The Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie opened in theaters last weekend and took home approximately $9,000 dollars, making it possibly the biggest box office bomb of all time.

The basic plot is that Hilton, the hottie, is best friends with Christine Lakin, the nottie. A guy is in love with Hilton, but can’t get over how crappy looking her friend is. Then the friend has a super sweet extreme makeover, takes off her kilo of fug makeup, and becomes equally as hot as Hilton (if still brunette), at which point the guy realizes he’s been in love with the ugly duckling all along. Obviously this movie sucks b#lls, but plenty of reviewers take care to point out how offensive the message of this story is, placing all the girl’s value on her physical beauty and implying she can’t get love without it.

Well, this probably sounds a little cynical but, to me, the dumbed down, superficial comedy based on the Pygmalion template is just another cheap staple of cinema, like Taming of the Shrew stories (when romance based on a ruse or a game turns real) or Prodigal Son stories (when the reckless hero redeems himself but it’s too late to avert tragedy). I don’t defend the theme as valid – I’m with reviewers, the moral is stupid and counter to all reasonable values – but it’s as old as Western storytelling, and certainly as old as film: the boy and girl can’t get together until the weird one transforms from dowdy to beautiful, from unruly to well behaved. Can’t Buy Me Love, She’s All That, Princess Diaries – and it’s by no means restricted to sh!#ty movies, I mean Sabrina, Funny Face, I could even theorize that The Way We Were is based on this premise, except the girl eventually loses the guy because she won’t change. Beauty even wins out in the actual parable of the Ugly Duckling. The happy ending comes when the freakish looking bird grows up to be a fierce looking swan, not when he grows to accept that physical attractiveness is an arbitrary social construct, and what matters is who he is as a person.

Of course, I don’t mean any of this to imply that the general narrowness of American popular beauty standards isn’t worthy of all a reviewer’s ire and then some. It’s bulls#!t, but it’s perpetuated by so much more than a throwaway movie that Paris Hilton is rumored to have paid out of pocket to get a theatrical release for, because it was otherwise destined for direct-to-DVD. In fact, I tend to think that Hilton’s persona is horribly hinged on a sort of mean spirited, post modern celebration of everyone’s hatred for her. She receives loads of attention but is rarely spoken of in anything but a condescending – if not all out vindictive – manner by the media. She’s famous for being stupid, overly sexualized, and rich without having a job. It becomes a really decadent cycle (that’s decadent implying decay, not chocolate cake) because the media continues to promote her on this premise, while simultaneously mocking her for it.

The only person who doesn’t seem to be in on it is her, and if she’s playing dumb, it’s probably at a terrible cost. In that light, it seems like the Hottie and the Nottie promotes backward, destructive thinking no matter what your angle is. At least almost every movie goer in America appears to be doing the best possible thing by ignoring it.