Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: The Outside

“Beauty is only skin deep” is a well-known saying meaning that a person’s personality and character are more important than what they look like, and was probably written by a beautiful person who never had to deal with being what society deems as physically unattractive.  Growing up being the ugly duckling leaves long lasting psychological scars that live with us far into our adult lives.  The fourth episode delves into such an issue and the lengths that one woman would go through to transform into the beautiful swan.

Stacey (Kate Micucci) works at a bank surrounded by affluent, gossiping, coworkers who are all beautiful and glamorous.  Always feeling like an outsider, she is surprised when she gets invited to a holiday party at a coworker’s house where she is given a gift of Alo Glo skin cream.  But she seems to have an allergic reaction to it, causing her to feel even more ostracized from the group.  Back at home, her loving husband fails in trying to console her.  Unable to sleep, she watches some television where a commercial for Alo Glo seems to speak directly to her and convinces her that she needs to keep using the product if she wants to transform. Which she does, causing a rift between her and her husband.  Will Stacey transform into a beautiful swan and will her husband survive the process?  Watch and find out!

Stacey’s hobby of taxidermy is a great metaphor for the episode.  She takes something most would find unattractive, a dead animal, and  she rips out the insides and stuffs it full of Styrofoam and filler. She replaces the eyes with glass and makes the outside appear beautiful and alive again, but the inside is hollow and fake. When looking at her coworkers, what we are shown are things beautiful on the outside and yet dead and fake on the inside and yet, this is what Stacey longs to be.  Kate Micucci plays the part to perfection, and you can feel the longing from her in just how bad she needs to fit in, to just feel like she belongs.  Her husband, Keith (Martin Starr) loves her completely, but that just isn’t enough, and he could never understand the feelings of utter despair and hopelessness someone like Stacey feels.

I am not going to lie, I had a very hard time watching this episode, it hits a bit too close to home for me.  The beauty industry makes billions off of products like Alo Glo promising a quick way to reach the best you, and likewise the fitness industry promises quick transformations if you buy a certain supplement or do a specific workout, but there is no shortcut in real life and transformation has to begin from within and not on the outside.  That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t strive to be a better person both physically and mentally, it just means that the motivation shouldn’t be other people, but your own satisfaction.  It has taken me years to figure that out.  I don’t think the longing to fit in will ever go away, but learning to accept and love oneself is the ultimate goal and not the validation of others.