“It just feels really isolating to feel like people don’t see me as human,” I told my husband, Todd, after a long day of anxiety stemming from Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Whale. Blinking away tears as I drove to pick up a grocery order of food I didn’t want to cook anymore, I felt like I was out of control in my own body, trapped in a too-big vessel that kept most people from seeing me for what I am: a person.
It probably sounds like an exaggeration for me to be upset about a movie that hasn’t released yet, a movie I couldn’t even have seen. Unfortunately, the media discourse surrounding The Whale has reemphasized that many people—especially those in the business of Hollywood—don’t see nonnormative bodies as human.
Some spoilers for The Whale to follow. CW: Disordered eating.
Denver Center for the Performing Arts
For those who haven’t been constantly tuned in to Twitter’s coverage of the Venice International Film Festival, The Whale is a new film based on a play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter. Hunter adapted the play himself, working on the screenplay and remaining involved with the film. Aronofsky, who has directed films like Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream, took on the project and lent some big-name credibility to it. Of course, the film stars Brendan Fraser, who I’ll talk about later. The plot follows Charlie, a 600-pound man who wants to rebuild his relationship with his daughter, who he hasn’t seen since he left his family to live with his same-sex lover years earlier. Now that his partner has died, Charlie feels the need to reconnect with the family he once left.
While that sounds moving, Charlie’s nonnormative body frames the plot. At approximately 600 pounds, he’s limited in what he can do and spends much of his time at home. In the play version of The Whale, Charlie spends most of the runtime sitting on a couch in the middle of the stage, the actor playing him encased in a fat suit that limits mobility. Behind-the-scenes footage from one production shows a thin actor putting on a padded suit with multiple layers of lumps, bumps, and sculpted curves. Every part of the actor’s body becomes exaggerated except his head, which remains its normal size (a problem with many fat suits). In the film version of The Whale, Fraser dons a hybrid of fat suit and CGI (via Vanity Fair). According to Vanity Fair, designers created the suit to look realistic yet limiting, and Fraser spent time “working closely with the Obesity Action Coalition [to] immerse himself in the disease’s particulars.” All of this sounds well and good, and it’s almost impossible to determine what the tone of The Whale will be until it releases. That said, the way media outlets have discussed the film is what’s genuinely telling—and alarming—for fat audiences.
The seemingly most widely circulated review comes from Owen Gleiberman at Variety, who discusses Charlie’s body in hyperbolic, disgusting terms, comparing him to Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars and calling him a “sedentary lump.” Though the review ultimately commented that The Whale is underwhelming, the tone of the piece says everything: Fat people are disgusting and need help and pity. Before anyone starts wondering if there’s a big redemptive moment for Charlie where everyone realizes how lovely he is and expresses appreciation for his existence, that doesn’t happen. I read the screenplay, and it begins and ends with Charlie’s friends and family demeaning him, lecturing him, and insinuating that he is killing himself by eating. Unless something drastic has changed between the version I read and the final film, it’s pretty depressing.
Mary reading about The Whale for weeks on end.
The story frames fatness as a symptom of addiction, and I’d never suggest that binge eating isn’t real or that it doesn’t affect people in negative ways. There’s no doubt that Charlie has experienced trauma that he hasn’t dealt with, and that he deflects thinking about said trauma through eating. I’m also not saying that being fat is a good or bad thing, it simply is a way some people are, no matter how hard they try to lose weight. What’s more interesting to me in terms of The Whale is how it invites audiences—both in its stage and film versions—to stare at a fat individual and enjoy a spectacle with no fear of retaliation. Charlie is, in many ways, a sideshow act used and manipulated by those around him for entertainment. His daughter and his best friend treat him more like an object than a person. Throughout the screenplay, multiple characters emphasized and re-emphasized that they would not help Charlie go to the bathroom, as if that was the most awful thing a person could request assistance with. As if that is not a very real and intimate task many disabled people need help with.
Audiences that go to see The Whale will be asked to stare at the intricate fat suit/CGI combo Fraser wears for most of the movie as they watch Charlie binge eat and laboriously move about his small apartment. In Staring: How We Look, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson talks about the power staring has within society, and how it serves to establish social hierarchy and dominance. Garland-Thomson explains that through staring, individuals can “assign stigma to perceived traits.” Any individual outside of what’s considered normative—whether disabled, gender-nonconforming, or non-white—can become the recipient of stares, therefore marking them an outsider and assigning stigma to them. Stigma for what? Not being “normal.” In Fat Shame, Amy Erdman Farrell argues that the fat body is intricately linked to a disruption of civilization. Fat stigma, in some ways, evolved from the ostracization of people like Sarah Baartman (an enslaved woman put on display for her nonnormative—i.e. non-white—body), who was exploited because of her shape. Charlie is also on display in The Whale, not only established as something to be disgusted by, but something to stare at openly, to gawk at, to stigmatize.
Many people discriminate against disabled people because they are scared of becoming disabled themselves. Disability comes for all of us, eventually, as we age and change over time. In some ways, fatness also comes for everyone. Aging bodies have slower metabolic rates, and therefore more weight in some cases. While getting older doesn’t automatically make one fat, it definitely makes additional weight more of a possibility—a reality that many people are terrified of. For some viewers, Charlie surely represents the worst thing that can happen to a person, becoming disabled and imprisoned in his home because of his weight. Even when he receives a wheelchair to help him navigate his apartment more smoothly—which brings him joy for a brief moment—there’s no chance that Charlie will be able to take his newfound mobility aid outside. The looks he’d receive from passersby would be simply unbearable, shaming him back into hiding.
Considering how The Whale doesn’t end with some redemptive arc or realization, part of me can’t understand how the cast signed on to this project that essentially consists of a fat man receiving shame from everyone in his life. I want to note here that Brendan Fraser has his own highly publicized trauma, having suffered injuries earlier in his career that changed the course of his life. His experiences might have influenced the decision to take on the role of Charlie in The Whale, as he has also suffered enormous loss and shame. That said, Fraser isn’t entirely innocent in making this film, though I don’t necessarily blame him for taking the role and restarting his career. In the press coverage of The Whale, Fraser described Charlie as a saintly man, saddled with the weight (pun intended) of the world.
Another great moment in fat suit history
“He’s a light in a dark space. I think it’s poetic that the trauma he carries is manifest in the physical weight of his body,” Fraser said. He went on to explain that he thinks people with similar bodies must be incredibly strong, both mentally and physically. For the most part, it seemed that Fraser was attempting to be respectful of Charlie and people like him, almost tearing up at times to think of the challenges fat people must endure. But no matter how happy I am for Fraser to re-enter the public consciousness and experience a renaissance in his career, he’s still an actor who signed off on this script, on this story. Like so many actors before him, he chose to play a character that’s part of a marginalized group without being part of that group himself. One critic from Variety asked Aronofsky why he decided to cast a well-known actor instead of an actual fat person for the role. Aronofsky said that he considered all sorts of people, but that Fraser was the one who ultimately caught his eye because it “felt right.” Aronofsky gracefully did not directly answer why he chose not to cast a person who did not need to wear a fat suit to play the role.
Whatever The Whale is trying to do, based on the screenplay, I don’t think it reached its goal. Despite his faith in humanity, everyone around Charlie mistreats him until his death. His hope and love for other people ultimately means nothing to those he cared about most. If the movie is trying to make audiences empathize with fat people, it’s not succeeding there, either. Charlie isn’t someone viewers are asked to identify with, and instead, they get to stare as he becomes sicker, more isolated in his trauma and body.
Thinking about this movie and reading the early reviews has me worried about how people will potentially praise The Whale once it releases nationwide. Will it encourage others to view fat people as an oddity meant to be gawked at? Will it prompt reviewers and Letterboxd fans to write nasty reviews demeaning people who look like me? I don’t know, but I can share that as a fat person, I feel bad enough about myself without the help of The Whale. Years of shopping for plus-sized clothes, traveling, and just living in the world have helped me know that many people don’t see me as desirable or (in the worst cases) worthy of being treated like a human.
Just when plus-sized icons like Lizzo make headway for body inclusivity, something like The Whale has to knock us down a peg or two, doesn’t it?
Choosing to celebrate Lizzo instead.