'Uglies' Can't Alleviate Appearance Anxiety at All

Before watching this film, I had a pretty limited understanding of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies—it’s a YA dystopian story like The Hunger Games or Divergent. It came out a few years earlier, but it was adapted into a film later than both. After watching the film, I think there's a reason for that. My biggest takeaway is a question: does a simple story that could be summed up in two sentences really need to be stretched into a 100-minute movie? Or even a franchise?

Maybe it does? We often forget that what seems simple and natural to us can be mind-blowing for teenagers. I still remember being shocked by Hanna (2011) as a teen—a girl assassin? So cool! But later, I realized it was just that typical story of a man's fantasy about a young girl.

Is that what teen movies are about—something you can not enjoy after growing up because they feel so simplistic, maybe even shallow? Of course not!

This might be Uglies's issue: its core concept is too basic. In a future hundreds of years from now, every 16-year-old must undergo surgery to become their best self, and the idea that equal beauty can eliminate all social differences and disharmony? That’s a flawed theory any thoughtful kid would see through. Maybe back in 2005, when Uglies first came into existence and social media was just emerging, using unrealistic beauty standards as the basis for a dystopian story might have felt fresh. But now, it just seems outdated.

I don’t know how to write a modern dystopian novel about beauty standards, but I can still dig into the subject, for at least I know Uglies isn't the answer.

As Gen Zs, we might be the last group to have experienced a world without smartphones or social media. Living through the transition from a time when the internet wasn’t mainstream to a world where no one can live without their phones, I have this very subjective, perhaps completely irrational feeling— society hasn’t progressed much over the twenty-odd years. Sure, technology has advanced at a breakneck pace, but I’m afraid people's mindsets haven't. Take beauty, for example: it’s still treated as a scarce resource, and people are just more obsessed with it than ever, using new cosmetic techniques to enhance their looks while claiming that natural beauty is superior to artificial.

So when a dystopian story tries to soothe our appearance anxiety with the same old clichés—like inner beauty being more important than outer beauty—we just don't buy it. And to be honest, I can’t say I’ve overcome my appearance anxiety; I’ve just gotten used to it, accepted that looks can’t be changed. The only reason I don’t choose injections or surgery is because I don’t have the money, and I see the many downsides of plastic surgery. But if someone offered me a red or blue pill to become beautiful, I’d choose it without hesitation.

Uglies pits outer beauty against inner beauty, which is just another form of binary utopian thinking. A more interesting setup would be: after everyone becomes 'beautiful', they find that even stricter and more extreme beauty standards emerge, creating new differences and more terrifying stories.

On a side note, the characters in Uglies—whether it’s Joey King, Keith Powers, Chase Stokes, or Brianne Tju—aren’t ugly at all. They’re already pretty enough, which makes the whole premise feel ridiculous.