The Commodification of Anna Faris

Anna Faris in Smiley Face (above) and The House Bunny (below).

I first noticed Anna Faris in the Scary Movie franchise in which she parodied, among other things, Neve Campbell’s role in Scream. Following that, Faris provided expert comic relief playing supporting roles in two of the most prestigious productions of the last decade, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.

Her breakthrough role - the first indisputable proof that Faris could completely carry a comic film on her own - was as the stoner chick, Jane F, in Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face (2007). Smiley Face is a stoner comedy with integrity. It begins with the already-stoned heroine, an unemployed actress, hungrily consuming a plate of cupcakes baked by her roommate - not realizing that they are marijuana cupcakes - and then follows with the logic of inevitability her wasted path to disaster. In the scene illustrated above (top), Jane delivers a Marxist rant to a group of puzzled workers at a meat-packing plant. We get to see two versions of the scene - the speech as she imagines it herself, a heartfelt diatribe against the alienation of labor - and the speech as it is actually delivered, an incoherent babble.

Wikipedia refers to more than 40 titles in its article on stoner films. Significantly, the protagonists of most of them are pairs of young males. Smiley Face is not only funnier than most of these films* - thanks in large part to Ms. Faris - but in featuring a solo female lead, it puts a few more cracks in that glass ceiling we keep hearing about.

Faris’s next starring vehicle, The House Bunny, which opened this weekend, is in many ways a step back. The most startling thing about it is Faris’s physical transformation - comparable in some ways to Robert De Niro’s physical transformation in Raging Bull, or Charlize Theron’s in Monster. To wit, in order to play a Playboy Bunny evicted from the Mansion, Ms. Faris has injected collagen in her lips, saline in her breasts (either that, or she wears a cleverly designed series of push-up bras), and toned her slender body to fashionable perfection. The subtext is obviously that this is what a woman needs to do in order to succeed in the world. However, it’s not just subtext - it’s the film’s overt message. The House Bunny, written by the same two women who brought you Legally Blonde, charts the title character’s success as a house mother who teaches the girls in her sorority how to win friends and acquire social prestige by basically tarting themselves up.

No one thrust this project on Ms. Faris. She is credited as one of its executive producers and apparently shopped the idea around quite a bit before she found a company willing to produce it (Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions). The result is, as you might expect, pure follow-the-numbers formula unabashedly borrowing from Legally Blonde with dashes of Mean Girls and Animal House thrown in. And yes, Faris’s talents as a comedienne make the whole thing almost worth your while. You, too, can be a shallow-but-successful commodity!

And, if you don’t believe me, I’ve got an Alaskan Governor I can sell you.

* It is not, of course, funnier than The Big Lebowski, which is a masterpiece any way you look at it.