Pretty Hurts Beyoncé

was said to have “made a bold, feminist statement when she released “Pretty Hurts” as a single from her self-titled 2013 album.”

 Beyoncé envisioned the music video to be about beauty pageants reflected in the lyrics ‘just another stage, pageant the pain away, this time I’m going to take the crown’ Beyoncé stated that “I thought about the most humiliating, judgmental place you can be as a woman,” the singer describes of the video’s concept that takes place at a beauty pageant. “I feel like sometimes the world is a big contest. We’re all being judged. I wanted to capture how humiliating and how insecure that makes you feel. Melina was able to capture that emotion and capture the extremes that we feel like we have to go through to please the people that judge us.”

music video stars Beyoncé herself as a beauty pageant contestant, it explores the themes of beauty standards that are forced upon women and uses the pageant environment to reinforce these behaviours due to society’s standards.  The video is a combination of narrative and performance, and it shows us a back story of a character (played by Beyoncé) and her experiences with beauty pageants but also Beyoncé has her own sections where she is herself, where she is either lip syncing to the camera or smashing things and even slight dancing aspects to her performance.

The music video not only showcases Beyoncé's character but the other girls competing in the pageant too. In this particular scene it shows Beyonce’s character and another girl fighting over a hair dryer they both act aggressively towards one and other and appear agitated and annoyed. This could be highlighting how girls are pinned against each other and are made to see one and other as competition, not even just in a pageant environment but similarly within the media and real life. Similar scenes are included throughout the music video to highlight this idea that our society pits women against each other as we are taught by society that our value is based on our appearance and that one girl’s gain is our loss creating jealousy and petty behaviour between women towards one and other. This is all because society never focused on telling women the exact opposite, and that everyone is beautiful in their own way, it doesn’t have to be the ‘conventional’ beauty standards created by society. The scene once again reinforces these beauty standards forced upon women as they fight for an appliance to fix their hair.

This is a notable scene which shows Beyoncé's character being weighed and then her waist measured to ensure she fits the beauty standard is ‘thin enough’ to compete in the pageant. Her facial expression and body language clearly demonstrates feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable. The following scene shows her being singled out and her body critiqued as she is confused and insecure, she’s then paraded round for practice for the pageant. In the second scene shown in the photograph sequence above is another pageant contestant eating cotton wool this is also known as ‘‘the cotton ball diet’’ which swept social media in 2013 as a new craze for weight loss. The diet consists of eating cotton wool balls to fill up your stomach to prevent the feeling of huger and dramatically cut daily calorie intake. In the final scene shown above is Beyonce making herself throw up, highlighting the eating disorder bulimia and bringing awareness to the illness. All these scenes demonstrate our flawed society, and how the girls feel the need to resort to dangerous and unhealthy habits in order to keep up with the constant expectations and standards forced upon them; this pressure is especially prevalent in the beauty pageant environment which is why it was cleaver chosen for this music video and to shed light to these issues.

The technical code of diegetic sound is utilised in this scene as the music cuts out and dialogue is included. It consists of Beyoncé's character being asked the question “What is your aspiration in life.” To which she replies “Well, my aspiration in life would be, to be happy”.

The three scenes above are used when Beyoncé is repeating the question out loud as she thinks of an answer the words aspiration in life echo in a distorted creating the sound of head fog along with more diegetic sound of the splash into the water which also echo's and adds to the effect of your head being submerged underwater, in which a performative scene is created as she moves around in the water. Piano cords play quietly in the background creating a melancholy sequence of shots which all relate to the feeling of overwhelming sadness and distress caused by the industry.

In the scene shown above the music abruptly restarts and a series of performative sequences are shown. This particular scene above is in slow motion as Beyoncé whacks all the trophies, presumably from the pageants, off the stand in almost a fit of rage as she screams and angrily moves around.  

The final scene i have chosen to talk about is this scene where she is shown with a plastic surgeon as the lyrics say “ain’t got no doctor or pill to take the pain away” which highlights the fact that no matter what work people can get done to make themselves feel better about their appearance, the pain of never truly loving themselves for who they are will always be within them. Beyoncé is presented as not wanting the filler in her face as she resists and turns up her nose at the man trying to hold her still and inject her face which could be symbolic of society trying to tell her how to change her appearance to fit into the beauty standards even though she may be happy with how she looks, further reinforcing that the issues with beauty standards lie within our society.