Wonderfully Awful: A Rant With Teeth
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a blogumn by Robin Rosenzweig
Photo Credit: Andres Thor
As someone who gets massively geeked out on television, I know as much as the next person that sometimes you have to take what you watch with a grain of salt. It’s called suspension of disbelief, and it allows the viewing audience to accept things like mystical tropical islands with magical time travel powers and ordinary people with extraordinary superpowers. And for the most part, I’m cool with everything my TV shows throw at me, except for one little detail that keeps sticking in my craw…
Exceptionally good teeth.
Yeah, that’s right. Teeth bug me. Teeth. Particularly, when a character on television has way better teeth than he or she should.
I really noticed this a few weeks ago when I was watching the series premiere of Justified on FX. The show follows a rugged lawman played by Timothy Olyphant as he is reassigned to his rural hometown in Kentucky. And although Olyphant has exceptionally good teeth, it wasn’t his that bothered me. It was the ones that belong to his former best friend and current rival Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), leader of a local backwoods white supremacist gang. Here’s a guy who grew up working the Kentucky mines and is currently a violent moonshine-swiller who entertains himself bombing churches. And yet…and yet…his teeth are straight, sparkling and blindingly white. I enjoy pretty much everything about this show, except for Goggins’ incredibly distracting teeth. I just have a hard time buying that this character makes flossing any sort of priority.
About a week later, I settled in to watch a highly anticipated episode of Lost which promised to explain the back story of the island’s resident ageless wonder Richard Alpert. (Caution: spoilerish details ahead.) We were taken back to the Canary Islands in the 1800’s where Richard was hardly among the upper crust who gained any sort of primitive orthodontic services. He spent time as a prisoner accused of murder and as a slave on a ship that crashed violently into the Lost Island. He’s a downtrodden man, and spends most of the episode looking as if his last bath is nothing but a distant memory. And yet, and yet…despite the soot covering his skin, he has the brightest, most well-aligned teeth I ever did see.
And now that I think about it, these dental distractions are not just limited to Richard Alpert. Let’s look at the entire cast of Lost. Do you mean to tell me that a plane full of people crashed into this island and nobody as much as even chipped a tooth? I know Lost Island is supposed to have magical healing properties. But I’m just not buying that Sawyer in all of his hotness has perfect teeth, be it before the crash during his con-man days or afterward when, you know, his face likely launched into the upright seat back in front of him.
Now I know actors have to have good teeth to get gigs. But at the same time, they’ll also fatten themselves up like a Thanksgiving turkey to gain weight or work out like fiends to drop pounds just to get a part. They’ll sit through multiple hours of makeup to ugly up for that sure-to-be-an-Oscar-winning role. And yet…and yet…the teeth always remain perfect.
I’m not saying actors should tie a string to a door to yank out a tooth to be believable in a role. But perhaps I am saying that maybe it’s time to ease up on the whitening formulas and porcelain veneers. Let’s keep the amazing television teeth where they belong. You know…with the Glee cast and the vampires.
Have you seen Tim on American Idol this season? That boy is a walking toothpaste commercial. I want what he is using.
Have you seen Tim on American Idol this season? That boy is a walking toothpaste commercial. I want what he is using.
I was just talking about this with my husband a few days ago! I also find it incredibly annoying when some character has teeth that are so obviously not in keeping with the character's time period/socio-economic status/presumable lack of access to good dental care. I know some movies do teeth prosthetics/makeup, but a lot of smaller-scale productions and TV shows don't seem to think about the teeth. So white, so shiny, so straight….so distracting.
I was just talking about this with my husband a few days ago! I also find it incredibly annoying when some character has teeth that are so obviously not in keeping with the character's time period/socio-economic status/presumable lack of access to good dental care. I know some movies do teeth prosthetics/makeup, but a lot of smaller-scale productions and TV shows don't seem to think about the teeth. So white, so shiny, so straight….so distracting.
This makes me crazy as well. It's not just the teeth it's the hair and makeup as well. We saw book of Eli and I couldn't get over how perfect all of the lead actress clothes were.
Or how chubby Denzel was despite having walked across america, surviving on little but cat meat.
Mmmm, Denzel…. Mmmm, cat meat…
This makes me crazy as well. It's not just the teeth it's the hair and makeup as well. We saw book of Eli and I couldn't get over how perfect all of the lead actress clothes were.
Or how chubby Denzel was despite having walked across america, surviving on little but cat meat.
Mmmm, Denzel…. Mmmm, cat meat…
It's the veneers. I'll chime in on the sister rant because it's made me crazy for a while now. Perfect, straight, white veneers have become what we believe teeth SHOULD look like (along with immobile, botoxed foreheads). It's particularly noticable if you watch any vintage TV from the 70's or 80s. Teeth back then are starting to look weird and yellow to us. Which in turn makes us self concious about it which is why I have a bathroom full of whitening products.
Following the Lost example – remember whatsername – the first girl to get the DUI. Ana or something?? She had natural teeth when she first appeared and then giant, white, freaking chicklet teeth the next time we saw her. I was so happy when they shot her character because of her damn teeth.
Whooops. Sorry. Here's your soapbox back. Didn't mean to steal it.
Ana Lucia – aka Michelle Rodriguez. And yeah, are we supposed to believe that The Others subjected her to teeth replacement as some sort of island torture?
Those darn Others, always torturing people with new veneers.
No, this drives me crazy. And I hate when actors sell out this way. What's wrong with your original teeth? It's just ridiculous.
It's the veneers. I'll chime in on the sister rant because it's made me crazy for a while now. Perfect, straight, white veneers have become what we believe teeth SHOULD look like (along with immobile, botoxed foreheads). It's particularly noticable if you watch any vintage TV from the 70's or 80s. Teeth back then are starting to look weird and yellow to us. Which in turn makes us self concious about it which is why I have a bathroom full of whitening products.
Following the Lost example – remember whatsername – the first girl to get the DUI. Ana or something?? She had natural teeth when she first appeared and then giant, white, freaking chicklet teeth the next time we saw her. I was so happy when they shot her character because of her damn teeth.
Whooops. Sorry. Here's your soapbox back. Didn't mean to steal it.
Ana Lucia – aka Michelle Rodriguez. And yeah, are we supposed to believe that The Others subjected her to teeth replacement as some sort of island torture?
Those darn Others, always torturing people with new veneers.
No, this drives me crazy. And I hate when actors sell out this way. What's wrong with your original teeth? It's just ridiculous.
I dunno. Some people just have good teeth. In my family, only one of my siblings had problems with alignment. The rest of us just look like we've had braces. I got lucky, I guess. So, straight teeth don't bother me, but the SUPER WHITE teeth bug the crap out of me. There is such a thing as too white when it comes to teeth.
This one time, my husband and I were in Flagstaff visiting his MIL and we had to run into Walmart for diapers or something like that. As we were leaving the parking lot, a woman passed in front of our car, out on a walk with her friend, and I swear that her teeth were so white they were glowing. I turned to my husband, and he was like, "Yeah… I saw it, too." I am crazy, and so I made him turn in their direction when we left the parking lot, because I wanted to see if it had just been a trick of the sunlight on her teeth or something, and as we passed them again her face was in shade and her teeth were still glowing. I don't know if she was fresh from a whitening session or had been spiking her mouthwash with plutonium, but it was the weirdest thing I have ever seen.
Anne, I also come from a family with great teeth. And yes, it's the whiteness that bothers me, too — the straightness I can deal with.
I dunno. Some people just have good teeth. In my family, only one of my siblings had problems with alignment. The rest of us just look like we've had braces. I got lucky, I guess. So, straight teeth don't bother me, but the SUPER WHITE teeth bug the crap out of me. There is such a thing as too white when it comes to teeth.
This one time, my husband and I were in Flagstaff visiting his MIL and we had to run into Walmart for diapers or something like that. As we were leaving the parking lot, a woman passed in front of our car, out on a walk with her friend, and I swear that her teeth were so white they were glowing. I turned to my husband, and he was like, "Yeah… I saw it, too." I am crazy, and so I made him turn in their direction when we left the parking lot, because I wanted to see if it had just been a trick of the sunlight on her teeth or something, and as we passed them again her face was in shade and her teeth were still glowing. I don't know if she was fresh from a whitening session or had been spiking her mouthwash with plutonium, but it was the weirdest thing I have ever seen.
Anne, I also come from a family with great teeth. And yes, it's the whiteness that bothers me, too — the straightness I can deal with.