Summary
The Beauty is very much on-brand for Ryan Murphy, a silly, extreme body-horror vehicle that touches on all of his favourite subjects.
The Beauty might have the most Ryan Murphy opening ever. Here’s a supermodel on the runway, looking great. But also looking a little off-kilter. It’s a believable model performance because it’s Bella Hadid, a casting coup a bit like Kim Kardashian starring in a legal drama. But Bella isn’t the lead here. In the opening minutes of Episode 1, “Beautiful Pilot”, she goes nuts, starts attacking people in the crowd and glugging their water, flees into the streets, steals a motorcycle, races through Paris, gets T-boned by a car and goes flying through the air, breaking several bones on landing, staggers into a cafe, batters some more people, shrugs off a gunshot, and then literally explodes.
See what I mean? Very Ryan Murphy. And it only gets more Ryan Murphy from there, if that’s possible.
Bella Hadid’s explosive outburst, dubbed by the press as Catwalk Carnage, is just the latest in what seems like a string of similarly combustible incidents. On the case are FBI agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett, who are in a transactional sexual relationship but are chalk and cheese in terms of their personal approaches to their physical appearances. Jordan didn’t like her boobs and got new ones; on a date, Cooper’s grey-ish teeth were criticised, but he didn’t feel the need to do anything about it. “Beauty is pain”, Jordan says at one point, which seems like a capsule summary of the show itself, and is, of course, the idea that underpins everything. How far are you willing to go to be beautiful?
If you’re someone like Jeremy, an overweight and socially incompetent incel living in his mother’s house and lost in the miasma of webcam sites and extremist forums, you’ll go pretty far. Jeremy is obsessed with changing himself to become more desirable to the women he covets; he wants to become the quintessential contemporary man, and you can kind of imagine what he means by that, but the clues fall into place throughout the premiere in the off-chance you’re unsure. Through the forum, he’s directed to an elite aesthetic clinic presided over by a man (I think?) who has undergone so much facial surgery he looks like he’s wearing a Bo’ Selecta! mask, and he undergoes some procedures that turn his face into a Bo’ Selecta! mask, which he thinks makes him extremely beautiful.
To test this theory, Jeremy heads out to a bar, where he’s approached by three nice-looking young women. They dance and cavort, and it seems, for the first time ever, that he is suddenly desirable. But when he rushes to the bathroom to throw up, they take the first opportunity to get out of there and saddle Jeremy with their drinks tab. To say he doesn’t take the rejection well would be a bit of an understatement, since he returns to the clinic with a gun and starts indiscriminately shooting people.
The surgeon only survives the massacre by promising a more radical solution. He takes Jeremy to the penthouse suite of a swanky hotel, instructs him to strip and lie on the bed, and await the arrival of a woman named Claire (Chanel Stewart, aka Miss Universe Australia), who eventually turns up and climbs astride him and takes the virginity he has been trying to get rid of for such a long time. But this seemingly altruistic gesture is anything but. Jeremy wakes up the next morning sweating and gasping for water, like Ruby in the opening scene. In a nice little body-horror sequence, his body starts to contort and change in real-time. His teeth fall out. He pulls his innards from his throat. His face sloughs off. But when he emerges from a gooey chrysalis, he’s a new man, the handsome, in-shape Chad he always dreamed of being.
Thanks to the rest of The Beauty Episode 1, we know this is bad news. Jordan and Cooper start looking into the death of Ruby, and similar incidents in Berlin and London that begin to form an interesting pattern. None of the dead models began as beautiful stunners. They, like Jeremy, were once typically “unattractive” people. They became their own idealised versions of themselves. Jordan and Cooper assume it was through surgery, but thanks to what happened to Jeremy, we now know better. They all seem to have contracted the same STD that Claire passed on, which makes them beautiful, but at a cost. Eventually, they spontaneously combusted.
Beauty is pain, as Jordan said. I don’t think anyone quite anticipated this much pain, though. Anyway, there has been another related case in Venice, so that’s where Jordan and Cooper are heading next. See you in Episode 2.
RELATED:
