DROP DEAD GORGEOUS (1999) - 4/14/2025
A few questions after this revisit
Sorry for being absent for a while. I really haven’t been up to par with watching any movies this year for a bunch of reasons. Partially, it may be because I watched so many last year and am just slightly exhausted from it1. It may also be in part because after 633 days2, I have a full-time job as an AE once again. And it feels great. And I am slowly pulling myself out of the pit of despair (and accumulated debt over that time).
As I mentioned before, I’m sparingly going to write about things I watch from now on, but this was one I wanted to dive into a bit more.
Drop Dead Gorgeous, the mockumentray following a group of young girls3 competing in the Sarah Rose Cosmetics Miss Teen America pageant, is a film I loved and thought was absolutely hilarious when I was younger. And, while parts of it are still incredibly funny, it is, without a doubt, an absolute relic of its time. So, here are three major topics I wanted to address.
One Offs
While a lot of the comedy is very up front and obvious, there are a few little things here and there that I picked up on watching this nearly two decades later.
When Harold gets yelled at by John the pharmacist, for not leaving his brother Hank with the baby sitter, he mentions that John knows it’s a sensitive topic because she’s dead. Was one of Hank’s baby sitter Tammy, who dies in the tractor explosion?
Hospitals don’t usually have eating disorder wings. Is the reason there is one in Mount Rose because of all of the issues the Sarah Rose Pageant has caused to this small town over the years?
There’s a quick aside before the pageant starts where we see Lester Leeman cozy with his assistant before he pulls away. She is a judge in the pageant, so it’s already implied that she’s meant to vote for his daughter Becky. But were they actually fucking? Was this because he wants to cheat on his wife, or was he strictly just pushing a winning agenda?
There’s a quick scene where the Mount Rose committee is handing out water to the wrestling team, and Gladys takes a deep, long look at one of the boys’ junk at eye level. This film is rife with underage sexualization jokes, mostly aimed at the young pageant women. But is Kirstie Alley’s character also dabbling in these problematic waters?
Before the parade starts, we follow Sam as he talks about getting the float from Mexico, where he gets everything. He jokes that he says he’ll pay the workers in tacos. Shortly after, we learn that the float smells like gasoline and eventually bursts into a large fireball, leading us to assume it was. Did the people who made the float cover it in gas to fuck this man over for being a huge dick to them all the time?
After Amber’s trailer burns up, we learn that all of her outfits merged into “one giant polyester ball” except for her tap outfit she needed for her pageant. It just happened to land on the neighbor boy’s roof “still on the hanger”. Has this dude been breaking into her room to steal shit like a little creep?
One of the contestants later talks about how her previous roommate at state boned Adam West. And these are teenage girls. We’re really gonna fly past that one?
The Use of the R-Word
Listen, this is not an excuse, but it was a time. In the same way you’ll watch something from the 50s-80s just openly use slurs for no reason. This film is bountiful with wildly inappropriate innuendos, slurs, and jokes, that all felt like the comedy of the time. It’s impossible to predict what attitudes will be like in the future and what is and is not okay. It’s hard, realistically, to ding something for that.
This film is also supposed to be a parody of a small, white, wildly christian (Lutheran mainly), small town that definitely does not have the exposure or diversity of the outside world. That’s why things like “If you don’t Jew me out of this” don’t entirely seem out of place, even if that is something that’s hard to hear. But this one is particularly bad.
Again, in the 90s, disability jokes were not uncommon, and I’d be lying to say I didn’t laugh at Carlos Mencia when I was in middle school. Those were the taste makers and that’s the comedy we saw. But in this film it is truly rampant. Major plot points and jokes hinge around the Hank’s severe mental disability, with nearly every main character using it with vitriol, as a casual aside in place of stupid or moron, or as a legitimate term to refer to Hank.
That last one isn’t entirely wrong, seeing as there are still organizations that use the r-word because, when they were founded, that was the technical and medical term - even if they have migrated away from it. But just like any other word, if it is used in spite of a person or peoples, it can easily become a very problematic and hateful thing.
I’m not hear to say this film is wrong and bad because of this use. It is a fact that it was done, and there’s nothing that can undo it. But, I think what we have learned over the past twenty years, is that comedy shouldn’t be made in jest of things that people cannot control - race, ethnicity, gender, ableism. To perpetuate general stereotypes that demean a group for something that is out of their control - whether the joke is innocent or not - is uncouth. You can make fun of someone of being an absolute fucking idiot. That is completely fine. You can be self-deprecating at the expense of your own heritage and classifications, that’s cool. But to sling hateful jokes in the direction of those that are different from you for a cheap laugh doesn’t sit well.
It “others” groups, thus creating more segregation amongst people. Not only that, it empowers people who actually believe in those prejudicial stereotypes, even if that wasn’t your intent. People are fucking stupid and read things in any way that fits their agenda, so with that you have to be very careful in order to breaks these shitty behaviors. Yes, there are larger problems that effect the world and marginalized groups of people, but this one is always an easy step to normalize diverse groups throughout the country and world, even if it is in a very homogenized small town in Minnesota.
So while this film still has plenty of humor and holds up in a variety of ways, this part, that does not age well at all, makes me almost nervous to say I still like this movie after all of these years. Clearly it was a part of it I absolutely memory-holed.
The Most 90s Thing About This Film
As I said previously, this film is an absolute relic of the time - sometimes in a good way, sometimes (as talked about above) in a bad way. But there are a ton of wildly 1998/99 things that make this feel so encapsulated in time.
There’s an entire bit built around having an eating disorder wing at a hospital. That’s not really a thing, but building a joke around anorexia was very 90s coded. As is the stereotypical jokes about people who aren’t WASPy whites. There’s the pervasive underage sexual jokes about older men who creepily are into young girls (John, Adam West). Complete and utter 90s shit (meant with some endearment).
There’s also the entirety of pageants, which were a center of 90s - and before - culture. And yes, by having the eating disorder stuff, or the ditsy girls, or the overt sexual overtones is a way of addressing many issues that have arisen from teen and younger beauty pageants over the years, but to be able to condense them all in one space to talk about one topic - pageants - is of a time.
There’s quick asides like taping over Days of Our Lives, the Cops crew showing up, or having Adam West as a star that are fun. There’s the idea that Lester Leeman is the richest man in town because he owns a local furniture emporium4 - something you definitely can’t be rich from in 2025. In fact, it gave him enough money to buy a globe bar that has a cassette payer in Afghanistan. Absolutely 90s coded. But truly, the most 90s thing about this entire film is the smoking.
Everyone in this film smokes. All the god damn time. People are lighting up darts nonstop around everyone and no one cares. Sure, this is part of the joke of small town America doing what they want, but it really reminds you of how casual everyone was about smoking cigs everywhere, especially indoors. They’re smoking at the restaurant. They’re smoking at rehearsal. They’re smoking at the actual pageant! It’s so funny to look back and remember that we truly did just have people smoking indoors all of the time for no reason. That is the most 90s thing about this film.
I’ve only logged 50 up to this point in the year, where as I was near 100 at this point last year.
As of when I started this current job, but who’s counting?
An absolutely stacked cast that includes Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, Brittany Murphy, Amy Adams. And then you move on to the the moms in the film that include Kirstie Alley, Mindy Sterling, Ellen Barkin, and Allison Janey. Then after that you have a slew of “that guy”s that includes Sam McMurray, Will Sasso, Matt Malloy, and Alexandra Lasso.
Not unlike Helga Pataki’s dad.