This may be the dumbest article (opinion or not) that I've read in a long ass time.
https://www.thedaily...ia-at-its-worst
Let's pretend for a second that a 600lb shut-in is normal and that someone playing them in a fatsuit is some beyond the pale notion. Casting an actor at or near that actual weight for inclusivity reasons would be an exercise in futility from all angles. Assuming you can find a 600lb actor (are there any?), a 600lb individual is not doing much of anything, they get winded just getting up and walking around. The idea that someone of that weight could function on 12hr days of a film set is pretty insane. We don't cast actual drug addicts to play drug addicts very often because that would be a major liability for the production, so the idea that we should cast someone with an obvious eating addiction like that (barring those with medical problems that cause weight gain) is skewed AF. I truly want to understand how she thinks that a 600lb actor is the answer here...
She calls it "a deeply harmful portrayal of a fat person". The person in THE WHALE is not just a "fat person", they are an obese person who is deep in an unhealthy lifestyle that is killing them. 600lbs is not a normal weight for ANYONE, and no one called simply "fat" is 600lbs. The health problems of a person who weighs that much are myriad. I'm a pretty average sized guy, but I carry around 10-15 extra pounds in a given month and even
that absolutely affects my health and I cannot imagine the physical and mental problems that would manifest if I weighed 3x more than I do. So this notion that it's "harmful" is like saying portraying drug addiction is harmful...it's not.
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"I’ll be upfront in saying that I haven’t actually seen The Whale"
....wait what? So you don't even know the context of this story, but you've written an opinion piece? Okay lady.
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"It was also that it was written and directed by two thin men"
Look, I understand the notion of a POC writing something deeply significant for POC as a "lived experience" that a non-POC cannot have....but a thin person not allowed to write a story about someone who is obesely fat is...weird gatekeeping nonsense.
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"screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, who has said he "self-medicated with food” as a young man (which is not the same as identifying as fat)"
WTF? People don't "identify" as fat do they? My gods we live in a world where everyone wants to be a victim really badly. Does this woman think that someone who is 600lbs LIKES to be that, and wants to be recognized FOR that? Weight is not culture, my gods. Aside from all else "self-mediating with food" is absolutely something depressed people do OFTEN (I eat my feelings, is something you hear a lot) and thus is worthy of being the context that the screenwriter applied from his own life to the Charlie character...the fact that this woman thinks that should not count because he didn't "identify" as fat is...wow.
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"and the thin director Darren Aronofsky"
The
projection on her part here is magnificent really, if it weren't so insane as a take.
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From what I gleaned early on, The Whale fell for the trappings of classic trauma porn: a self-hating fat person punishing himself over and over. As someone who has worked hard to counter my own anti-fat biases and embraced the word “fat” to describe myself, I wanted no part of it.
The fact that this woman has not seen the movie could not be more clear than in this paragraph. The movie is about loss, depression and meaning, and how we bury ourselves in our vices if we spiral into said depression. It's not trauma porn, it's a very realistic portrayal of humanity and how easily we slip into depressive states that are destructive, regardless of what that destructiveness manifests as.
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"It matters that Fraser won the Oscar for a role that Lindy West, the fat-positive author of the memoir Shrill (which was made into a groundbreaking Hulu show a few years ago), recently described as “a fantasy of fat squalor, a confirmation that we ‘do this’ to ourselves.”"
I'm not sure that a 600lb person (again, that's what we are talking about here, not someone who is simply overweight or plus size, but someone who is so grossly overweight that every day they are in danger of dying) is "at fault" as it were, but depression...the overarching theme she's wildly missing in the film (which she might know if she'd SEEN it), is a very real and dangerous thing. If it doesn't cause weight gain, it can cause the opposite (after a breakup once I stopped eating most days for a long time, and I dropped a LOT of weight and it took a visit to the doctors to learn that I was bordering on an eating disorder and needed to start eating normally again or I was going to be in trouble), or drug addiction, or alcoholism, or any number of other vices we as humans throw ourselves into when depressed. Like this is the problem I see in her take...she's literally refusing to accept the fact that this film is about depression, and sees only something that is showing fat people in a bad light. It shows you how shallow her (and every other critic she cites in the article to try to support her asinine take) argument is beyond the fact that she didn't watch the film she's taken an opinion on. She's equating the struggle of someone who is 600lbs with that of the average overweight person and has structured her argument around that.
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"Three years ago, I published a feature in the LA Times suggesting a version of the Bechdel test for fat representation on TV. It was not enough to write fat people into scripts and cast fat actors in prominent roles, I argued; it was important that their story lines not revolve around their weight or desire to not be fat."
This is all fine and good in a normal film or tv show where a person is simply overweight or plus sized...but this is not what she's taken her position on. She's taken her position on a role about a 600lb depressed obese person on the verge of death. These are not comparable.
The second half of the article tries to equate Fraser's win with the general view of overweight actors and writers being underrepresented in Hollywood, which I don't feel is a plausible comparison. I feel like the thrust of wanting to see fat actors in roles that don't just revolve around them being fat is fine...but THE WHALE is simply not equatable to that fight. Not even a little bit. I maintain that no 600lb actor is being cast in anything due to the fact that no production would cast someone who was so clearly physically unable to fulfill that contract.
The writer of this article is overweight herself (though it doesn't appear to be excessive mind you, just a very average plus size woman if the photos are recent), and the aspersions she casts over this movie are beyond her fight for representation of plus sized people...because I doubt that Plus sized overweight people are seeking to be 600lb's and unable to move without feeling that weight with every step and he associated health issues that accompany it.
TL;DR: Plus sized people deserve to be represented and listened to in Hollywood, no argument there...But THE WHALE is not about them no matter how much they want to try to make it about them, it's about depression and about someone who is WELL beyond what anyone would consider "overweight". 600lbs is dangerous healthwise unless you're 15ft tall. Hell, I think something like 10-15 of the people featured on that TLC show MY 600lb Life have died since their episodes aired. She's using the wrong piece of media to frame her fight, and it exposes a projection and victimhood inherent in her. She also WILDLY ignores that Fraser was overweight himself until VERY recently from his own depression after his nasty divorce and the physical toll the MUMMY movies took on him (and having been sexually assaulted)...but noting that would fly in the face of her argument more than she's already accomplished herself with the whole bad faith take.
"When the last tree has fallen, and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money, oh no." ~Aurora
"Someone will always try to sell you despair, just so they don't feel alone." ~Ursula Vernon
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