modeling jobs creates turmoil in the girl’s personal life. During an argument with Michelle over whether Gerren should wear a padded bra to school, the child sobs that her mother has ruined high school for her but there are ways in which those years have been disrupted that she doesn’t yet understand. Her sensible Los Angeles middle-school principal finds herself dealing with a classroom-management problem, and asks Gerren to sign a “Behavior Contract.” Insulted, Michelle transfers her daughter to a more “understanding” school on Santa Monica Boulevard , and eventually pulls her out altogether for home schooling.

Roberts asks questions such as, “Do you ever think this might have an impact on your health?” when speaking to models about the profession that leads them to starve. He is tentative and quiet. The only time his voice rises in anger is after a photographer fights with an African-American woman who refuses to wear makeup that will lighten her skin by four or five shades.

As the photographer berates the model for being ignorant, “unable to listen” and “knowing nothing” about beauty, fashion and society, Roberts who is black himself listens incredulously. The “problem” of the model’s dark skin tone is simply one manifestation of the “problems” all women are told they have if they don’t match the fashion ideal. But Roberts knows women like the model and the photographer doesn’t; so he ordains himself with authority as a man with a camera.

“America the Beautiful” has a powerful message, but Roberts includes too much material not germane to his story: His own experiences on beautifulpeople.net, where applicants are rated on a sliding scale to find out if they’re beautiful enough to join; more standard footage of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and other plastic creatures; even more unnecessary stills from an interview with celebrity-gossip correspondent Ted Casablanca whose four-letter language earns an R rating for a film which could rescue some girls age 12 and up.

But it carries its message persuasively, all the more effectively because of Roberts’ level tone. The cold fact is that nobody can look like a supermodel and be physically healthy. And among all its astonishments designers like their models thinner because (are you ready for this?) To save money on expensive fabrics one of its most stunning comes late in life when we learn what happened to Gerren Taylor.

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