When I first saw “Village of the Damned,” I was 11 years old, staying up late to watch the Million Dollar Movie on our local ABC affiliate.
It wasn’t a particularly scary film, but it did give me a moment’s pause, as much of a moment as an 11-year-old can spare for philosophizing.
It occurred to me, watching that phalanx of tiny blonde aliens, that people had a love-hate relationship with angelic-looking white kids. While they were desirable in a sort of Aryan way, they also personified some sort mythical creature whose perfection is destructive.
Of course, these kids were not alright, to paraphrase the Who.
They gestated in human mamas, but were the product of some toxic, intergalactic sperm that turned them into nefarious versions of the Von Trapp Family singers.
Again, I wasn’t “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” scared, but it did give me an appreciation for being a brown-eyed, chubby brunette, with the same bad hairdo.
I thought of these damned village people when I was confronted with the Sydney Sweeney controversy.
I am sure that you know who Sweeney is, even though I didn’t until five minutes ago. Apparently, she has starred on a few cable series, most notably “Euphoria” and in an annoying Dunkin commercial.
Still, I kept thinking she was Allentown’s Amanda Seyfried every time I saw her in a magazine. I will never again make that mistake.
That is because I now know that Sidney is the 21st century version of Magda Goebbels, a woman who was the prototype of the Nazi goddess.
Magda was married to Hitler’s chief minister of propaganda, and had a passel of children who themselves were the prototypes for the kids in that damned village. They were the Aryan ideal, blonde and blue eyed and athletic, with clear white skin. In other words, baby Nazis in training.
The fact that Magda poisoned the unfortunate little tykes before killing herself after she realized that Hitler’s days were numbered means nothing. These children were socially engineered for Aryan perfection.
Back to Sweeney.
She recently starred in an American Eagle ad for blue jeans. Showing off her cornflower blue eyes and her voluptuous bosom, Sidney smiles at the camera and says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My genes are blue.”
It’s a clever pun, and much less “in retrospect” icky than Brooke Shields’ “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” of a generation ago.
Now, however, the controversy isn’t about Pretty Baby and sexualizing young girls. Now, a whole slate of woke progressives believe that this is some salvo against ethnic Americans, those who have dark skin, textured hair, brown eyes and who don’t sound like they have two last names. In other words, minorities.
I won’t list all of them, but the usual suspects were out there complaining about how this “racist” ad made them feel unseen, threatened, disrespected. A lot of social media users complained that they used a white woman to promote eugenics, even though no one says anything about eugenics when Halle Berry or Beyonce come out hawking whatever it is they are selling at any given moment.
It’s a ridiculous overreaction to a culture that is now supposed to crash through the Looking Glass and pretend that those overweight and tattooed Dove models are the standard of a new sort of beauty. They are the standard of a new sort of something, but beauty isn’t even close.
I am sure that I will get a lot of pushback from the “don’t judge” crowds, who then go on to judge women who represent a classic standard of beauty, a la our own Grace Kelly.
The ones who demand tolerance for piercings, cellulite and pink hair are exactly the ones ready to attack Sweeney for being Eugenics Barbie.
And the idea that we need to have a Chinese-menu sort of casting for every print and television ad, with one from column Black, one from column Asian, one from column trans, one from column pre-Ozempic and one from column Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter — but none from column blue-eyed blonde — is much more disrespectful than Sidney Sweeney seducing the camera.
So while I am not a fan of blondes per se, and think that Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner wiped the floor with Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve-bottle blondes, but who’s paying attention.
This reflexive outrage at a pretty woman who isn’t afraid to flaunt her stuff is much scarier than that group of vanilla children out to take over the world.
Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times in Pennsylvania. Her column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
