Between the beautiful and the monstrous.

Abstract

Fashion shares with horror cinema the monstrous nature of body transformation. In this article, I will read the short film MUTA (2011) by Lucrecia Martel from a perspective that focuses on the material dimension of the coded objects of feminine beauty that hold the promise of feminizing the bodies on screen. I start from the following questions: “How do objects promise happiness? How to show that which is invisible in everyday life? How does cinema make the usefulness of objects associated with the feminine strange and monstrous?” To outline some answers, I propose to start with the artificial nature of cinema as a way of constructing behavioral models in viewers, and then observing how introducing failure into these objects allows us to think about critical potentialities that show the construction nature of certain established meanings.