Latest / We Are Spiraling / I'll Never Forgive The Princess Diaries: Why Hollywood Straightens Curly Hair

Transcript

I'll Never Forgive The Princess Diaries: Why Hollywood Straightens Curly Hair · We Are Spiraling

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everyone, it's Priya Anand and we are spiraling.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In this show, we talk about curly hair to learn more about our culture.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: From our personal identity to how the world sees us.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Quick update: you're going to be hearing from me more often.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're introducing mini sodes.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're shorter episodes, a handful of minutes long, because our full episodes are narrative stories like the magazine features I used to do as a journalist, but on audio.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: They take a lot of reporting and production TLC to make well.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: But there's so much I want to talk to you about sooner, so this is how we'll do both.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really excited.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into today's mini sode.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's Anne Hathaway here with The Devil Wars Prada 2, The Odyssey, and everything else.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And she said that we could soon get a third installment of The Princess Diaries, her most iconic role, her first major film, where she plays Mia Thermopolis, a regular San Francisco girl who turns out to be a princess.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: The Princess Diaries is a generational classic for millennials.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And while I love the movie, I also hate it and find it to be one of the most uniquely damaging for women.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can hear why from Medea, a listener of the show, who found We Are Spiraling on social media and shared her story with me.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Medea Giordano.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a writer living in the Northeast and I'm 31.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: I have always had a complicated relationship with my curly hair.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: And growing up in the 2000s, you know, super sleek straight hair was in, and I I just couldn't understand why I had to have coarse curls.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Even when we bought our first flat iron, it did not produce anything near what you could do today.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: I remember watching the Princess Diaries for the first time and asking my mom, like, look at what they did for me as hair.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: Why can't we do that for me?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: And she had to explain that they had to intentionally make her hair look that way in the before scenes, which then made me realize that they were using curly hair to emphasize that she was quote unquote ugly.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then she didn't get pretty until they could figure out how to straighten it.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, watching it now, you know, that's not the case, but I had already considered myself ugly at that point because of my hair.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it just really drove the point home.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it took a long time to work through that.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Ann Hathaway did an interview with People Magazine last month, and she told them that she had one regret related to the movie.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: She said, My natural hair is rather straight, so we had to create a contrast.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: We gave me a curly hair, and people thought we were saying that curly hair is unattractive, which was a terrible, completely unintended side effect.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a matter of it was going to be easier and less time in the makeup trailer for us to just go with my natural hair for the post-makeover stuff.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a decision that was made for practical reasons that wound up having unintended consequences.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But other than that, a pretty flawless experience.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's break down her comments because I don't fully buy this explanation.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: We've interviewed a celebrity hairstylist when we were spiraling.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew Collins told me that curly hair is, in his words, technically looked at as more disheveled in Hollywood.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this idea that it was easier to create a contrast from her normal hair by making it curly, they could have done a lot of other things to make her straight hair look bad while still being straight or somewhat wavy.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: They could have dyed her hair, they could have given her a terrible before haircut, they could have made her hair look dry and straw-like, but the easiest way for them to signal bad was by making it curly.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hollywood uses that as a shorthand.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've reached out to Anne Hathaway's team at least twice in the past year requesting an interview on this topic and how she actually feels about it.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm glad to see her addressing it.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I also think that the explanation falls flat.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: The article also says that Anne finds it beautiful that girls who watched the Princess Diaries as kids are now watching it with their own children.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I actually find that troubling at best.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: This framing is going to continue to poison young minds and hold them hostage.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Kat Rowland and I'm a friend of Trios.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: When I saw the Mia transformation in Princess Diaries, I was probably eight or nine.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was really young and I had curly hair that more or less manifested as bushy hair because I was dry brushing it and didn't know how to take care of it.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, by that point already wished I had straight hair.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I watched the scene and felt like, oh thank God, there's this technology.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I was aware of hair straighteners, keratin, whatever it is we had at the time.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of watched with anticipation of like, oh God, what how are they gonna deal with this hair?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because I certainly can't deal with it.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me, I almost washed it with a sense of relief.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh good, there's something to be done about this.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I just have to access that technology.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: To this day, Kat still straightens her hair regularly.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: These representations of women and beauty on screen have a real impact.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like the princess diaries was maybe the most prominent example of movies, Hollywood television telling me curly hair, big hair, frizzy hair is an undesirable trait.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's something to be fixed.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I also feel like it was certainly that was a big one for me because that's when I was that's the movie I watched as a young girl.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: But as an adult, I've come to see so many other examples of Hollywood telling you this more or less explicitly or implicitly.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: I look at evil characters in movies like Linda Cardalini's character in Legally Blonde, like Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction, and even to some extent Karen Radshaw and Sex in the City, where we're told curly hair women aren't to be trusted, that they are not stable.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: We dug deep into why Hollywood hates curly hair in episode four with Seinfeld Zenny Corzen, and in episode two, why are so many people secretly curly?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Find them in your feed to hear more.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still waiting for a movie where a lead actress has straight hair and they give her curly hair as part of makeover.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Send me your questions about curly hair, our culture, and anything else you'd like me to address in one of our future mini shows.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Priya at WeARSpiraling.com.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: This show is produced by Citizens of Sound and hosted by my upcoming hair care line, Myura, theme music by LopGun.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: See you on Instagram and TikTok.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Our handles are in the show notes, and talk to you on here very soon.