Shallow Hall: Misguided Good Intentions

Shallow Hal (2001): A Summary and Critique

In the movie Shallow Hal a superficially-minded man, used to objectifying women and seeing nothing but their physical beauty, is hypnotized by self-improvement guru Tony Robbins so that he can see the internal beauty of women. By this sleight of hand, Shallow Hal acquires the gift of “depth” integrated into his very perception. Hal walks out of his chance meeting with Tony Robbins seeing a changed world, a world in which most women look like sleek supermodels.

Upon approaching them, he is surprised to find that they aren’t as dismissive as his usual targets are. The reason is that these women are in “reality” very overweight or not considered very attractive. So although Hal thinks he’s meeting women of incredible beauty, this is only because he can see her “internal” attributes, and they themselves are quite pleased to be approached by an average-looking man. So that he is surprised by the success he is able to have and thinks Tony Robbins has blessed him by allowing him to do better with women, as opposed to changing his perception to make him think certain physically unattractive women are incredibly beautiful.

Hal meets Rosemary, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, in a department store. He finds her stunningly beautiful and becomes involved in a relationship with her. Their dating is marked by an insistence in bringing forth interpretative asymmetries, where Hal compliments Rosie repeatedly, while others or even she imply that she is fat and unattractive. He does not understand their implications, and is outraged when her father remarks that she is not a pretty girl. Hal firmly stands by his conviction that she is really beautiful, and thus impresses her father. But the plot further complicates in that her father is actually Hal’s boss.

The end result is that not only does Hal find the love of his life, but he impresses Rosie’s father and even his friends with his newfound “deepness”. So this optic phenomenon endows Hal with a fundamentally different moral standing, and his improved ethics reward him with happiness and success when Rosemary’s father promotes Hal.

However, the film is complicated when Mauricio, Shallow Hal’s equally Shallow friend, finds Tony Robbins and learns the phrase that would undo what Robbins calls “de-hypnosis”. So Mauricio says the words to Hal, who loses his optic gimmick and suddenly is overwhelmed by the physical ugliness of people he thought were beautiful, including his girlfriend Rosemary. Hal is forced to either revert to his shallow self, or to overcome his fixation with physicality and instead come to arrange his relationships according to “true” beauty. Hal overcomes his condition and finds true “depth” as a person. He stays true to Rosemary and to inner beauty in spite of physical appearance.

Critique:
At the heart of this movie is the idea that a fixation on physicality is superficial, “only skin deep” or whatever, while the interior beauty of a person is overlooked. So this movie purifies the negative association we have with physical beauty by capitalizing on the idea that it is not true beauty. Of course, the convenience of such an attack on physical beauty is that beauty itself, as a concept we can cling to, is saved from the horrible suspicion that it is a confluence of factors, a mix of hypnoses or indoctrination, and that its reality is much less certain than the immediacy of flesh. The film therefore masquerades itself as an attack on superficiality while its acts to filter out that tickling of nihilistic suspicion, only to deliver beauty as an ideal firmly into the fold of a morally satisfied and complacent smile. Shallow Hal as a character serves to mark a standard of superficiality so that we can feel profound, whereas in reality preferring a woman for her supermodel looks or for her involvement in the peacecorps are equally clutchings of a person rather than the actual person.

Shallow Hal goes ever further in this purification. The movie also acts to re-align material wealth and social prestige on the side of “depth”, a concept here created by satirizing Hal’s superficiality. Hal’s flirtations with depth as he courts Rosie impress her father who happens to be his boss. So the film imagines that appreciating “true beauty” is directly linked to material fulfillment. True beauty is embodied in the fat folds of Rosie, and that her father is president of Hal’s company metaphorically ties in career advancement to aligning ourselves with Hal’s discovery of the true principle of beauty.

Upon leaving this film we can feel comfortably profound, and assured that a commitment to these principles the movie endorses will result in our success. So like Job, our piety will eventually be rewarded in the flesh. The reality however, is quite different and quite complex—the loss of the beauty principle: beauty not as something to be found in social patterns, but rather as a personal creation mapped out by the trajectory we decide upon. Beauty is fictive, not real. Conforming to the standard espoused by Vogue magazine is no worse than conforming to the standard espoused by Shallow Hal—both pretend there is a beauty principle out there, when there is not.