“Life is one fucking beauty contest after another… Do what you love, and fuck the rest!” As a business student, this phrase has a particular meaning in my life. Tests, competitions, presentations never cease to end. With everyone constantly trying to be better than everyone else, at times you can’t help but think “Do what you love, and fuck the rest”. It’s easy to get consumed by society’s expectations and the desire to be ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’ can lead one to lose themselves. Little Miss Sunshine shows that things are never really as bad as they seem, as it depends on how you interpret them. Richard is unable to finalize his deal, Olive doesn’t win the beauty pageant, Grandpa dies of his poor lifestyle choices, and Dwayne can’t become a pilot. The film represents every individual in society, as we all have our average life goals we’d like to achieve. An aspect of society that is still just as dominant towards its target audience is beauty pageants. The film uses failure to mock beauty pageants through ideologies and societal expectations. The beautiful part of the film is when you see everyone putting their own desires on pause in order for Olive to reach hers. Seeing what one might describe as a “hopeless” family transform into a unified and connected family is what gives the movie its everyday life message…
The mocking of pageants and societal expectations come hand in hand, as pageants can be seen as a symbol of society’s expectations on what defines “beauty”, and even as success. It’s Olive’s failure that actually shows the bizarreness of the concept of pageants. The type of rejection faced by Olive faced would have ripped a normal girl apart on the inside, however Olive’s attitude didn’t seem to let that affect her. In “Pageant Trouble: An Exploration of Gender Transgression in Little Miss Sunshine”, Alison Happel speaks of how beauty pageants can be oppressive and the standards they set in their defining of femininity. In the film, it is evident to the audience that Olive does not meet these standards, however, the real portion of anticipation in the audience came from the question: “When will Olive realize?”, as she seemed to be quite clueless for most of the movie.
Little Miss Sunshine wouldn’t be classified as a comedy, well, unless it showcases many comedic performance traditions. The film portrays bathos and scatological comedic elements. Both bathos and scatological humour were demonstrated when Olive’s grandfather passed away, which represented a serious/sentimental moment, and the care of his dead body is when things get absolutely ridiculous in the movie. From stealing his corpse from the hospital, to hiding it from the police officer played a huge part in making humour out of a sad situation. When hiding the body from the police officer, sexual humour was used, as the officer thought they were trying to hide adult magazines in the trunk instead of a body.
msoomro2014 