Screen resistance: New Anatomies of Beauty?

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If “Hollywood films shape and express the way we see—and don’t see—our bodies, our selves” (Chris Holmlund, Impossible Bodies, 3), in an industry where “director and dialog matter less to box office take, while bodily spectacle and blasting sound matter more” (Ibid.), is there any room left for alternative discourses on the body on screen? While the dominant discourse of bodily spectacle looms large, with the development of franchise films in the past decade in particular, sensibilities to what bodies do what on screen, and how, have developed, testifying to a complex spectatorial engagement with the phenomenon. Meanwhile, television series have secured their slot in the entertainment business, competing with multi-million-dollar feature films for viewers’ attention. And while bodies on screen are still central to their attractiveness, the nature of these bodies begs attention: a gangly crew of children in Stranger Things, nerds and geeks in The Big Bang Theory, all matter of grotesque characters in American Horror Story, an African American female lead in How to Get Away with Murder or Scandal. As Hollywood regularly struggles with accusations of whitewashing and sexism in its most popular vehicles, popular TV fiction chips at the ideological edifice, promoting a more diverse visual environment. Yet it is a challenge that a handful of films are also trying to meet, encountering opposition proportionate to their intended viewership. This article examines how resistance to the promotion of “spectacular bodies” is developing on screens large and small and how bodily spectacle has become a political and cultural battleground. Attention focuses primarily on the female body and how its relationship to beauty as a generic expectation is problematized, concentrating on recent tv shows, (How to Get Away with Murder, Dietland, Girls), and films (Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford, 2016 and Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve, 2017).