"For as long as there have been stages and screens, disability and disfigurement have been used as visual shorthand for evildoing..."

"... a nod to the audience that a character was a baddie to be feared. But disability rights advocates say this amounts not just to lazy storytelling but stereotyping, further marginalizing an already stigmatized community that is rarely represented onscreen." 

From "Scary Is How You Act, Not Look, Disability Advocates Tell Filmmakers 'The Witches,' a film in which Anne Hathaway’s character has disfigured hands, has resurfaced the debate over depicting evil as disabled" (NYT). 

Other examples given in the article: "The Joker. Lord Voldemort. All manner of scarred Bond villains and superhero antagonists. Dr. Poison. Freddy Krueger. The Phantom of the Opera. Shakespeare’s hunchbacked, butcherous Richard the Third." 

Yes, but — speaking of hunchbacks — the greatest disabled literary and movie character is a hero, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame":

 

Here's Anne Hathaway's apology:

Does having a large head make you look short?

I'm thinking of this question a propos of Stormy Daniels's discussion of Donald Trump (blogged here). I've never thought about this question before, even though I have a large head, which I've only ever thought of as a problem when shopping for hats...



... which is the main point of that video. But I'm seeing some discussion from body-builders who worry about the distortion of perception from a large head: Your body will be perceived as smaller.

And here's a woman angsting over the opposite problem (in Elle, a fashion magazine):

I'm convinced that [my head is] too small for my body, and only if I'm at an impossible-to-maintain weight (for me that would be 123 pounds for my 5'7" height) do I look balanced....

Hmm. There's a benefit to having a large head. You can weigh more. (Also factor in the added weight of the head itself!)

Actors are known to have large heads, which are thought to translate better to the screen, and the actress as determiner of beauty ideals has never been stronger....

"Hmm," [says casting director Meredith Tucker], "I saw Carey Mulligan in The Seagull on Broadway and thought, Here's this amazing actress, but she'll never make it on screen; her head is too small. Then she did. So I think it's a myth." She pulls away from the receiver to consult her associate. "Yes!" she hollers. "It is true." I hear the words "Philip Seymour Hoffman" in the distance....

Actors are big heads on the screen, and it doesn't seem to matter too much if they are short. Maybe it's preferable for them to be short. And once you get some shortish, big-headed actors in the movies, you don't want to bring in actors who will distract viewers into thinking about head size.

[T]he head, the female head in particular, it turns out, is a locus of much social meaning. Stanford professor Londa Schiebinger... tells me that... [c]apacious skulls were viewed as a sign of greater intelligence and thus the ability to reason. Women, who have smaller skulls than men on average, were said to have limited reasoning capacity, a belief presented during the suffrage era as an argument against our getting to vote. The theory hit an impasse when data grew and it became evident that women have proportionately larger skulls than men. But science in the service of the patriarchy found a way out. "Who else has proportionately larger heads?" Schiebinger asks. "Children! So this became a way of labeling women as more childish than men, rather than smarter."

One could argue that figures such as Betty Boop were a particularly reassuring sex symbol. As unchallenging and loving as babies. Have I not always coveted a bouffant, or at least more hair, because it inflates the head and helps achieve the sexy baby effect?....

The sexy baby effect... That doesn't sound right.

"At a fund-raiser for the president at his Westport, Conn., estate Monday night, Harvey Weinstein spoke in a softly lit room shimmering with pink dahlias, gold Oscars, silvery celebrities and black American Express cards."

Wrote Maureen Dowd in August 2012, in a column I'm reading because in my previous post, about Dowd's current column, I observed that Dowd had been writing about the movie business for a long time and wondered whether she'd ever gone after Weinstein. She quoted somebody calling Weinstein a "master" at avoiding bad press by "giving to liberal causes."

So let's see what press Dowd gave Weinstein in the heat of the 2012 presidential election. That column — which begins with the sentence I've used as the post title — continues:

“You can make the case,” Weinstein said of Barack Obama, “that he’s the Paul Newman of American presidents.”...

Paul Newman, Dowd explains, was aloof. 

[T]he president does not think people should expect too much in return for paying $35,800 for an hour of his time, as they did at the Weinstein affair, or in return for other favors....

“[Obama] realized that he could stir crowds while also thinking to himself that it was all a game and posturing,” [said David Maraniss, author of “Barack Obama: The Story"]. “He is always removed and participating at the same time, self-conscious and without the visceral need or love of transactional politics that would characterize Bill Clinton or L.B.J. or even W., in a way.”...

“His [will] is cool and [Bill] Clinton’s is hot, but they burn at the same temperature inside,” [Maraniss] said. “So he does some of what he finds distasteful, but not all of it, and not all of it very well.”

By the way, 60 guests paid $35,800 for the dinner at Harvey's.

There's not a whiff of negativity about Weinstein in this old column, which is about Obama's cool lack of interest in being "a glad-handing pol." The phrase "a glad-handing pol" seems to relate more to going out among the common people. At Harvey's, Obama was ensconced with the beautiful elite. I have to go to a different NYT article for this:

Among the guests were Anne Hathaway, who played Catwoman in “The Dark Knight Rises,” the new Batman film; Jerry Springer, the talk show host; Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue magazine; Joanne Woodward, the actress and widow of Paul Newman; Aaron Sorkin, creator of television shows like “The Newsroom” and “The West Wing”; and Gov. Daniel [sic] P. Malloy of Connecticut.

Mr. Obama made sure to single out Ms. Hathaway, who was wearing “a silver dress with puffed sleeves gathered from the elbow to the shoulder, and a tight bodice,” according to a pool report by Dave Boyer of The Washington Times. “She’s spectacular,” Mr. Obama said....

ADDED: Other old Weinstein mentions by Dowd:

From  November 2015: "The Women of Hollywood Speak Out/Female executives and filmmakers are ready to run studios and direct blockbuster pictures. What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps them from doing it?"

In her black-and-cream miniskirt and black Balenciaga hightops, [Leslye] Headland was a magnetic presence with a throaty voice and a booming laugh. She had a Nicki Minaj ring tone, ‘‘Truffle Butter,’’ and several movie tattoos: ‘‘redrum’’ from ‘‘The Shining’’ on her lower back; a line from ‘‘War Games’’ — ‘‘The only winning move is to not play’’ — on her left forearm; ‘‘How would Lubitsch do it?’’ in script on her right. Harvey Weinstein, for whom Headland worked as a receptionist and assistant, calls her ‘‘wildly talented.’’

From December 1998, "Liberties; Icon and I Will Survive":

The President's head is on the block, and the First Lady has never looked more radiant. As her husband gets dragged through the mud by bone-headed Republicans, she glows. She looks as if she's traveling with her own pink baby spotlight.

Here she is on the cover of Vogue, looking Hallmark happy and Hollywood glamorous. Here she is making the flashbulbs pop, with Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow at the New York premiere of Miramax's ''Shakespeare in Love.''...

Last Thursday she repaid the generosity of Mr. Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax who is a big contributor to Clinton campaigns and the Clinton legal defense fund. As Alex Kuczynski reported in The Times, the First Lady went to Mr. Weinstein's premiere and spoke in praise of ''my friend Harvey.'' Sounding very Tina Brownish, Mrs. Clinton raved about ''the buzz'' around Miramax, and said the company ''has done a great service.''...

Apparently, people hate Anne Hathaway.

But why?

Psychology professor says:  "When times are good we prefer actresses with rounder faces...They convey these ideas of fun and youth."

But Hathaway hath a narrow face, which "suggests she would be popular when times are more challenging... As the economy improves, Hathaway...  may just be a reminder of bad times."

The haters have been chided by Lena Dunham (of "Girls" fame):

"Ladies: Anne Hathaway is a feminist and she has amazing teeth. Let's save our bad attitudes for the ones who aren't advancing the cause," Dunham tweeted.

I hope you can tell that's sarcasm. (Dunham is a genius. Interpret her words accordingly.)

I haven't been reading the anti-Hathaway scribblings (and I've never seen Hathaway in anything), but I would simply assume that women reject idealization of someone that thin.

HuffPo can't tell the difference between nipples and darts.

Because... look!... darts nipples!!!!

If you see nipples, it's because that's what you want to see.

Maybe Anne Hathaway's breathtaking bust darts will bring back traditional style bust darts. It actually is something that looks new in fashion, and it's fascinatingly retro. In the 50s and 60s — before the "natural look" seemed like a good idea — bodices were constructed with darts.



Remember when a size 14 had a 34" bust measurement?! What's 14 today? Something like 40"?

"Lady Jerks of 2012: A Year in Review."

Today seems to be my day for finding screwy ideas in Slate. This one seems to be a twist on the old feminist bumper sticker "Well-behaved women rarely make history." I can't quite tell whether Amanda Hess is trying to encourage/facilitate female jerkiness or what. Yeah, there's the ancient problem of wanting to be liked, which is really only a problem if you want it too much and want it above other, better goals. It's perfectly idiotic to think that the solution to the excessive desire to be liked is to be unlikeable.

But, whatever... the women Hess recognizes as the "Lady Jerks of 2012" are: the CIA agent who complained that she shouldn't have had to share the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for finding bin Laden; Anne Hathaway, the actress who talked back haughtily when asked about the photographs that paparazzi somehow were able to take of the body part Hess refers to as "her vagina"; Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia who called some political opponent a misogynist; Taylor Swift, the pretty young singer who crashed a Kennedy wedding with her Kennedy boyfriend; and Susan Rice, who, as Hess would have it, lost out on getting to be the next Secretary of State because people thought she was “prickly,” “hard-headed,” “temperamentally unfit,” and “always right on the edge of a screech.” Hess writes: "The personality police eventually moved Rice to withdraw her name from the running." That's not what I heard!

"Tuesday night’s Hollywood premiere of 'Django Unchained'... has been canceled out of respect for those affected by the Newtown shootings."

A fear grips Hollywood: What if the Christmas crowds don't feel like sitting through 2 hours of violent revenge fantasy?

Poor Quentin Tarantino and Jamie Foxx! And poor Ke$ha — the radio won't play her hit song “Die Young.” Another celebrity who's been hurt is Anne Hathaway's Vulva. Its moment in the sun... gone!

ADDED: Tarantino "said at a press junket in New York for the film on Saturday that he was tired of defending his films each time the US is shocked by gun violence."

"I just think you know there's violence in the world, tragedies happen, blame the playmakers... It's a western. Give me a break."

Yeah, Quentin's tired. Give him a break.

"Inmate hatched castration plot after Justin Bieber didn't return his love letters..."

We're told Dana Martin, 45, felt like a "nobody" in prison, and now, we're all talking about him. Pretty impressive: A prisoner — in for life after killing a girl — is able to seize the headlines. He should be a nobody, but now, he's been allowed to become a big old celebrity and to tie his name to that of a mega-celebrity:

Martin — who has a large tattoo of Bieber on his leg — offered $2,500 for each of Bieber’s testicles, which were to be snipped off with a pair of Fiskars Durasharp pruning shears last month, records show.

I think we should have prevented this: Martin's leap into fame.  And we should not be talking about "Bieber's testicles." Talk about Anne Hathaway's vulva if you want: She flashed photographers. But Bieber has kept his pants on and has nothing to do with the despicable nobody Martin.

Sorry to be part of the machine that is making Martin famous, but I want to call out everyone who's getting off on this story.

I know that it's possible for prisoners to commit crimes from prison by hiring others and that it's not automatically a big joke. But specifying the brand of the pruning shears and the pattern of the tie to be used for strangling (paisley) smells like dark comedy. It should not be this easy for a prisoner to amuse himself and aggrandize himself this way. Martin killed a 15-year-old girl and is a life prisoner: turn the spotlight elsewhere.

"It kind of made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age..."

"... when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and rather than delete it — and do the decent thing — sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which brings us back to 'Les Mis,' that's what my character is, she is someone who is forced to sell sex to benefit her child because she has nothing and there's no social safety net. Yeah so let’s get back to 'Les Mis.'"

So there we see how smart Anne Hathaway is. (And what a lout Lauer is.)

"I looked like my gay brother."

Says Anne Hathaway about her "Les Mis" hairstyle.

We spend $20 billion a year on drug and alcohol treatment programs -- without demanding much of any evidence that they work.

"[V]ery few rehabilitation programs have the evidence to show that they are effective.... And the field has no standard guidelines. Each program has its own philosophy; so, for that matter, do individual counselors. No one knows which approach is best for which patient, because these programs rarely if ever track clients closely after they graduate. Even Alcoholics Anonymous, the best known of all the substance-abuse programs, does not publish data on its participants’ success rate."

***

By the way, I saw that movie "Rachel Getting Married," which begins with the main character graduating from a drug treatment program. (Here's the trailer.) I hated it. I felt like I was watching the actors doing improv scenes in preparation for a movie to be made later. Maybe you like that kind of thing. Did you like "Festen" ("Celebration")? I didn't. (Yikes, I'd forgotten all about Dogme 95. Scary flashback!)

But RGM wasn't just the actor-fest of a movie about a big dysfunctional family celebration. It also had music. Little bands playing in the next room while the actors emoted over here. Singers coming up to microphones and sometimes permitted to sing a whole song, perhaps to entertain us or perhaps to make us feel like the main character who's rather alienated from the whole affair. Overheard in the lobby after the movie: "It was like being at a bad wedding. If I want to go to bad weddings, I'll go to bad weddings."

There are way too many wedding movies and weddings in movies. I think it's because there's an assumption that women love weddings and if there's a wedding in the movie, women will want to see it. Not this woman.

Also, I complained before about how they always put actresses in bathtubs in movies. And sure enough, they get Rachel Rachel's sister into the bathtub. Want to see Anne Hathaway taking a bath? Yes? Sucker!

IN THE COMMENTS: Chip Ahoy says:

Is this post about spending $20 billion with uncertain results or is it about weddings in movies or actresses in bathtubs? Sometimes I get confused. Because, if it's about weddings, well, weddings make me hurl. I dread going to them. Except for one thing I found delightful. There's a blog I've become fond of, to me interesting, chiefly food-related but not entirely, written by Lucy, an expat living in Southern France. She describes a French wedding that held my interest all the way through.

She writes about weddings at other times too, but I especially like this one....

Charming!

fivewheels says:

"there's an assumption that women love weddings and if there's a wedding in the movie, women will want to see it."

Sadly, it's not an assumption, Ann, it's a fact. American women are so Pavlovianly wedding-obsessed that any movie with "wedding" or "bride" in the title will make a mint, even if they're horrible.

Wedding Crashers? Huge hit. Wedding Singer? Hit. My Best Friend's Wedding? Hit. My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Biggest indie movie ever. Crappy movies that made over $100 million? -- American Wedding, The Wedding Planner. The entire indie revolution was started by? Four Weddings and a Funeral.

The alternative explanation, of course, is that all of these enormously successful movies are wonderful examples of cinema. Right.

I've managed to avoid all those movies, except "Four Weddings and a Funeral" -- which I saw because I had reason to think it would be good and it was.

Anne Hathaway on Barack Obama: "I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him."

"I was kind of afraid of Obama the first time I saw him... I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him. It was around the time that he gave his speech on race that I just said 'I can't deny how I feel about you, Barack Obama.'"

Oh, celebrities, please just keep talking. You don't ever need to know how ridiculous you are. We love you this way.

Afraid to have hope... an interesting fear, really, isn't it? But the human organism produces the fear response for a reason. Contemplate the survival value of the fear of hope.

At the New York Sun... and that scoop about Ahmadinejad's visit to Ground Zero.

Today, I paid a visit to The New York Sun. It's in a great old building on 105 Chambers Street, the Cary Building, which I was told was the oldest cast iron building in the city.



Whether it's actually the oldest or not, I don't know, but it's a landmark, built in 1857. And the look of the place is so distinctive....



... that just as I was trying to ask if the place has been used as a movie set, my host was going on about the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" and working his way toward telling me that this is the desk where Anne Hathaway sits at the end of the movie:



Okay, take a picture of me in the Devil Wears Prada memorial chair (with Joe Goldstein, the Sun's legal reporter):



It was fun sitting in on some newspaper meetings. There was a lot of excitement today over the scoop that Iranian President Ahmadinejad plans to visit Ground Zero -- a visit to be facilitated by Mayor Bloomberg. Here's the story:

President Bush, moving quickly to respond to news that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has asked to visit ground zero, had a spokesman issue a statement aimed at Mayor Bloomberg that said – in so many words -- deal with it.

"This is a matter for the City of New York resolve," a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, Gordon Johndroe, said. He added pointedly: "It seems odd that the president of a country that is a state sponsor of terror would visit ground zero."

The White House comment came as news of the proposed visit was being greeted with astonishment and outrage by New Yorkers on both sides of the political spectrum, and also presidential candidates, including Governor Romney and Senator Thompson.

UPDATE: The linked news story has been updated to show that the city is rejecting the Ahmadinejad visit to Ground Zero.