Let's play a game: Can you name a book or movie...
Most people in the Middle-Ages were illiterate, so the catholic church used visual aids (what we would call memes nowadays) to express messages and concepts. A big theological topic was how to behave to avoid hell. The seven virtues and the seven cardinal sins were the pillars of the morality-system. In these visual aids, the church linked "good" to "pretty" and "bad" to "ugly".
Can you name a book or movie where the good people are ugly (not simply mediocre-looking, but actually ugly!) and the bad people are good-looking?
The first thing that comes to my mind is the Hunchback of Nôtre Dame... except that the original story is a tragedy where he dies alone in the end by the grave of his PRETTY girlfriend.
What about comedies about some loser getting the girl... except that those losers are never actually bad-looking and they get a PRETTY girl for all their troubles.
Can you think of examples?
= new reply since forum marked as read
One of director Brian DePalma's early films was "Phantom of the Paradise," a reworking of Phantom of the Opera but set in the future music industry. The phantom isn't great looking to begin with, but in the first act of the film his face is crushed in a record press so one of his eyes is sort of hanging out of his face, and his face is badly burned; thus he dons the mask. His girlfriend is pretty but she, too, turns against him. He truly has no friends. And of course the people in the music industry (the bad guys, depicted as morally depraved) are supposed to be attractive, expensively dressed, living in mansions, having groupies throwing themselves at them, etc... Paul Williams plays the primary bad guy. You might be thinking, "Paul Williams isn't exactly Brad Pitt," but the director manages to make this work.
This film also ends tragically, with the Phantom dying live on stage, and his girlfriend totally confused about who is "good" and who is "evil." Although I think his girlfriend (named "Phoenix"
sort of gets what's happening. The last few moments of the film are chaotic and confusing.
I barely remember a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa called "The Storyteller" about an indigenous story teller in South America who mesmerizes people with his stories (while preserving the culture) but mysteriously goes missing. I think he was described as being quite unattractive, but it's been a long time since I read it.
...Tod Browning's 1932 masterpiece about a carnival. But you'd better have a strong stomach...
