Let’s Talk About the ‘Uglies’ Messy Trans Subtext
Image; Davis Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Industry Entertainment, Wonderland Sound and Vision, Netflix
The Uglies is the first book in a dystopian young adult series about a society governed by strict beauty norms. I came to it as an adult, which might surprise you since it’s geared toward teenage girls. I picked up my copy of Uglies in 2015 and tore through all four of its main books, and controversially liked Extras the best.
I bring this all up not to brag but to tell you that, from the perspective of a reader, I am familiar with this series. I was excited about Uglies coming to Netflix. And I was equally excited when trans actress Laverne Cox was cast as the villainous Dr. Cable, the antagonist of the series holding up this society’s dystopian beauty norms.
I am going to be doing a trans reading of this film because, well, I want to, and also, I think Cox’s casting adds something interesting to a film whose plotline is about children getting surgeries to conform to societal beauty norms— a theme that is pretty messy.
Trans beauty
For those who don’t know, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series takes place in a post-fossil-fuel and post-capitalist world where our current civilization has fallen due to our society’s unsustainability finally catching up with us. A virus destroyed all of our fossil fuel, most of our tech stopped working, and we are now referred to as the Rusties after all of our rusting and rotting shit.
In the place of this dysfunction, a new society has emerged — a collection of city-states that have tried to remove all divisions between people by making everyone pretty. As the narrator, who is also our lead, monologues in the beginning:
People’s differences continued to create classes, clans, and countries, which prevented them from their shared humanity.
So, they came up with a radical solution: the transformation. Everyone, on their 16th birthday, undergoes a life-changing operation to become their most perfect self. And when everyone is perfect, conflict melts away. Everyone is healthy, happy, Pretty.
Almost everyone gets surgery at 16 by a set of trained doctors to make them “scientifically” pretty, and it’s here we meet our protagonist, Tally Youngblood (Joey King), a titular “ugly,” who is on the verge of her sixteenth birthday.
If you are very clever, you’ll have noticed right away that by creating a split between “pretties” and “uglies,” this society, like so many before it, has created a caste system. Instead of being divided by wealth, its leaders rule through a combination of physical traits and what role they happen to possess in society — with doctors on the Committee for Morphological Standards being on top.
And who maintains this dystopian, shame-ridden society guided by the principles of eugenics?
Well, it’s Laverne Cox’s Dr. Cable, of course. We first meet her in a stunning dress, monologuing to Tally’s class via giant hologram about the importance of getting the pretty surgery:
For those of you turning 16 today, you are truly on the cusp of a metamorphosis. That change starts with one elegant procedure that will make you perfect, both inside and out. You’ll be beautiful and free from hatred and discrimination based on the way that you look.
And, like, to me, these words can be interpreted as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for transitioning. There is a big goal for some — though certainly not all trans people — to “pass.” For you to undergo such a transformation that society cannot tell the difference between you and a person that has a gender that matches their assigned sex at birth.
If only I get this right set of elective procedures, the logic goes, then I’ll be a “real” man or woman or what have you, and as Cable says, you’ll “be free from […] discrimination based on the way that you look.”
As the film progresses, we learn that Dr. Cable does not tolerate dissent: she forces Tally on a quest to find a mysterious sanctuary called “The Smoke,” which is filled with runaways who do not want the operation. She is quite literally a trans person hunting down children so they forcibly undergo elective surgeries.
There is a chilling scene where Dr. Cable, due to Tally’s unwitting help, finds The Smoke, and she brags about forcing a bunch of children and adults to get elective surgeries. “In fact, all of your procedures have been scheduled,” she maliciously cackles to a crowd of horrified onlookers.
It’s a comment that struck me because I (a trans person) am painfully aware that that is how a lot of conservatives see transgender people currently — villains who are forcing people, mainly children, to transition into something they “don’t want.” As Trump erroneously said this year: “Can you imagine your child goes to school and they don’t even call you, and they change the sex of your child?”
The trans subtext in this film is messy, and it’s further complicated by how this film conveys rural-urban relations.
The environment & shit
In the books, the city-states are 100% totalitarian. Residents are constantly monitored, scary hovercrafts monitor the perimeter, and their schools are using indoctrination to pressure children into having a surgery that we learn later in the book (and movie) will impair them cognitively.
Yet, importantly, they are not lying about the city’s environmentalism in the books. Their governments seem to care deeply about sustainability, so much so that many of the luxuries of the pretty part of town are biodegradable. The Smoke is seen as a threat partially for its potential impact on the environment, as it will encourage people to move outside of cities (and for populations to expand).
The best example of this concern has to do with the White Tiger Orchid. It’s a product of Rusty society in the books. A plant whose growth was bioengineered to be so effective that it’s now invasively taking over the surrounding landscape, leeching so many nutrients out of the soil that it desertifies everything it touches.
In the books, Tally meets a group of city-run rangers who are eternally charged with the task of control-burning the periphery of the Orchid’s range so they do not take over the world. As one ranger tells Tally in the books:
About three hundred years ago, some Rusty figured a way to engineer the species to adapt to wider conditions. She messed with the genes to make them propagate more easily….One of the most beautiful plants in the world. But too successful. They turned into the ultimate weed. What we call a monoculture. They crowd out every other species.
…the orchids eventually die out, victims of their own success, leaving a wasteland behind. Biological zero. We rangers try to keep them from spreading. We’ve tried poison, engineered diseases, predators…but fire is the only thing that really works.
In the movies, however, the city’s environmentalism is a lie.
The flowers were engineered as an unsustainable energy source, with desertification being a planned feature of this plant to keep dissidents inside the cities. As the Smoke native David (Keith Powers) lectures:
Those orchids are toxic. They pull all the nutrients from the soil
and destroy everything in their path…Those flowers are turning the planet
into a wasteland. Killing everything. Forcing everyone to live in the city.
This sets up an interesting dichotomy between the totalitarian, urban landscapes of the cities and the more egalitarian, environmental community of the Smoke. As David monologues in another scene: “The city is not going to stop. Because The Smoke is a threat to everything they stand for… Where we believe in preserving what’s natural, they believe in manipulation.”
When you pair this anti-urban outlook, which in a US context is traditionally associated with conservatism, and you add it to everything else we have been discussing, it can leave an awkward taste in your mouth. The evil city dwellers are trying to force children to have surgeries, and they are destroying rural safe havens to do so.
It’s just a weird subtext to process in 2024 America.
An ugly conclusion
I want to emphasize that I don’t think this film actively endorses this subtext. There was no attempt by director Joseph McGinty Nichol to make an anti-trans movie, especially considering the casting of Laverne Cox as the villain, which I think was a bold and commendable choice. It’s more of a problem of this film just playing things so safe (i.e., conservatively) that its message ends up being dull enough for you to project any subtext onto it that you wish.
The film doesn’t bother to speak about LGBT identity one way or another. We do not see queer representation in Pretty Town or The Smoke, which would have definitely sharpened what it was trying to say here. The narrative also softens its perspective on things such as race. The books had everyone who underwent the surgery adopt a standardized olive skin tone. While in the film, the evil standard of pretty is quite inclusive, racially and ethnically speaking.
And that’s a shame because I see what this film could have been. There could have been something exciting said about how beauty norms often coincide with white supremacist, cisgendered, and heteronormative values that this film just sidesteps.
In the end, it ends up saying even less than the 2005 book version did, and that conservatism leaves an ugly taste in my mouth.