Shallow Hal

They have been showing the movie Shallow Hal quite frequently on cable lately.  I thoroughly enjoy the movie for its concept, screenplay, and dialog.  There is just one thing that is hanging me up…

For those of you unfamiliar with this movie, it’s about a man, Hal, who is superficially hung up on the outside appearance of women.  In all other respects, Hal is a genuinely nice guy, caring and fun.  But because looks are the first thing he uses to judge people, he never makes it past the surface to their inner beauty.

One day Hal gets trapped in an elevator with Tony Robbins, the famed self-help guru, and shares his trouble with dating.  Tony hypnotizes him, so that he no longer focuses on the outer looks, but focuses on the inner beauty.  This transforms Hal’s world, as he starts to be attracted to women that he didn’t look twice at before.  The comedy of this comes when everyone else around Hal can still see them for their outer looks, and there is a disparity between the way Hal describes them and how they see them for real.

Which leads me to the thing that hangs me up.  Hal doesn’t see EVERYONE differently, only strangers.  For example, his best friend, Mauricio; his neighbor, Jill; and his co-workers are still portrayed and seen exactly the same.  My first thought on this was that he was seeing them the same, because they were genuinely portraying themselves exactly as they are.  But then I took it another level deeper and realized that the writers of the screenplay had a fundamental dilemma to overcome.

Hal COULDN’T see them differently, because then he’d realize something was up.  So, everyone he already knew is exactly the same, so that his brain has no awareness that he’s been hypnotized.  I realize that Tony Robbins could have layered that into the hypnosis, so that his brain wasn’t aware, but I’m not sure it would have “taken.”  The brain is a wonderous thing, and if the “trick” is too far-fetched, then the brain will reject it.  It had to be plausible without pushing the boundaries of what the brain would accept.  I realize that I probably analyzed it way deeper than the writers.  They probably thought about this, and then just decided that either nobody would notice, or they wouldn’t question the fact that certain people didn’t change in Hal’s mind.  Or perhaps they just thought this would add to the comedic irony of it all.

But it made me wonder about how I would see the people around me.  Would they appear more beautiful, more ugly, or exactly the same?