What <em>Dumplin’</em> and <em>Queen America</em> Say About Female Beauty
Midway through the 1999 movie Drop Dead Gorgeous—still one of the most caustic satires of beauty pageants and their scarily dedicated contestants—the mockumentary’s camera crew goes to visit the reigning Mount Rose American Teen Princess, Mary Johanson (Alexandra Holden). The interview takes place in the eating-disorders wing of a hospital; Mary suffers from such severe anorexia that her hair is falling out in clumps and she can’t walk. She smiles, radiant and grotesque at the same time, while describing her preparations for last year’s pageant. Two weeks before the contest, she says, inhaling carefully, “I was practicing my talent, finishing my costume, brushing up on current events, and running 18 miles a day on about 400 calories. I was ready.”
Lona Williams, who wrote , knew intimately the toll that pageants could take on the women and girls who participated—she’d been in 1985, placing as first runner-up nationally. Her movie, about an impoverished teenager (Kirsten Dunst) who wants to win a scholarship to college so she can be a news anchor like her idol Diane Sawyer, relentlessly skewers the darker elements of beauty contests: the ferociously pushy parents, the corporate sponsorships, the awkward negotiation contestants with an effigy of Jesus nailed to the cross). But with Mary, nods grimly at the cost of pressuring women to be perfect.
