Article contributed by Daniel A
If you could change every aspect of how you look, would you? Caitlyn Sponheimer’s film, I Want To Be Like You, which she wrote and directed, presents a world where two women (played by Brittany Drisdelle and Lorna Kidjo) can do just that. Using photos of one another, they undergo cosmetic surgery to look like each other, hoping to obtain the perfect body. “I wanted to show how people can see beauty in each other, but then fall short in acknowledging ourselves and celebrating differences,” Caitlyn said.
I interviewed her, along with the film’s leads Lorna and Brittany to dive a little more than skin deep into I Want To Be Like You. It’s a film “about the chase we are guilty of – that constant need for self improvement, regardless of the consequences” Brittany says, and Lorna adds “that it shines a light on how destructive these standards can be, and how it can make it almost impossible for women to find and love who they naturally are.”
“What we see in advertising, film or TV creates a narrow window of what beauty is,” Lorna continues, and says “we’ve all been unconsciously conditioned by beauty standards that are perpetuated by the media. As a woman of colour, I’ve always wanted to look more white, because that’s what I was taught was beautiful.” Caitlyn follows on by saying she was inspired to make the film because she was “sick of seeing women put themselves down, including myself, often brought on from external sources. Sick of the inundation of images of what beauty “is”; when really it is whatever beauty is being marketed to us at any given time.”
“If you look at the ‘perfect body’ throughout the years, it almost changes every decade,” Brittany says about beauty standards, and Lorna agrees that “it changes with trends.” This is exemplified in I Want To Be Like You when their characters, named C-786 and C-424, after having completed their surgery to look like one another, once again start to find faults in the way they look. When asked about her decision to name the characters this way, Caitlyn says “we didn’t want to give them ‘real’ names because that also gives them more of an identity; each woman is supposed to be representing women as a whole, not an individual.”
The conclusion of these women’s journey in I Want To Be Like You alludes to this idea and Caitlyn cites “this mentality of not being good enough is cyclical, we will continue to seek validation outside ourselves if we don’t begin to accept who we are.”
When asked to elaborate on potential future concerns in regards to plastic surgery, Brittany warns that “I don’t necessarily think we should change our image according to a current fad or trend,” and Lorna added, “changing how you look on the outside will not make you feel better about how you feel on the inside, in the long run.” Caitlyn reiterates, “the beauty industry wants us all to believe beauty is this one thing, but it’s not and that is where we are going wrong. If we all fall into that trap, then we’re all gonna start looking like one another and acting like one another.”
While I Want To Be Like You aims to start a conversation about these issues, its writer/director and its stars have some ideas on what can be done to prevent the film’s dystopian world from becoming a reality. Brittany is concerned that plastic surgery “is just too easy and too accessible now. I do think there needs to be more education behind the dangers of it. I’m all for self improvement but I do think we need to be more aware of how serious surgeries, fillers etc are.”
Lorna notices that advertising “also unconsciously shapes what straight men find attractive and indirectly exacerbates the problem. I think there should be more women and LGBTQ+ behind the scenes to change the way we portray the world we live in because art imitates life and vice versa. There are just too many white men calling the shots.”
And what Caitlyn doesn’t want her audience to forget is that, “that media, advertisements, pushes on us is this one image and then we will all become carbon copies of one another. We will all lose our originality and become undefinable. The thing that makes us all so friggin’ cool is that authenticity.”
