January 27, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Absence makes the heart grow fonder
Ampersand has a very interesting post on the "Absent Fat Person" -- the way that movies and TV use fat suits to make thin actors fat. He argues that they do this in order to keep us from being made uncomfortable by laughing at a real fat person, which would be mean, not funny.
I think he's right about that, although I think he gives it too much importance. Fat kids have been made fun of from time immemorial -- was it Chaucer, or one of his contemporaries, who has the long series about the fat priest? Most people associate extreme overweight with extreme forms of the same behaviors as those that make the rest of us gain weight -- eating too much and not moving. Whether that's fair or not, as long as self-control is prized, there will be a stigma attached to the external evidence of its absence.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 27, 2003 3:52 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksYes, it's an interesting trend to have fat characters portrayed by thin actors. I tend to think, "Gee, couldn't the casting people have found a talented actor who also happens to be heavyset?"
And it's true that chubby kids get picked on mercilessly in school. From my experience (and I've never been overweight or fat) though, it seems people ignore the heavy kids more than mocking them outright. They're invisible. To some extent that's just as hurtful. The stigma that encourages this prejudice is the same in either case, for sure.
One note: Barry Deutsch is a man. There's a self-portrait above the site-meter image on the right margin of his blog.
How could you forget Ned Beatty? (My favorite character actor...) Of course, he's getting old now...
Don't forget Darlene Cates from 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape.'
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Cates,%20Darlene
Recall that she was a genuine horror to behold.
Most roles for the hugely obese are in comedies or horror films. In either case the real thing doesn't work well because rather than funny or scary they're just sad. If Martin Short really was configured like Jiminy Glick it would be merely grotesque and nauseating, not funny.
Part of the problem here is that we're not talking about fat. We're talking about morbid obesity. This is not a parallel to race but a wretched disorder that can strike any variety of human.
At 6' and 225 pounds I am fat. But I manage to fit in a regular coach seat on airliners and I don't beep when I move backwards. I have a significant weight problem but one I could hope to overcome with self-discipline. There is a state well beyond fat, though. Carnie Wilson was a good example. I saw her close up on several occasions while she was engaged to my cousin. (Not her eventual husband.) She was simply buried beneath her own mass. The change brought about via surgery is nothing short of stunning.
BTW the guy in the last Seinfeld was John Pinette. It always struck me as odd for hime to have such a dainty last name.
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Pinette,%20John
G.K. Chesterton was a fat man who wrote mysteries about a priest named Father Brown. I don't know whether Father Brown was fat though.
Absaolutely have to ageeree with you there, Jane. ALso, notice howe peoplse with lots and lots of zxits just sreally make me wannato puke.
I laughed hard and long at John Belushi,
Roseanne Barr, Jason Alexander, John Candy -- and before that Jackie Gleason. It's not mean to laugh at a fat person. Not if he or she is doing funny things.
I wish some had lived long enough I could have laughed longer.
It's mean to laugh at a person SO fat he or she CAN'T do funny things; or any thing. If she can't rise from a couch without assistance, or he can't walk thru a doorway without squeezing, or can't get into a bathtub for fear of getting stuck... That's not comedy, that's tragedy.
But that's reality for some people, too.
The difficulty is getting an actor ABLE to portray the character's diaability. It's much more likely that Richard Dreyfuss will play the dying crippled hospital patient in _Whose Life Is it Anyway?_ than it is the role will go to Christopher Reeve. Sometimes it happens, but don't expect it. Usually, it's too much trouble to put a truly handicapped actor on the stage or the set. (The movie, _Children of a Lesser God_, notwithstanding.)
So, "fat suits".
I agree with Melcher. Sometimes the role calls for movements and activities that a real morbidly obese person either could not do, or could only do so very awkwardly that it wouldn't work on film (at least not comedically).
Not all cultures find fat unattractive, even in women.
And things change with time too - a "Rubenesque" woman wasn't likely to have TB or other health problems, for instance, and in ages when food was comparatively more expensive it was a sign of wealth.
It's funny what people think of as "obese," though. 30 pounds overweight is obese in many medical texts. 30% over your ideal weight for some others. Which means that if youre ideal weight is 125 pounds, and you weigh 160 pounds... guess what?
Morbid Obesity only takes being about 100 pounds overweight. Which is not as much as some people think it is. And an astonishing number of people who say they can never imagine getting that fat wind up there by middle age.
The most frightening part? Of those who become obese, only a tiny minority will manage to get back to non-overweight status and stay there for more than five years. Of those who reach morbid obesity, perhaps 1% manage it.
If you look at any of the peer-reviewed research on obesity, the numbers are rather frightening. The best study I ever saw on the matter involved a large number of obese patients put into a clinic. They got psychological counseling, regular consultation with dietitions, and professional trainers, all dedicated to putting the patients on a permanent lifestle choice of smarter eating and regular exercise, as well as an extensive and expensive support system.
About a third of those who did not drop out of the program were defined as successful. Which meant that 2/3rds were unsuccessful.
As for the 1/3rd defined as successful, you had to read carefully: if you kept off 10% of your excess weight, you were in the successful third.
So if you were 50 pounds overweight, and kept off five pounds over the course of a year, you were in the success group.
Dealing with obesity is going to be an increasing issue for the wealthy industrial countries. There are obviously worse diseases to contemplate (like starvation) but the shit's getting serious, and we really know far less about how to treat it than we think.
There also seems to be a tendency to cast nice-looking people as ugly characters, instead of sending out casting calls for "a woman so ugly that no man could ever love her", for example.
I think that WC Fields did use some genuinely fat, ugly, and ridiculous-looking actors in his films. Sometimes repeatedly. Exception proves rule in this case.
Pacific Islanders and Arabs seem to have a genuine attraction to very large women. Black American men are well known to like big butts (I've done surveys of my friends, it's not just that one song).
Ah, yes: in Hollywood terms, "ugly girl" = "Beautiful girl with glasses and no lipstick"...
Indeed we often get the silly situation of a movie with a "pretty girl" and a "ugly girl" where anyone outside of the movie industry can see that the "ugly girl" is in fact the more attractive of the two.
I'm thinking particularly of "The Truth About Cats and Dogs" here.
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