Thomas Wictor

The uncensored version of the video for “Blurred Lines” made an overnight star out of Emily Ratajkowski, the brunette. She was the first woman in the history of the human race to publicly bare her breasts. Now she’s on the cover of GQ. What struck me about her affect in “Blurred Lines”—yes, I was looking at her face—was how cold her eyes were. In the article about the GQ cover, it’s her gigantic lips that catch my attention. She looks like she’s having an allergic reaction.

The first really famous actress to show off her inflated lips publicly was Barbara Hershey in the movie Beaches. Bette Midler can’t take her eyes off them.

I never saw Beaches. The song was ubiquitous and so horrible that I couldn’t chance the film. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s how rancid that tune is.

Pure agony. I apologize.

In her youth, Barbara Hershey had perfectly fine lips. They were thin, but they matched her face.

A brief aside

I was going to recommend a Barbara Hershey movie called Just a Little Inconvenience. It’s about a Vietnam War vet who lost his left arm and leg. He’s drowning in self-pity, so a fellow vet decides to teach him to ski. They’re in the lodge, the amputee sitting in a dark booth with his left side facing the wall. Barbara Hershey comes in with a girlfriend, and the four all flirt and agree to meet on the slopes the next day.

When Hershey sees that the man is a double amputee, she wordlessly turns and skis away.

It’s a very powerful movie. The wounded war vet is played by James Stacy, who lost his left arm and leg in a motorcycle accident.

Doing research for this post, I learned that Stacy is a convicted child molester. He raped an eleven-year-old and was arrested for stalking two other little girls. As a result, he’s a registered sex offender here in California.

I won’t watch Just a Little Inconvenience again. It wouldn’t be possible. Look how he’s smiling for his official sex-offender photo. You think he’s remorseful?

Back to Emily Ratajkowski

Now, is this attractive? Really?

To me her lips look diseased or injured.

When my sister Carrie was about five, she ate some chiles that my mother was growing in the garden. Carrie’s lips swelled to three or four times the normal size. She looked just like Emily Ratajkowski.

I read that as Stanley Kubrick got older, he became more and more obsessed with his lifelong dream of making an X-rated film starring A-list actors. His final work was the execrable Eyes Wide Shut, which had such graphic sex scenes that they used computer-animated people to block your view of the rutting club members. Although Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman didn’t have sex on camera, Nicole treated us to a contrived, nude monologue. The scene reeks of smug self-consciousness, like a smart-alecky sixteen-year-old just daring you to criticize him.

Robert Altman got fixated on sex in his last films. He put in tons of utterly gratuitous female nudity that had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. Maybe I’m not normal (!), but as I get older, I’m becoming less attracted to young women. I like faces with lines in them. And I can’t stand labial bloat.

When I see pumped-up lips, I think the woman is going to talk like this.

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against young people. Some of my best friends are young.

That’s a lie. I don’t have any friends.

But if I did, their age wouldn’t matter. Simply as a physical-attraction thing, however, I prefer women closer to my own age. This one, for example.

No idea who she is, but you’d never look at her and think, “She’s about twenty-three.” I like everything about her. That’s an extremely attractive woman. And it took me AN HOUR to find that photo. Almost every other image of women my age or older showed disastrous cosmetic surgery.

Years ago I used to drive to Old Pasadena and walk around at night. The houses are huge and beautiful, and the streets have trees. That’s what separates the wealthy from the working class: trees. For some reason blue-collar people hate shade. I live on the street where my mother was raised. As the old residents died, their houses were bought by younger, dual-income couples.

The first thing they did was chop down all the trees on their properties. Now the street is like a blast furnace. There’s no shade anywhere—except for the front yard of Tim’s old house, and in my front yard. Tim planted a tree there that he bought when it was a sapling. Look at this monster!

On my long walks in Old Pasadena, I’d marvel at the trees and the fact that nobody had curtains. They all wanted the world to see into their mansions. So I looked, and I learned that though there were shade trees, there were no women between the ages of thirty-five and seventy-five. The men were middle-aged or elderly, but their women were all in their twenties or early thirties. A few couples were octogenarians, the only people chronologically matched.

When I imagine happiness, I think of having a picnic under a tree with a woman like this.

I’ll bet she’s past sixty, but she’s hotter than anybody who’s ever appeared on the cover of GQ.

The Eye of Sauron is upon you, lady.