B0041VYHGW EBOK (144 page)

Segment 4
tries to show that, in contrast to these cultures, modern Western society stigmatizes gaps. Several more interviews, intercut with other material, show that women have felt that their own teeth were unattractive. One tells of a dentist who tried to convince her to fix her gap (mocked in a song about “filling your mouth with wires, your head with lies”). But the idea that gapped teeth are ugly is immediately counterbalanced by vigorous editing. Two magazine images of models without gaps are followed by a pretty little African-American girl with a gap; then a photo of Madonna, perhaps the ultimate gap-toothed glamour icon in modern society; and then a
Vogue
cover showing Lauren Hutton, the first major gap-toothed fashion model
(
10.14
).
As if in reply to these images, a woman says she’s worried about her height and weight, as well as her teeth, although she herself is conventionally quite attractive
(
10.15
).
Her comment is then countered by other opinions, as one woman talks about how in magazines “you never see a person with gapped teeth,” and a mother with a gap-toothed toddler recalls that she had hated her own teeth until Lauren Hutton became a successful model. By intercutting the woman’s comments with illustrations of what she mentions, Blank achieves an intellectual comparison somewhat akin to Sergei Eisenstein’s intellectual montage
(
10.16
–
10.19
).
Overall, the editing drives home conflicting attitudes toward what is beautiful.

These interviews are less playful and funny than the opening sequence, but the film becomes light again. Lauren Hutton herself roams through city streets in a vain attempt to find gap-toothed people to interview. The scene turns the usual show business interview upside-down by having celebrity pursue and address ordinary people, a point underlined by Blank’s use of a TV-style handheld camera
(
10.20
).
Hutton is then interviewed in her home, saying that if a person finds herself attractive on the inside, she can be satisfied with her appearance.

The same playfulness is sustained in another musical interlude, folk singer Claudia Schmidt’s “I’m a Little Cookie,” a song accompanied by 10 photos of gaptoothed girls and teenagers, all smiling. This segues into a series of testimonies about how women have tried to correct their teeth with homemade devices, followed by a mock commercial for an actual device designed to fill in gaps
(
10.21
).
This segment of the film ends with the interview with the elderly woman who is proud to still have her own teeth, gap and all (
10.10
).

Segment 5, which we’ve labeled “Careers and Creativity,” begins with another Schmidt song about gaps. As we see images of more gap-toothed women, including Whoopi Goldberg, the song reintroduces the Wife of Bath motif (“old Chaucer knew where the score was at”) and leads into an interview with Schmidt herself. She recalls that she used to be defiant about having a gap and extolled “gap power.” There follows an interview with the cartoonist Dori Seda, standing beside a poster for the film we’re watching and explaining that recognizing her gap helped her link herself to a tradition of unusual women
(
10.22
).
The film is moving toward associating gapped teeth with pride, comradeship, and creativity.