"On The Beauty, most people hate how they look. That's the baseline premise, which then brings in big pharma, big tech, and big government to complicate the show's story about how average people would be convinced to get the Beauty, either by spending thousands of dollars on an officially distributed shot or having sex with someone infected with a stolen version of the virus."
"What's equalizing about The Beauty is that it treats nearly all of its characters as broken in the same fundamental way, which is that they don't quite believe their exterior self reflects their interior self."
"The body horror of its physical transformations are part of that nonsense. The goop! The slime! The ooze! It's like an R-rated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles origin story over here."
The Beauty, a Hulu and FX series, presents a world where most people are dissatisfied with their appearance, leading them to seek a transformative virus distributed through official channels or illicit means. The show involves pharmaceutical companies, technology corporations, and government entities in its narrative. Rebecca Hall's character desires a different appearance, while Evan Peters plays an FBI agent resistant to the Beauty. The series attempts to comment on societal vanity and narcissism through grotesque physical transformations involving body horror elements. Despite its absurdist approach, the show's core ideology treats all characters as fundamentally broken, believing their external appearance fails to reflect their internal self. This premise allows the narrative to explore character transformations and their significance within the story's broader commentary on identity and self-perception.
#body-horror #identity-and-appearance #vanity-and-narcissism #science-fiction-drama #social-commentary
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