200 Pounds Beauty

On Wednesday night, I watched the Korean film 200 Pounds Beauty, a movie about a 200-pound girl with an ugly face. Hanna works as a phone sex operator and is the singing voice of Ammy, a mean, manipulative pop star. After a hurtful prank causes Hanna to lose face in front of Ammy's attractive manager, Hanna blackmails one of her phone sex clients into giving her total plastic surgery. She goes into seclusion for a year and works off literally half of her body weight (there are scenes with a newly beautiful Hanna jumping around the house in one of her legs of her old jeans). Her face is completely reconstructed.



The result is a beauty that is so pure-looking it looks all-natural, and so silicone-enhanced Hanna becomes Jenny, a pop star who has never had plastic surgery.

200 Pounds Beauty is a movie that was difficult for me to watch without thinking of the cult of beauty both in Asia and America. Based on a Japanese manga, the movie depicts the sad truth of how little ugly, obese women are valued and unfortunately fails at delivering a message of inner-beauty and self-acceptance. Sure, the most beautiful thing about Hanna is her inner-beauty, but the movie never lets us forget that her success as a singer could not have happened without plastic surgery.

Although it was described to me as a comedy, the jokes are sometimes dark in subject nature and were at times offensive to me as someone who believes women should be valued for who they are.

• Hanna's best friend repeatedly fat-shames her, despite being "overweight" and "unattractive" herself (I personally thought she had her own quirky charm). After being swindled by her boyfriend, the friend overdoses on pills in an attempt to commit suicide. It fails, even though (as her doctor pointedly reminds us) she took enough pills to kill an elephant. In the movie's closing scene, she reveals her own wish to have total plastic surgery.
  
• Hanna attacks her friend's boyfriend, in what is probably the most gratifying scene of the movie. For the first and only time during the film, a male is confronted with his own deceitful, shallow behavior and is punished for it rather than a female character punishing herself. The moment is short-lived. Hanna's manager breaks up the fight, and the boyfriend threatens to sue. In response, the manager rips up Hanna's skirt, musses up her hair, and pushes her out of the elevator. "I told you if you dress like that, it's an invitation to rapists," he says. Um, is that supposed to be a punchline?
  
• After her plastic surgery, Hanna learns that even though she has become beautiful, she will be looked down upon for having gone through plastic surgery. "You're a monster," her friend tells her, and Hanna is painfully aware that the man she loves would not accept "unnatural" beauty in his own girlfriend. Like Frankenstein's monster, her body is a somewhat grotesque amalgamation of different beautiful features. She is afraid to have sex, because her plastic body could betray itself or become spoilt. Jenny's "natural" beauty is somewhat scary -- her flawless face, large almond-shaped eyes, small upturned nose, and pouty lips seem like they were ordered out of a catalogue rather than owned by a living person. At the end, Hanna is distraught. She's changed so much of her appearance she's lost her identity.

What bothered me the most was the lack of ownership Hanna seemed to have over her own decisions. Everything of consequence that happened in the movie happened because she was pretty, ugly, or fat. Even choices Hanna made, such as getting plastic surgery, were made to please others, not to have power and autonomy over her own body. The film reminded me of the U.S.'s short-lived tv show The Swan, which featured female contestants who got several major plastic surgeries and competed in a beauty pageant. Entertainment media noted that it was unfair and sexist to take women with low self-esteem, give them drastic makeovers, force them to compete against each other, and provide only temporary counseling. Sure, entertainment plays a role in enforcing unattainable standards of beauty and encouraging making jokes at the expense of "fat" or "ugly" girls. However, society also finds it much easier to sympathize with the "after" than the "before."