Years ago, I had the mischievous idea of going around the planet, burning down all the wax museums. They just seemed so pointless in the modern world. Something about the idea of turning the figures into puddles of wax, like so many melted candles, appealed to me. In 2023, with ubiquitous internet access that can provide videos that have better resolution than the real world, the idea of wax representations of celebritites seems even less necessary.1
And yet, like paper checks, wax museums persist long past the point of usefulness. It was with no small amount of amusement that I saw a recent wax museum controversy featuring a much-too-pale rendition of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson at Paris’s Grévin Museum.
The museum’s website includes this:
• The star’s Samoan tattoos took the painters 10 days of painstaking work and a lot of research
• The eyes of Dwayne Johnson’s waxwork had to be redone 3 times to avoid too dark a tint making the star’s face too hard and erasing its warm aspect.
All that work, and yet apparently, no one noticed that they’d turned the Black and Samoan actor into a white man.
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