Little Miss Sunshine: A Movie About Society's Ridiculousness

    The 2006 award winning film Little Miss Sunshine, directed by husband-and-wife team Johathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, tackles heavy societal issues throughout the film while also using a variety of comedy for the movie to be enjoyable to all. Dayton and Faris’s movie pokes fun at the topics of beauty and society’s love for winners (and hatred for losers), to which suggests to the viewers that although these issues are ridiculous, they need to be addressed and changed as soon as possible.

    The film begins in Albuquerque, where you meet the dysfunctional Hoover family. The youngest, Olive, gets qualified to attend the Little Miss Sunshine Beauty Pageant in California, and all the Hoovers, plus the mother’s adult brother, embark on a road trip to California in a beat-up microbus. Richard Hoover, Olive’s father, is obsessed with the idea of winners and losers, and believes that he and his family must be winners at all costs, as he has created a 9-step book to success that cannot, by any means, be wrong. 

    Along the road trip, Richard’s infatuation with the idea of being a winner puts a lot of pressure on Olive, who is roughly ten years old. When stopping for lunch at a restaurant on the way, Richard insinuated that Olive was fat for ordering ice cream. He manipulated his young daughter into not eating it by mentioning that all of the women on television who won beauty pageants were skinny.

    After a few more ups and downs, the Hoover family finds themselves at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, where there were lots of sexualized children competing against Olive. These other little girls wore clothing that showed more skin than necessary, wore heavy makeup and spray tan, and performed dance numbers that were not quite for children. These girls clearly outmatched Olive, and freaked out all of the Hoovers.

    

Beauty pageants are very common today, and have been for a while. Although most are aimed for adult audiences, there are pageants and shows like Toddlers & Tiaras or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo that are for younger children. Being exposed to these events and television shows at an early age can really mess with children’s perception of beauty. Young children pick up on things quickly and try to mimic as much as they can to “fit in”. Beauty pageants will further the idea that you can only be pretty if you’re skinny or wearing ten pounds of makeup. Kids will feel pressured into wearing revealing clothing that are meant for older children or teenagers. Our kids will grow up too fast and miss out on healthy childhoods.   

    Richard’s winner complex is a common idea that many people have today that unfairly divides society. In the grand scheme of things, none of us are truly winners or losers. Some of us have advantages that others do not, and disadvantages that others do not. In the end of Little Miss Sunshine, Richard realized that after all of the ups and downs along the way, he was a winner just because he had a family that he loved, and because he never stopped trying when life tested him and his family on the road trip. And Olive didn’t have to wear revealing clothes or ten pounds of makeup to be the winner that she was. Olive, who didn’t win the beauty pageant (and got banned from entering one in the state of California), still came out a winner, for she had a family who loved her without a doubt, and she gave her performance her all. And that’s all that really matters.