On the whole, Dove's decision to question the notion of beauty that is marketed to women is, of course, admirable. Such a campaign dove-tails (sorry) nicely with the brand attributes (purity, simplicity, truth), but regardless, to commit to a strategy that declines the use of the most powerful weapons in a beauty marketer's arsenal is bold and worthy of praise. The famous "Evolution" spot in particular proves the power of the approach, of daring to tell the truth in the light of systemic falsehoods that are generally way more effective, proven strategies.
And I get the idea, here, too. Call it evidence-based body dysmophic disorder. But it's a tricky thing to illustrate. How do you allow women to see for themselves the disparity between how the world views them and how they view themselves? If honestly achieved, this might have a powerful effect, shed light on where the most damaging distortions really operate. So the project seems both in line with the overall strategy and a worthwhile social experiment in and of itself.
The problem, at least for me, is in the execution. First, It's hard to overlook the fact that the person they bring in to translate the subjects' verbal descriptions to drawn portrait is a FBI-trained law-enforcement officer, a person whose career was built on capturing the likenesses of criminals. Without even getting into the politics of having a male authority figure (a law-enforcement officer!) come in and essentially diagnose and dictate to these women their diminished feelings of self-worth, the fact that what he is doing exactly replicates the process by which victims or witnesses to a crime describe the perpetrator automatically associates all the portraits with descriptions of transgressors, those who have done wrong.
The entire process is inverted, where the women who Dove wants us to understand are victims of the great advertising machine are portrayed via the process as the criminals themselves. Now, you could argue that all this is intentional and adds another layer in suggesting that the subjects are somehow complicit in their own diminished self-esteem. That since they create the poor self-image, they are in fact, the ones that need to be stopped. But that's a little harsh, and clearly not part of the intended program. This is not Scared Straight, or at least I'd have to imagine it wasn't supposed to be, that it wasn't their intent over at Dove HQ. This leaves us with just the surprising political oversight on their part.
And on a more formal level, did the producers not see with their own eyeballs that the renderings that the forensic artist produced were not 'wrong' and 'right' or even the traditional 'before' and 'after', but closer to 'horrifying' and 'only slightly less horrifying'? Again, it's just a question of I think leaning too hard on conceptual scheme to do the work. If you put a mug shot into a Pottery Barn frame, that doesn't transform it into anything other--it's just a nattily-presented mug shot. Here, too, the renderings don't in any way shed their wanted-poster connotations, and so it becomes doubly weird when the women are brought in afterwards to evalutate and discover themselves as the usual suspects. Who will they finger? Yes, her, that's the one. Good enough. Take her away, boys!
Plus then there's the casting of the artist himself. This guy doesn't exactly ooze compassion even as he sort of soft-shoes his conversation with the subjects. He's trying hard to be sensitive, but everything about how he's presented suggests otherwise. We see him first in silhouetted profile, then a hard cut to a push in on his dramatically lit seated pose. He seems hardened by the things he's seen, so hardened that we might as well be being introduced to the statue of LIncoln at the Memorial down in DC. Are we to believe that what's driven this guy to suck down the Jameson nightly and develop a permanent scowl is not the incomprensible violence that he's witnessed as a member of the FBI, but the the impossible feminine ideal that the beauty/fashion industry puts out there for young girls to choke on? And this is in whose hands (of which we see one bearing a very ominous, onyx ring) we are to put this very delicate mediation? Are they trying to cash in on the popularity of shows like CSI and NCIS? Plus, by the way, what does this say about the validity of any criminal sketch given both the as we now see probably distorted impressions of the eyewitness and the also apparent limited interpretive skills of even an FBI-trained sketch artist? Is it any wonder that pretty much every wanted poster you've ever seen showed a face that you'd be hard-pressed to match with any living human on earth? I have nothing against old Gil or his profession or law enforcement procedure in general. But it makes you wonder.