I recently embarked on a voyage to see just how Eclipse, yet another episode in the Twilight saga, was being cast for the screen. I found the information on Entertainment Weekly’s website if you’d like to see for yourself. What caused this sudden curiosity, you ask?
I was curious because this menagerie of brooding bored bloodsuckers (Bella included) all look alike to me. I don't think the entire cast was chosen because they all look like they could be related.
Because they're all the same kind of good-looking. If you've stocked the cast with such individuals, they blend into each other too easily. There's no contrast, there's no chasm between the vampires themselves, Bella and Jacob as portrayed in the film. All the boys we're greeted with are superlatively attractive, each with the required muscles clothed in shirts of deliberate tightness. Bella herself has a small nose, thin hips, thinly tweezéd eyebrows, and clear skin, and indeed the vampire chicks are similarly built.
A follicle of beauty is surprise, in my opinion that's what takes your breath away upon seeing some unanticipated beautiful object. One of the reasons why this beautiful cast appears so dull to me is there is no surprise. Indeed, how could casting have made such an error? Furthermore, why did makeup decide to vamp their pallid appearances in similar ways?
Because beauty and attractiveness remain a specific, suffocating set of standards. Popular culture has always enforced various ideas of beauty. But, in studying what was "a good idea at the time" one finds popular culture's idea of beauty has always been arbitrary. In the 18th century, a man's calves was considered with the same eye as his biceps. In the medieval times women shot for a bloated, pregnant look. Until the twenties, tans weren't common and pallor was popular, in the 19th century, some women ate arsenic cookies to inhibit circulation and achieve that oh-so etiolated look.
Our standards of beauty haven't been leading up to the cast of Twilight. They're an example of how beauty becomes packaged with other ideas which are irrelevant and make beauty less about beauty but more of a look-alike contest with the phantom of the perfect man or woman that haunts every generation's mirror.
Beauty, in my opinion, is too myriad to approach with the same standards in all its given instances. Carey Grant and Jimmy Dean are too different guys, but they are still both appealing without one being superior to the other. It's too easy to approach "beauty" with a prototype in mind, it's also too limiting.
I would rather see a cast of distinct features. Yet, the Eclipse casting calls for individuals who are "beautiful," "tall," and/or "slender." I have nothing against people having a type their after. However, in putting constraints on what is attractive nothing can come across as attractive! Consider how the looks and the makeup of the Twilight cast have been engineered from a similar set of standards. This doesn't leave the impression of some beautiful, supernatural world upon the viewer, but in many ways a cloying, artificial environment where teenage fantasies are acted out by twenty-somethings in heavy makeup.
Tall, dark and handsome suddenly becomes dull, shallow and mediocre.
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