When I first started watching Slanted, I honestly didn’t know what to expect.
Because the whole idea sounds crazy.
A teenage girl wants to win Prom Queen so badly that she is willing to change her race just to fit into the image of what she thinks is beautiful and acceptable.
And that’s exactly what Joan does.
Joan is a Chinese-American teenager who believes that becoming more like the popular white girls at her school will finally make people accept her. To her, winning Prom Queen isn’t just about wearing a crown.
It’s about finally feeling like she belongs.
And that is what made this movie interesting to me.
Because beneath all the body horror and craziness, there is something very real happening.
Joan doesn’t wake up one morning simply hating herself.
She has been influenced by the people around her, by beauty standards, by popularity, by social pressure and by the idea that there is a certain kind of person who gets admired while everyone else has to work harder to be accepted.
So she starts changing herself.
At first, you might look at Joan and think, “Why would you do this to yourself?”
But the more I watched, the more I realized that this isn’t just about Joan.
How many people change themselves because they desperately want to be accepted?
Someone changes the way they dress.
Someone changes their body.
Someone hides their accent.
Someone pretends to like things they don’t like.
Someone constantly compares themselves to people on social media.
And sometimes, people spend years trying to become the person they think everybody else wants them to be.
That’s where Slanted hit me.
Joan thinks the problem is her appearance.
But the real problem is the way she sees herself.
And even after getting what she thought she wanted, she still isn’t satisfied.
That’s the scary part.
Because sometimes you can change everything about your appearance and still feel empty inside.
The body horror in this movie makes that message even stronger.
The physical transformation becomes a representation of what happens when you keep forcing yourself to become somebody you’re not.
And honestly, some of those scenes were uncomfortable to watch.
But I think that’s the point.
The movie doesn’t want you to simply look at Joan and say, “What a ridiculous decision.”
It wants you to ask yourself why she felt that decision was necessary in the first place.
Another thing I liked about Slanted is that it doesn’t present Joan’s problem as something that can be solved with one motivational speech.
Her struggle is complicated.
There is family.
There are friends.
There is school.
There is popularity.
There is racism.
There are beauty standards.
And there is Joan’s own desire to be accepted.
All of these things come together and push her further down the road she’s chosen.
But I also think that’s where the movie can feel uncomfortable and sometimes a little messy.
There are moments when I felt the movie had a lot to say at once.
Body image.
Race.
Popularity.
Identity.
Acceptance.
Social pressure.
And sometimes I felt like the movie was trying to juggle too many ideas.
But even with that, the central message stayed with me.
You shouldn’t have to destroy yourself to become acceptable to other people.
That’s probably the biggest lesson I took from Slanted.
Because there will always be somebody who thinks you’re not attractive enough.
Not successful enough.
Not rich enough.
Not popular enough.
Not fashionable enough.
Not good enough.
And if you spend your entire life trying to satisfy everybody, you can lose yourself in the process.
Joan wanted the crown.
She wanted the popularity.
She wanted people to look at her differently.
But what she really wanted was to feel valued.
And those are two completely different things.
A crown can give you attention.
It can’t give you self-worth.
And that’s what makes the story sad.
Because Joan wasn’t really chasing Prom Queen.
She was chasing acceptance.
And she believed changing herself was the price she had to pay for it.
For me, Slanted is not just a horror movie.
It’s a movie about what can happen when you become so desperate to fit in that you stop asking whether you even like the person you’re becoming.
And honestly, that’s a frightening idea.
Because you don’t need experimental surgery to lose yourself.
Sometimes all it takes is spending too much time trying to become somebody else.
Slanted may not be a perfect movie, but I appreciate what it is trying to say.
At the end of the day, the movie reminded me of something simple:
Don’t spend your whole life trying to become somebody else’s idea of beautiful.
Because if you finally become what everybody else wants…
you might discover that you’ve lost the person you were supposed to be.
James
