Power and Pulchritude
29th July 2010
Freeberg nails it yet again. His explanation for Palin Deragement Syndrome rings true.
There is a large, and perhaps still growing, contingent of mostly females who believe it’s quite alright for some among their sisters to be prettier than they are. And more powerful. Just not both.
Our current President has had an opportunity to nominate replacements for, what, two Supreme Court vacancies now? And both nominees are ugly toad-like women. You only have to analyze the statistics so long before there is an ugly truth revealed to you: Someone is being satisfied with this unbroken trend. It has to be the case. If you sent me out to find women this homely and unappealing, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t know how to start. Two out of two of our vacant seats on the Supreme Court have to go to homely women? This is what “best qualified” looks like, huh. Yeah. Tell me another.
So with real power, among liberals, men have to be at least as handsome as John Kerry, and women have to be at least as homely looking as Hillary.
I think that this is behind my objections to Liv Tyler as Arwen in the Lord of the Rings movies. The woman is a thousand years old, and she looks and acts like a prom queen? Oh, please. Cheerleader? Sure. Sorority? No problem. Most beautiful woman alive? Not even close. Try, oh, Angelina Jolie. Or, better yet, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Not only drop-dead gorgeous, but it’s entirely believable that she could kick your ass and run a global corporation. Liv Tyler? She could maybe put her makeup on in the morning, and then rest for a while. But casting someone like Catherine Zeta-Jones as Arwen would have been offensive to the Target Demographic, and Jackson (consciously or unconsciously) realized this, and stepped back from the brink.
July 29th, 2010 at 12:04
Wow! Freeberg nailed it.
And, Wow! Kind of over-thinking LOTR, aren’t you, Tim of A? (I do have to agree that Zeta-Jones looks both beautiful and like she could kick-a$$ at pretty much any level.)
July 29th, 2010 at 13:54
Hey, everybody and his dog has an opinion about the LOTR movies, I’m just asking for my fair share. Jackson did a lot of cutting on the original story, most of which I didn’t like but understood once the logic of it was explained (in the commentary on the DVDs), but that was one decision I think wrong and will continue to think wrong. Oh, that and having Sam treated like a comedy sidekick rather than the body servant that was Tolkein’s original concept. (I put that down to the fact that Tolkein was an English gentleman who understood such relationships, whereas Jackson wasn’t and doesn’t.) By and large Jackson completely missed the social relationships in the LOTR — Frodo was a MIDDLE-AGED country gentleman, Merry and Pippin were Younger Sons of old country families, and Sam was a working-class servant. All of which is, of course, Politically Incorrect these days.