The REAL Ugly Truth

Has anyone else been seeing the commercials for the Ugly Truth movie and been worried about it?

Ever since I first saw an ad for it, I got the feeling that it was another movie that exploits the stereotypes of men and women in order to get some laughs. The poster for the movie shows the female lead, Katherine Heigl, holding up a heart by her head and the male lead, Gerard Butler, holding up a heart by his crotch. “Great!” I thought, “Something else that says that women only care about love and not sex, while men only care about sex and not love!”

Here’s the synopsis on the Rotten Tomatoes page for it:

The battle of the sexes heats up in Columbia Pictures' comedy The Ugly Truth. Abby Richter (Katherine Heigl) is a romantically challenged morning show producer whose search for Mr. Perfect has left her hopelessly single. She's in for a rude awakening when her bosses team her with Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler), a hardcore TV personality who promises to spill the ugly truth on what makes men and women tick.

This synopsis didn’t do much to quell my worrying. It seemed to just be confirming my thoughts about what kind of movie The Ugly Truth would be. Not wanting to let one site define the entire movie for me—and kind of hoping what I was reading wasn’t true—I looked up the IMDB synopsis for the movie:

A romantically challenged morning show producer (Heigl) is reluctantly embroiled in a series of outrageous tests by her chauvinistic correspondent (Butler) to prove his theories on relationships and help her find love. His clever ploys, however, lead to an unexpected result.

This synopsis is only a little bit better. The definite step-up from the last one here is how it at least identifies that there is a chauvinistic character. But does that help? Brushing the male lead off as being chauvinistic doesn’t make it suddenly okay for him to do chauvinistic things, especially if he’s giving out chauvinistic advice to someone and the other person listening instead of telling him that he’s crazy. And it’s obvious that the “unexpected result” is going to be that Heigl’s character falls in love with Butler’s character, isn’t it? The idea that this movie might entail a woman falling for a chauvinistic pig (she would probably end up seeing him as “cute” or “charming” in his ways and try to justify her liking him by saying that he’s just kind of naïve about how women truly are) makes me very unhappy.

But hold on, now. I don’t want to jump to conclusions. After all, my analysis of this movie is being based purely on assumption right now. The movie doesn’t actually come out until the 24th of this month, so it’s not like I or anyone else has actually seen it. However, I can tell that there are some things about this movie that I wouldn’t like even if I had seen it.

One, the first synopsis describes Heigl’s character as “a romantically challenged morning show producer whose search for Mr. Perfect has left her hopelessly single.” Hopelessly single? Honey, there ain’t nothing hopeless about being single. If your movie portrays being single like that, then I have some issues with how you think about women.

Two, Heigl’s character quite obviously is trying to change herself so that men will like her. This is idiotic; if men aren’t interested in you for who you truly are, then they’re not worth your time. If they don’t like you for who you are now, they’re not going to like you if you’re trying to be somebody else, and you are not going to like you if you’re trying to be somebody else. I think a commenter on the YouTube video I posted above summed it up pretty well: “girl's no need 2 do all this shit.”

Three—and this is a big one—even if your movie is only showing the stereotype that men only care about sex as something ridiculous, there is a problem in thinking that this is something that should be laughed at. Men and women with opinions like that should be educated, not brushed off as amusing. If this is something we’re laughing at, then it shows that we’re excusing his behavior as just being kind of silly, which shows that we at least agree with him a little bit. If we disagreed with him completely, we wouldn’t laugh; we’d sit there in disgust, hoping somebody in the movie actually succeeds in getting him to see how wrong his views are instead of just expressing their dislike for him.

But again, I don’t want to completely criticize this movie without seeing it. Hopefully the real truth that The Ugly Truth shows is not that its writers (who are actually female) are inherently sexist.

What do you guys think? Am I completely off base? Is this movie a problem, or should I not be worrying about it at all?