The best smeared make-up14 Images
A perfectly made-up face is a sure sign of a woman in control, according to Hollywood at least, where even when in extreme peril or while living in a post-apocalyptic world, female characters always find the time to apply a bit of lipstick that never smudges. So, when movie make-up is anything less than immaculate, it serves as a shorthand for a woman in distress.
Since a woman’s power in films is almost always contingent on youth and beauty, the moment she falls, her mascara tends to follow. A make-up look ruined by dirt, sweat or tears can indicate that a woman is full of rage, deranged, manic, heartbroken, humiliated, or having a full-on breakdown. You can see it in Fleabag’s dissociated mascara-streaked gaze, Harley Quinn’s dirt-smudged face and Taylor Swift’s raccoon eyes in the “Blank Space” music video, each look evoking their unique pains and vulnerabilities.
When Diane Ladd’s character in Wild at Heart, Marietta, enters a guilt-driven psychosis she compulsively covers her body in red lipstick. In The Substance, Demi Moore’s Elizabeth expresses her self-hatred by violently rubbing her make-up off. And it’s not just the women. Dr Frank N Furter’s make-up stays perfect as he murders and seduces with equal glee in The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it’s only once he loses control and his vulnerabilities are revealed that his make-up gets a little blotchy and tear-streaked.
Here are the best instances of smeared make-up in cult cinema and the moments st-block-21of fury and mania that gave rise to them.
For one long night, newlyweds Brad and Janet get swept up in alien-mad-scientist (and queer icon) Dr Frank N Furter’s theatrical schemes. Before their eyes, Frank performs for, seduces, births, murders, freezes and unfreezes his castle’s motley crew, always in perfect drag make-up. Only once his supremacy and eyeshadow begin to slip does his vulnerability emerge, in song: “I’ve seen blue sky through the tears in my eyes and I realise I’m going home.” He weeps both in despair of being misunderstood and in relief of returning to his home planet Transsexual. Frank remains a beloved figure of androgyny and sexual liberation, certifying that wearing make-up (and crying it away) is for everyone.
In this micro-budget sci-fi fever dream, extraterrestrials on the hunt for heroin wreak havoc on a Manhattan party. More specifically, they suck the endorphins out of every sexual partner of protagonist Margaret. For her final monologue, Margaret unplugs all the neon, drags glow-in-the-dark pigments across her face, and laments the stories she was told about princes coming to save her. In her Connecticut youth, the princes were lawyers; in her New York adulthood, they’re agents. She concludes that the only way to be free is to “fuck women instead of men”. Her rainbow face reflects her words: vibrant, chaotic and rejecting the heteronormative status quo. Embodying the emergence of underground queer clubbing in the 70s, Margaret can only make her true self visible under blacklight.
In one of David Lynch’s most polarising projects, Diane Ladd plays Marietta, an overprotective mother with big southern hair and razor-sharp acrylics consumed with her daughter’s safety. Through seduction and the occasional wailing episode, Marietta manipulates men into murdering anyone who has or might hurt her kid. But her ambivalence and guilt eventually drive her into psychosis. After caking herself in lipstick – a woman’s weapon of mass seduction – in a scene that mimics self-harm, her reflection matches the bloody faces of her victims and sends her deeper into her spiral.
Cinematic make-up smearing often occurs in mirrors, where characters can witness their transformations, mental breaks and rock bottoms alongside us. This film has little to no sympathy for its main antagonist, despite her villain origin story being her daughter’s very real sexual assault via a family friend. Apparently, dramatic and vengeful women pay their price with wasted Dior.
After teen siblings (Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) get trapped in a TV show depicting 1950s utopian (dystopian?) American life where residents are seemingly perfect, they encourage the townspeople to find their true selves and transform into technicolor. In one scene, their fictional mother Betty reapplies the grey in fear of her own inner voice, freedom, and the unknown.
Rose McGowan plays Courtney Shane, the leader of a candy-coloured, twiggy clique who accidentally murder their fourth member on her birthday. Courtney’s secret gets out during her prom queen crowning, and the crowd pelts her with corsages. In movies, women often lose their shit at prom, before a raucous crowd, and in the musical sunset of their youth. Courtney claws at her own face, somewhere between protecting herself and joining the mob in undoing her carefully curated persona and highlighter placement.
Undead popular girl Jennifer, played by Megan Fox, seeks revenge on her abusers and men at large. “I’m still socially relevant,” she declares at one point, followed by, “I am going to eat your soul.” She cries (in the mirror), mourning her old life, and spreads foundation over her ghoulish complexion in an attempt to conceal her shame and present the picture-perfect face of her former self.
The film shares a name with Hole’s song “Jennifer’s Body” from the band’s 1994 album Live Through This. Centred around the plight of women, Hole’s second studio album explores the rigid expectations forced on women, dismissal, and male-perpetuated violence. The album cover, featuring model Leilani Bishop, pays homage to the 1976 horror classic Carrie. In the photo, Bishop’s make-up and expression evoke the eerie muddling of happiness, confusion and fear that accompanies womanhood in the spotlight. This sentiment also manifests in the record’s first track “Violet”, when Love sings “When they get what they want… they never want it again.” For prom queens, Courtney Love, and her peers, the masses can turn on you in an instant. The line between highly rated and over-rated is as thin and delicate as eyeliner.
Margot Robbie is Tonya Harding at the end of her skating career, before she gets her husband to club her competition, America’s sweetheart Nancy Kerrigan, in the knee. Harding faced abusive parenting, classism, and endless pressures with the forced smile of a suffering child athlete. Towards the end of the film, as her life collapses around her, Tonya sits down to put on her make-up, applying thick layers of garish purple lipstick on her cheekbones. As she blends it in, she fights back tears and maniacally attempts several of the phoney smiles required of female performers, (almost, but never quite) ready for the harsh lights of the rink.
Lauded as the best scene of the film, the moment echoes another disgraced and defeated woman at her make-up table, the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons. “I love to call it our Dangerous Liaisons scene,” said I, Tonya make-up department head Deborah Lamia Denaver, referring to when the Glenn Close character removes her make-up before her inevitable doom. “Tonya did have the ego of a champion, but at the same time she always felt defeated. That’s what I got from that Dangerous Liaisons moment – after all that, there was still that defeat.”
After seasoned TV exercise star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) gets fired for turning 50, she injects herself with the eponymous ‘substance’ to become a younger woman (Margaret Qualley), but only for a week at a time. The more days she spends with a face and body that turn every head on the LA sidewalk, the more disgusted she is with her original, ageing self. In one scene, as she gets ready for a date, she experiences a particularly intense bout of self-loathing as she stares at her reflection in the mirror. She finally scrubs off her make-up in a frenzied attack on herself and her body that is no longer considered a perfect ideal.
