Ask members of Gen Z what radicalized them and you’re likely to get a lot of media-related answers, especially 2010s dystopian books. When I was in the throes of my dystopian phase, nothing felt more like a cheap attempt at infiltrating the genre than Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series. I was shocked when only recently I learned that it was actually released years before the YA dystopian genre’s crown jewel, The Hunger Games. Uglies is everything that is surface-level about the genre distilled, made as easily consumable as possible.Â
In September, the film adaptation that has been in the works for over a decade was released—the end result is a trashy Netflix movie starring Joey King and Chase Stokes, which feels fitting. So I watched it to see if I might have missed any of the story’s hidden intelligence.
What did I find?
Bitterly, I’ve always thought that Uglies is a premise that a man designed to appeal to young women, using the genre’s teen girl fanbase for profit, insulting our intelligence with its hollow commentary. In typical dystopian fashion, it starts in a distant future where life as we know it has been destroyed. All teens are considered “ugly” and live in a giant inescapable boarding school until they turn 16, when they are required to get an operation that turns them “pretty.” Then they move to a glamorous, futuristic city where life is perfect and people party around the clock.
Unsurprisingly, the operation is too good to be true—along with one’s physical transformation, the procedure dulls your brain until you are thoughtless and compliant. This, say the scientists, is the solution to human problems like war. The story centers around the ridiculously named Tally Youngblood, who dreams of getting her operation until she is forced to infiltrate a rebel group organizing against the society’s dictatorship and gets radicalized. Along the way, the leader of the rebels, who is somehow Tally’s age and super hot, falls in love with her instantly, of course.Â
There are a million technical problems with this premise that become especially obvious when adapting the book to film. The CGI is terrible in a way that I found refreshing—it kind of feels like I’m back in 2014—and the way people look after their operation is no more otherworldly than a bad Instagram filter. The acting is horrendous and the pacing is off, skipping over potentially emotional moments to speed the film along, though it still ends on a sequel-bait cliffhanger. The central hook of the story is off from the beginning—if an entire population can be tranquilized into compliance, why bother beautifying them at all? If people party all the time once they’re pretty, and everyone over 16 is pretty, then who is doing the labor?Â
But what bothers me the most is that this is a story with troubling political implications, all of which are ignored in favor of sequences of teens partying and flying on hoverboards. Where to begin with these problems?Â
If you wanted to go truly meta, you could argue that a society based on scientifically creating more perfect humans is rooted in eugenics. But Westerfield seems to have little desire to condemn this system beyond the Instagram platitude “everyone is beautiful.”
The society is run by a megalomaniac scientist played by Laverne Cox. This is an inexplicable casting choice, given her impressive resume, and I would pay money to know how it happened. I find it disturbing to put a Black trans woman in the privileged position of furthering an agenda based on white supremacy. To frame the ick factor of this in a different way, it’s a storyline where a trans person brainwashes impressionable young people into getting cosmetic surgery that allows the government to control them forever. Do you see the obvious but perhaps unintentional link between this and the current propaganda of the alt-right? Westerfield probably couldn’t have envisioned this when he was writing in 2003, but a casting director working today could have.
Fans of the dystopian genre won’t be surprised to learn that the film inadvertently falls into problematic traps. Following the explosive success of The Hunger Games, a slew of books attempted to replicate the formula. They created polished stories that all included the same elements: a preternaturally gorgeous yet rebellious teen girl lead; two equally attractive male love interests; brutalist urban architecture; remnants of our current society that has been destroyed (for some reason, abandoned roller coasters are a recurring feature); and some kind of gimmick or hook. Uglies has the beautification procedure, Divergent has the faction system, THG has, of course, the Hunger Games.Â
Uglies reads like a laundry list of these tropes. The film was trashy enough to feel like a pleasant form of nostalgia, but there’s no enjoyment found in revisiting the book, which is so lazy that it refers to the city as “New Pretty Town” and the boarding school as “Uglyville.” A quick Google search reveals that, unlike THG, Uglies has not been the subject of much scholarly inquiry. Most of the reviews date back to a time in the mid-2000s when it was still radical to say that we shouldn’t put so much emphasis on our appearances, and we shouldn’t compare ourselves to other people. (Adapting this message to film is undermined by casting stunning 20-something actors.)Â
Because few people have revisited the series between now and then, it’s unclear what author Scott Westerfield was originally envisioning when he was writing it in 2003. (Westerfield is currently 61—perhaps a bit out of touch with how teenage girls are feeling about society.) Recent interviews with him and the film’s (male) director show them discussing only the most surface-level aspects of the book’s commentary, saying the story is still relevant today because of the pressure we feel to look pretty on social media. Obviously, there’s more to it than that—think about corporate control of social media platforms, think about AI algorithms, think about misogyny and racism and ableism and a million systemic factors that divide us into categories far more specific than just “pretty” and “ugly.”
Egregiously, in an interview with Deadline, the director said part of what makes New Pretty Town so appealing is that “There’s no racism, there’s no sexism,” however neither the book nor film even touch the topic of intersectionality. Both the author and director speak seriously about the film’s themes of love, grief, fear, and fighting for justice, which clashes a bit with my cynical perspective. I’ve always been inclined to believe that Westerfield sat down to write the book purely to profit off of a fanbase hungry for content, and knew it was hollow from the beginning.Â
Whether Westerfield truly believes in his vision or not, he’s inadvertently created a world where dangerous images (like Black trans people as oppressors) are allowed to simply be, without commentary or critique. Uglies is at best lazy. At worst, bad dystopian fiction is dangerous, pushing harmful rhetoric unthinkingly and cannibalizing the radical projects that have shaped the genre for selfish profit.