Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Down-Sizing Beauty


Here is more of the sexagenarian Helen "I just want want to look young" Mirren. She was at a recent film premier in Palm Springs in the above photo. She's once again in a disheveled peroxide blond/gray hairstyle - if it can be called a style. She is wearing a too-tight, glittery, unflattering satin dress, with an odd pleated attachment just below the knees. Satin is a difficult material to pull off since it can look like cheap, gaudy polyester, or even lewd. The red lipstick, which people incorrectly think goes with everything, looks garish with that metallic purple. She should have opted for a more subdued, even beige, look.

Mirren looks like those Madames in Western brothels. I don't think that is her intention, though. The underlying problem, as with all liberals, is that she's simply not in touch with beauty and its standards, and can be lured into wearing whatever contemporary stylists, who themselves are hostile towards beauty, pull out for her.

Our stars (if they can be called that now) are failing us, with their lack of glamor and simple confidence. Paradoxically, they want to look young, which is perhaps their one last grasp at trying to look good without outright surrender to beauty. Of course, they just come off as elderly (older) women trying to look young. The answer would be for them to embrace their age, as I write here. Sophistication goes a long way towards recovering beauty lost due to youth. It is hard to imagine Elizabeth Taylor (even in her troubled later years), the inimitable Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, and a myriad of classic Hollywood stars in their fifties and sixties looking like Mirren. Our contemporary age has waged a bitter battle against beauty.

Once again, Mirren has that "I'm such a nice person" expression, which camouflages a steely, liberal, determination to change the world order. Such rejection of beauty (and even prettiness) is not an accident. Anything that speaks of an absolute, like truth or beauty, is shunned. The world is full of relatives for these equal-opportunity style-setters. And that means that beauty has to be down-sized.

But the more these stars (and other individuals who have somehow entered leadership realms) try to reject these hierarchies, the less they are admired by ordinary people, who still need certain hierarchies they can look up to. It is up to those leaders to fulfill their roles with decorum and, paradoxically, with humility.