Hottie Count - Zooey Deschanel

There was a time when it seemed the internet would open the world to opinion, offering individuals the platform upon which their unique worldviews could be displayed. I believe that time is past. What is left is fractured, sure, yet fractured into distinct paradigms where unlike ideas are treated with the same scorn they always were. Sometimes the black sheep is a tweet by an NFL player concerned with the nation's euphoria over a terrorist's death. Other times, it's a blog post discrediting the hottie factor of Zooey Deschanel.

Baaa.


Within the web paradigm I subsist, there seem to be some very definite opinions I'm supposed to have about famous actresses. One is that Megan Fox is annoying, not hot, and sucky, all of which is confirmed by Jennifer's Body. I liked that movie. Another is that Zooey Deschanel is a paragon of new age woman, multi-talented with confidence to boost.

Nooo. (intoned sheepishly)

I'm not usually one to disparage acting talent - as I believe the role often determines the quality of the product at the Hollywood level - but Deschanel is as wooden as the wall paneling for which her hipster fans yearn. Her sister (Emily aka Bones) is the talent, yet Zooey has managed to ride the coattails of her show business family into the spotlight as America's choice "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" (MPDG).

"But she is!" you scream. "She's just got the aura that makes her it!" Well, it all feels produced to me. She's the hipster version of that character ideal, and again I use the adjective "hipster" in the derogatory. Hipsters -- or at least the ones who've transformed our generation's meta-nostalgia fetish into a negative -- attempt to grasp onto an image that makes them cool because it made somebody else cool, and in doing so end up merely the reflection of a shadow. There is more emptiness than content, and it simply becomes an elitist niche of the same groupthink occurring everywhere else.

Zooey is not to blame for any of this. I believe she's trying. I have no reason not to believe she's a nice person. And I don't particularly care if people enjoy her acting and singing when I find them so bland and mediocre.
Nevertheless, and to bring things back around to the relevant topic of hottiedom, the fact that this maelstrom of what-I-perceive-to-be myth persists invariably turns me off to what may otherwise be a totes doable bod.

I don't necessarily blame the indie internet circle for any of this, either. It'd be nice if they always shared my opinions so I wouldn't have to write anything and could just read what I think, but alas, my rebel streak was ignited upon listening to a promotional interview on NPR for the party I do hold responsible for all of this...

I blame (500) Days of Summer. While the movie's hipster mentalities do bother me (e.g. the "check this tune out" soundtrack and ambiguous time setting also cherished by 2009's Whip It and Youth in Revolt), the seed of my bitterness was planted well before I watched it. The radio was interviewing either the director or one of the writers of the movie, and whoever it was kept reemphasizing the fact that the film most definitely was not a love story, or anything like that. It was its own entity, unclassifiable as a genre, or so the pretentious sell line echoed over and over again. It was something new. It presented a fresh perspective, just like the internet once did.

Well I ultimately did watch it, and it definitely was a love story. It was simply the hipster variation thereof, in that it was claiming to be something it wasn't.

Deservedly or no, Zooey exists to me in that same paradigm. So as I cling to my own contrived sense of self, I have no choice but to exclude Ms. Deschanel from this list. Alert me to an alternate and authentic MPDG if you know of one; in the meantime, the animated Ramona Flowers will hold her place.

This entry was posted by DoktorPeace, on Wednesday, May 11, 2011. You can leave your response.