Libba Bray’s novel BeautyQueens is a satire that plays out like an all-female Lord of the Rings, a
project that is now, contentiously, in development at Warner Brothers. The
author has written an essay for Entertainment Weekly about what
happened when Hollywood came calling for her project, and it’s definitely worth
the read if you’re interested in what people are calling, “Hollywood’s Woman
Problem.”
If you haven’t read the book, here’s my review:
When a plane full of teenage beauty contestants crashes on a
not-quite-deserted island, the young women find themselves fighting for
survival with all their pageant skills and determination.
It’s an old show business axiom that “Satire is what closes
Saturday night.” In Beauty Queens, Bray
lets loose on a ton of popular culture topics, from reality shows (Amish girls
and strippers share a house on Girls Gone Rumpspringa) to beauty
pageants to plucky businesswomen running for president. She hits her targets too, for the most part,
although the arch tone of the book’s prologue is a little annoying.
The result is not unlike the HBO movie about the Texas
cheerleader murdering mom, which was played tongue-in-cheek to good
effect. The problem is that this
estrogen-soaked version of Lost meets Lord of the Flies meets Survivor
is kind of one note and awfully silly and it’s hard to see what demographic
it plays to.
There’s also a part of us that sees the story more like one
of those parodies of contemporary movies, like Vampires Suck. Adding the satire to the comedy is not
necessarily a commercial choice. (Two
hilarious satires about politics, Election and Dick were both
disastrous at the box office ($15 million and $6 million returns, with no
international distribution), and this satire seems to have an even more narrow
focus.) Also, the shows that are the
targets here seem like somewhat dated topics—having been done to death in
Comedy Central and Mad TV and SNL and … many other places.
The characters are a lot of fun, though, even if they’re
not necessarily original. A lot of the best of the character stuff is internal,
as when one contestant sizes up her competition for the “ethnic” card of the
pageant and another takes charge of the girls with her firm conviction and
endless supply of philosophy culled from books by her idol, Ladybird Hope, the
most famous winner of the Teen Dream Pageant.
(She’s a running gag all the way through the book that pays off nicely
at the end.)
Some of the really best moments in the book come in the form
of Bray’s hilarious footnotes that explain who various characters and
situations are. The narrative is sometimes
a mess, especially when a particular subplot is introduced. The story actually resembles some cheesy
television movies about hot girls thrust into survival mode, but those were
played straight. Here things just seem
to be made up as they go along.
Still, Bray keeps things moving along in an amusing way and
the ending is a showstopper. This is very different from her Gothic-tinged
historical novels and a lot of fun.
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