‘America the Beautiful’: A Problem of Self-Image

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The idea of making a documentary had been rumbling around Darryl Roberts’s mind for a while before an impromptu sidewalk survey finally moved him to pick up a camera. Traveling around Chicago, Mr. Roberts found 200 women, and put the same question to each of them: Do you feel attractive? Only two said yes.

“It’s not all that complicated. I started doing the math, and if 198 women are saying ‘no,’ that means 99% of women feel unattractive. More than that, they blamed those feelings about themselves on all the magazines they read,” he said during a recent visit to New York, promoting his film “America the Beautiful” ahead of its scheduled New York premiere next Friday. “I knew the movie was starting to touch on something profound when I flew out to New York to tell all these magazine editors about my findings, that the images they print are having this profound, lasting effect on the women who see them. They laughed in my face.”

In this age of one-sentence elevator pitches and 30-second movie previews, Mr. Roberts — a former entertainment reporter on Chicago television — has the difficult task of selling audiences, festival organizers, and distributors on a movie that doesn’t easily fit a single genre. When the documentary opens here next weekend, many will rush to call it a movie about America’s image issues, or about its eating disorders, or about the modeling industry. But Mr. Roberts sees all these as three sides of the same, sad story — a web of misery that is being perpetrated by the entertainment and clothing industries, and encouraged by both cosmetics companies and plastic surgeons looking for new customers.

“There is a very clear point in the movie where the focus changes, where we shift from ‘This is what people are hearing and seeing’ to, ‘If you obsess over this stuff, then this is what can happen to you,'” Mr. Roberts said.

The idea, he said, was “to link pop culture to the way it makes kids and adults feel, and then draws a line between that and the resulting fallout.”

Venturing back and forth between Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, Mr. Roberts contrasts woman-on-the-street interviews with a behind-the-scenes look at the way advertising advances unrealistic expectations for women in American society. He then trains his camera on Gerren Taylor, a quiet 12-year-old who has become the hot new model on fashion runways around the world. He is there when her self-esteem peaks, after being told by everyone that she embodies the ideal woman; he is also there when the wafer-thin adolescent crashes and burns at the age of 13, told by the same people that she needs to slim down.

Showing Ms. Taylor as even she — a model — struggles with issues of self-esteem and rejection, Mr. Roberts starts posing questions directly to the viewer: If a thin, diet-obsessed teenager can be made to feel awful about herself, then what chance does an average-sized, middle-aged woman have?

He interviews parents of children who have died due to eating disorders — parents who suggest that cases like theirs are vastly underreported, given medical examiners who refuse to list eating disorders as the official cause of death. Digging into the world of cosmetics, Mr. Roberts looks at the products sold as beauty aids, advocated by advertisements that reinforce stereotypes. He discovers that whereas more than 400 ingredients have been banned from use in cosmetics throughout Europe, fewer than 10 have been regulated by the FDA in America. Is it possible, he asks, that cosmetics are not only often unneeded, but also unhealthy?

Then he turns his sights on the world of cosmetic surgery. “There are television shows out there following around these ‘plastic surgeons’ who have essentially no experience,” Mr. Roberts said, detailing — just as he does in the film — the ways in which women seeking better lips, faces, noses, and breasts are unwittingly putting themselves in extraordinarily dangerous positions. “There is a shocking lack of regulation in this industry, and you have these MDs who have taken a one-day plastic surgery course, have practiced on tomatoes, and who are now calling themselves ‘plastic surgeons’ and are putting women under the knife. That’s when things for me started going from unsettling to downright scary.” Since the film has started showing theatrically, several people have contacted Mr. Roberts to tell him that it was his film that led them to cancel their upcoming surgeries.

Mr. Roberts began the film in January 2003, and at every stop of the process, he says he has faced a hard sell. He had to talk his way into the AFI Dallas film festival, where the documentary’s premiere generated incredible buzz. He had to open without a distributor in Chicago, where the film sold enough tickets to attract the attention of such critics as Roger Ebert and ultimately land a distribution deal with First Independent Pictures and Larry Gleason, former president of Paramount exhibition. He was able to secure donations from men concerned about the ways this society is treating the women they love — an actor whose daughter was going through a self-image crisis; a doctor whose daughter was struggling with eating disorders.

But the most amazing part of Mr. Roberts’s story must be the face-to-face meetings he somehow secured with editors of such magazines as Seventeen — interviews that led to an array of blunt and brutal answers that have outraged early audiences. “To be completely honest, I was convinced that these magazine simply didn’t know about what was going on — about the effect their airbrushing and editing was having. I really believed that I would fly out, tell them what I’ve found, and they would be surprised,” he said. “But then I started talking to them, and it was stunning. ‘We don’t run a not-for-profit here,’ they started saying. ‘We’re not social workers, we need to make a buck. That’s the parents’ problem.’ It just blew me away. They know, but no one cares about the girls. It was all: ‘Money, money, money, money, money, we’re not social workers.'”

ssnyder@nysun.com


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