Miss Congeniality (2000)
Scene: A New Jersey school yard in 1982. An 8-year-old schoolyard bully is picking a fight with another, smaller boy. Unexpectedly, a girl comes to the rescue, telling the bully to back off. The following dialogue ensues:
Bully: "If you weren't a girl I'd beat your face off."
Girl: "If you weren't a girl I'd beat your face off.'
Bully: "You calling me a girl?"
Girl: "You called me one."
Whereupon the bully takes a swing at the girl, which she neatly evades, and she proceeds to deck him. She then approaches the other boy, and says sweetly:
Girl: "Forget those guys. They're just jealous. You're funny. You're smart. Girls like that."
Other Boy: "Well I don’t like you. Now everyone thinks I need a girl to fight for me. You are a dork brain."
Girl punches other boy in nose. End of scene.
Almost predictably, the girl grows up to become a tough-talking and tomboyish undercover agent (played by Sandra Bullock) without a boyfriend. The plot thickens when Bullock is forced to take an undercover assignment as a contestant in a beauty contest. Someone is plotting a terrorist act during the pageant and she has to find out who it is. First, however, she has to undergo a role change, something far deeper than a mere makeover. A beauty consultant (played by Michael Caine) teaches her how to walk like most women, wear make-up, and dress to kill. In her interaction with the other contestants, she begins to learn how to behave in a conventionally feminine way. She even becomes a finalist in the beauty pageant. In the end, she gets the bad guy, captures the heart of the handsome FBI agent (played by Benjamin Bratt), and wins the pageant's "Miss Congeniality" award. Her true self emerges and everyone goes home happy.
Sandra Bullock does not have a monopoly on this movie's theme, which is at least as old as Cinderella. In Hollywood as in fairy tales, the emergence of one's "true self" is often the resolution of the conflict that animates the story. Yet life rarely comes in such neat packages. The sociological study of social interaction shows how we balance different selves in front stage and backstage performances, play many roles simultaneously, get pulled in different directions by role strain and role conflict, and distance ourselves from some of our roles. To make matters even more complex and dynamic, sociology underlines how we continuously enter new stages, roles, conflicts, strains, and distancing maneuvers as we mature. This social complexity makes our "true self" not a thing we discover once and for all but a work in progress. The resolution of every conflict that animates our lives is temporary. Miss Congeniality is an entertaining escape from reality's messiness, but a poor guide to life as we actually live it. For that we need sociology.