It is rare that a movie triggers me. Nix that. I’ll rephrase that. It is rare that the idea of a movie triggers me. Sure, there’s been plenty of bad taste features over cinema’s century-long existence, but it has been so long since a film has actively bothered me that it’s become an obsession. In this case, I’ve developed an unhealthy relationship with Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of the James D. Hunter play The Whale (2022). I knew it months ago when I first heard about it, but now that it’s officially played at Venice Film Festival and earned Brendan Fraser a standing ovation, I’m kind of transitioning into a more repulsed state.
To be clear, I have no ill will towards Fraser. He seems like a nice enough actor who is deserving of respect. With that said, there is something baked into the premise that goes beyond fear of grand guignol with a fat suit. It is something about the very idea that seems to have brought up decades of personal self-hatred, making me notice that I have largely projected up to now. I don’t have any idea what this film looks like outside of a still of Fraser in a 600-lb body suit. I have no idea if this breaks Aronofsky’s trend of being a cruel bastard towards every last person on this sacred earth. What I do know is the general premise and that, apparently, I will be having to deal with this film for the next five months since it seems to be racking up Oscar attention.
At its core, the film focuses around Charlie (Fraser), who is a reclusive 600-lb gay man who is eating himself to death while seeking one last chance of redemption with his daughter. When asked why Charlie needed to be 600-lbs, Hunter claimed during the play’s original run that it was to create some distance between the audience and the character. Not a great excuse for anything, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt that his story is much more nuanced than poorly naming your show “The Whale” while portraying a character that is usually called that as a pejorative. After all, I figured as a society we’d know better than to so carelessly name something a negative stereotype like that (you wouldn’t name a Mexican drama “The Wetback” without some eyes being raised).
Without knowing a whole lot about the film, I will say that it already sounds like an offensive mess to me. Having just seen Aronofsky tear out Jennifer Lawrence’s heart and have a crowd physically assault her in mother! (2017), I am not expecting anything reverential in his follow-up. What I'm expecting is a cinematic version of that Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo (1999) gag where somebody yells “That’s a huge bitch” but somehow in a reverential tone. I’m expecting Charlie to be so damn disgusting, where his impulses are drawn as a poetic tragedy. There will be *some* sense of humanity, but ultimately you’re watching this ugly 600-lb man grapple with self-loathing as you inevitably expect him to die. His death will be portrayed as a cautionary tale and not really comment on anything resembling optimism. You know why I believe that? Because Requiem for a Dream (2000) portrayed a similar addiction without thinking to give us a happy ending. To Aronofsky’s credit, he’s at least consistent.
But to finally get to the heart of why The Whale in particular is bothering me so much, is that we’re only three months out from its official release. I imagine the trailer isn’t that far off. Given the positive acclaim, I am sure that I will see Fraser’s mug everywhere. I expect Twitter to be full of people trying to tell me that this movie is beautiful and one of the year’s best. I also expect a counterargument about the portrayal of fat people that will inevitably lead to a toxic conversation that reminds me how awful the world is to obese people. Again, it isn’t the fat suit that bothers me, but the idea that Hunter needed to make him morbidly obese just to reflect how a character can be distant from his audience. Like that poorly planned title, this is all coming across as cheap exploitation from a playwright who probably has a compassionate story to tell, but doesn’t know jackshit about being fat.
I’ll stop dragging this out. I hate The Whale because of how frequently it reminds me of my own struggles with body image. To a large extent, this was never about The Whale even if I’m still dreading the day I see it. I’ll expect people who have never had weight issues to find it beautiful and tragic like it’s supposed to while I’ll be there watching Charlie and finding his perspective more familiar. I will say that I am grateful to have never been even half of his weight. Mobility and self-reliance have been personal concerns my whole life because of these gasping-for-air stereotypes. Still, I know what it is like to live without the ideal image. It is sometimes isolating because you do feel like the world is just that bit off-center when you’re around.
Charlie will not be seen as attractive. Obesity rarely is. While I applaud people like Lizzo for making plus-sized celebrities more acceptable, there are still decades of bad messaging that have harmed me, that ate away at my confidence. We were gross, impulsive, the source of ridicule and constant bumbling. I saw it from Monty Python, Tim Burton, J.K. Rowling, Weird Al Yankovic, from just about everyone who otherwise was seen as harmless creative making art for the masses. Even Paul Walter Hauser in Cruella (2021) has recently reminded me that in a time where everyone is taking accounts of racial, gender, orientation, and disability politics, fat people are still a damn joke. For every Insatiable that gets mocked from existence, there’s endless scrutiny around figures like Rebel Wilson losing weight. Even looking up interviews on YouTube around The Whale reminded me of how embedded that phrase is as an insult, such as a video by Bill Burr from just last year called “My Girlfriend is a Whale.”
I recognize how difficult it is to find a sensible answer for weight. On the one hand, it’s been a struggle to accept that there are some overweight people who still qualify as beautiful and healthy. While I’m able to see others with a less critical lens, I think it always falls back on myself, where every insecurity isn’t really about the person I’m looking at. When I see a fat person akin to those Wal-Mart memes, it always feels embarrassing, reminding me of my father criticizing people of any size that wasn’t skinny. I think of the times people post pictures of morbidly obese individuals, calling them fat and stupid and which accidentally suggests that skinny people are both smart but also less likely to fall for corrupt politicians. Some will politely do backtracking and say “not all fat people,” but it always comes across as “not all men” for people who didn’t have to be concerned during Thanksgiving for a second entrée.
Whether it is through personal mental blocking or some grander stereotype, I do think that this has ultimately harmed my view of the world. As someone overtly self-conscious of perception, there are endless times when someone will post an attractive picture of themselves. I will definitely admire the aesthetic, like the picture or whatever the social media equivalent is, but I find myself paralyzed to go further. I have given the validation, but have no idea what would be seen as creepy. I don’t want to just do Tex Avery “yowza” stuff, but even the comment of “looking good” feels strangely too leering. Since nobody has really had the occasion to yell “yowza” at me, I don’t even know if people want my opinion on their beauty.
Which is the thing. I have taken plenty of pictures throughout my life. Some of them are even decent. However, there grows an envy quickly toward my peers, especially as their bodies start to approach slowing down. They can look back and remember what it was like to be young and vital, to have experienced a skinny life that opened doors to them. For me, life has been trying to accept those pictures and trying not to just see them all as ugly. Again, I think some of them work.
However, especially in my Mid-20s, I am self-aware of my weight issues to an embarrassing degree. There’s the bad skin tone, the double chin, the curvature. Oh, how curvature annoys me. Because I remember being in swim class in high school and seeing boys stare in disgust at my body, where they seemed dared to touch my chest, I have this unique experience of feeling shamed. Kids are so cruel, and while there are dozens that treated me with kindness, there’s an extent where seeing images of Homer Simpson and Eric Cartman be used as comic follies (because hey, they have a lot of moving parts… that’s funny, right?) begins to eat at you. There’s something obnoxious about Carl’s Jr. selling slovenliness while saying “Don’t bother me, I’m eating.” I grew up in the time of Shallow Hal (2001), Date Movie (2006), Just Friends (2005), and Good Luck Chuck (2007) where the image of fat people was slovenly and used as a gross-out joke. As it stands, the trailer for Good Luck Chuck embodies so much trauma in a short window and I can still envision it even if I don’t want to. But hey, so long as they got into shape, everything was going right, right?
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| With that said, I admire Kevin Smith for his openness with his weight journey |
But curvature. I understand that there are body image issues throughout the spectrum, but The Whale reminds me of how much I’ve loathed being fat even if I’m in a better place with it. It reminds me that what I want is to have those years back as a skinny, delicate, petite person to know if things would’ve played out differently. I want an angular jaw. I’d love to look down and see everything about my body in Olympiad physique, where I probably wouldn’t feel self-conscious sharing fries at a karaoke bar. I long to be something I’m not, and I recognize that everyone has that. The issue is sometimes I’ve felt like a failure because even with good action, I haven’t achieved it nor do I have the personality type to push it further. As perverse as it ultimately is, there have been times where I imagined getting a disease that would make me lose weight just to feel closer to this messed up image. Even as I read anorexia diaries that noted how harmful that mentality ultimately is, there was still part of me that was like “But imagine being complimented…” I’m curious to learn about anorexia nervosa, but that may also just be to feed some grand delusion.
Because for whatever reason, the past few years have found me more focused on body image than I used to be. Sometimes I feel like I’m way too old to suffer from this, especially as I look at the cute people online and wonder how I could even film myself without feeling some dread. Some days I look acceptable (usually from the shoulders up), and others I see photos where it’s clear that I’m fat, where no matter how much work I’ve done, the fluctuation will fluctuate. Even if I starved myself whenever I got depressed, the impulse will come back and the food will taste so lovely. I’ll still struggle to find words of aesthetic affection, but so long as I stay active, I tend to feel better about myself.
I understand matters are much more complicated. I recognize that there are 600-lb people with much greater struggles than whatever I’ve entailed. I can at least fit in a 45 minute walk every day if I wanted to. Still, I don’t believe from the outside that Hunter had the intention of making obesity more than a distancing device between him and the audience. It’s supposed to make skinny people feel relieved that they’re not overweight, that they’re not experiencing that severe a level of self-loathing. I’ve heard suggestions that there’s a lot of fat-phobic insults thrown into the script, but I will wait for context before judging that. Still, it sounds like everyone in this is cruel to fat people, and I hate that. I hate that this is the only story we usually get. I have that kind of story already in my life, where my father told me at 15 that I shouldn’t grow attached to an online relationship because the person on the other side might be a fat plumber. Sure, the intention may have been good in keeping me cautious, but you can’t deny that the use of fat in these officious places of everyday conversation suggests something that didn’t help someone who was overweight since the 90s: fat is evil.
I applaud everyone who can stay in good health and control their weight. It’s an amazingly difficult thing to achieve and I wish I was there with you. I have been working towards healthier behavior, but The Whale is reminding me of the stereotypes. Fat people are miserable, in some ways physically suicidal. We don’t take care of ourselves, so we deserve our fates. We’re ugly as sin and just long to be skinny no matter the delusion. I can only speak for myself, but so much is making me hesitant to praise Fraser for playing a 600-lb man. Sure, I wouldn’t want anyone to have achieved the look in less healthy manners, but I still don’t understand why Charlie needed to be that way save for Hunter’s perverse fascination with the idea of the human body as decay. It’d be one thing if this was a story rarely told, but fat people have been given that assignment 80% of the time. The fact that people way skinnier get scrutiny only makes me feel worse, like I’m a deformity. I don't anticipate Twitter’s discussion of The Whale because I imagine beyond the accolades it will be about the image, the idea that suffering is somehow prestigious while being happy and healthy (and overweight) is nonexistent. I’m not saying the Oscars have ignored this subject entirely, but there are ways to discuss image issues with more nuance and heart than making the audience gasp at one man’s misery. I don’t believe Aronofsky is the man to do it right, but everyone else sure seems to. I hope you’re right on this one.
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