 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| |||||
July 29, 2005
What did Lindsay Lohan really do when she lost so much weight? Did she offend by being blond or too much like Nicole Richie?
That's what the tabloids and wags like to say, but this weekend of Stealth made me think about it again. Jessica Biel is in that early Lindsay Lohan track. Rosario Dawson. Eva Mendes. Rachel Weisz. Drew Barrymore. Kirsten Dunst. Sarah Polley. Scarlett Johansson.
These women are - he wrote, aware of how politically incorrect it is - breeders. Hips and breasts and fertile, fertile, fertile.
Part of what felt wrong about The Island is that Michael Bay has always delivered long, lean women. (Liv Tyler is leaner on screen than in real life, but you get my point.) Tea Leoni, Vanessa Marcil. Tyler and the first look at the insanely thin Kate Beckinsale. Gabrielle Union was meat in Bad Boys II, but Bay had to match his now-superstars. And now, Scarlett… an extraordinarily beautiful girl who is not built to run around on-screen in a nearly one-piece sweatsuit.
What draws men to Ms. Johansson is her earthen way. She has always played quiet, strong, immovable objects. Of course, she is also a young women in the modern culture, so wanting to match the media standard of beauty makes sense. And girls just wanna have fun and all. But the emotional read off of all of her performances is the willingness to carry the weight for others… to deal with the hard parts and to keep going… just as a pregnant woman must.
The pop popularity of Paris Hilton is about sex and power. A rich girl who sluts around with no-that-attractive men and whose specific sexual willingnesses are on the table… which part of this doesn't make sense? There is nothing "mom" about Paris Hilton. It's all libido and it's all your libido.
Lindsay Lohan is an attractive girl, but she's not one of the world's great beauties. Yet, when she bounces down the hall in Mean Girls, she is magnetic. And it is way too simple to say, "Men like breasts." Men do like breasts. But the bounce and the unaware way with which Ms. Lohan walked… sex… implant the seed… this is a woman I must impregnate.
And no, I'm not saying that men have this primal urge that explains or excuses everything. Not even close. There is no excuse, in my mind, for the sexual ideas that so many men have these days or for the endless objectification of women. But looking at it intellectually does not allow us to escape that we do have primal urges.
The irony is that our magazine covers are endlessly thin, thin, thin. But these are not the women who draw men to the theaters. Diane Kruger is a beauty and is rail thin ... starred in two of the 13 highest grossing films last year… not a movie star. Nicole Kidman went from willowy to anorexic and all she draws are women and awards talk. Katie Holmes… no go.
You may not be able to be too rich, but you can be too thin. Playboy has taken it to the insane extreme, but "the girl next door" is not a supermodel… which, it seems to me, supermodels have become more Tyra and less Twiggy.
The current queen of the birth canal is Angelina Jolie, who mixes the raw sexuality with the fierceness of a mother warrior.
The weird obsession of middle-aged men with Harry Potter's Emma Watson suggests to me that something deeper is going on there and her earthen powers can be sussed out from early in puberty.
The veteran earth moms include the still gorgeous Diane Lane, Virginia Madsen, and Catherine Zeta Jones. The first thought was often sexual about these three… but what was the draw… turns out that all three were born to be moms.
There are all kinds of specific turn-ons and turn-offs in this world… lots of room under the big blanket of love and lust, from Sir Mix-A-Lot to Tom Cruise. It's possible that Jessica Alba might have a dozen children and Eva Mendes may never even want one. But in the unspoken language of primal male lust, one of these women reads as being for fun and the other reads as getting down to the hard, happy work of life…. for now vs. forever.
Just a thought…
