Thread by @KivanBay

Okay, I did promise a #FatStudyGroup pop culture analysis thread about Triplets of Belleville and my complicated feelings about it, and maybe we should get into that?

If that's something you want to avoid, you'll probably want to mute me for an hour, just sayin'. This is your ten minute warning.

Okay, so, Triplets of Belleville is a 2003 animated movie directed by Sylvain Chomet, the guy who did that Stromae music video about twitter, you know, that guy. It notably does not rely on much dialogue, choosing instead of communicate with its audience visually and musically.

I, personally, have always really enjoyed Chomet's animation style, but, uh...

He definitely doesn't like fat Americans.

I make this distinction because fat French people show up in the film as well and seem to be presented in less totalizing ways than the fat American characters. I'll provide some examples.

In the scenes taking place in France, fat characters appear pretty regularly. Fatness is often a sign of age, as in the main character Souza or Champion as a child before he begins cycling, or as a symbol of working class characters, as in this family eating dinner.

Fat women are also featured in the French scenes as the beauties celebrating with the winner of the race, which seems to run counter to the expressions of derision evident for fat Americans in this film.

However, even in these scenes in France, for Champion, food is still a measured commodity, his weight carefully monitored whenever he eats. I find this scene strange and distressing. It may be a disordered eating trigger, content note on that.

The first fat characters shown in the movie are fat American women. This is even the first scene in the movie, honestly, it directly follows the credits and these are the first people we see in the movie: fat, angry, high society women with their thin, small, emasculated husbands

In Fat Shame, Farrell discusses an appearance of a class of "nouveau riche", the burgeoning middle class who were often seen as being unable to "handle" the excesses of modernity, leading to them being classless, uneducated, shown as stepping outside of their station.

This was often achieved through drawings that presented the nouveau riche as fat. While the men in these relationships were allowed to show some signs of "uncivilized" fatness, women were expected to maintain the civility of the household through the maintenance of their bodies.

Indeed, Farrell discusses at length how in many postcards, cartoons, and posters from the modern era, we see men who are attracted to or married to fat women portrayed as less masculine, lower class, and weaker willed.

More recent studies quoted in Marilyn Wann's Foreword of the Fat Studies Reader discuss how men who are seen with fat women are also seen in this way: weaker, lower, less intelligent, pathetic. In this scene, Chomet's animation exemplifies this bias. It is ugly to watch.

Chomet characterizes all of America as fat, and lays the blame for that, visually, at the feet of our eating habits, as we can see in this shot of Belleville that features a parody of the Statue of Liberty (which, like, made in france) as a fat woman holding up a cheeseburger

However, because he characterizes all Americans as fat, something kind of accidentally wonderful happens.

There's fat characters everywhere in the background, fat bodies in motion, fat people of all classes and backgrounds, in all different scenes.

Fat is Everywhere.

In the diners, full of fat people, with a fat, no-nonsense waitress.

On the streets, boy scouts, women in bikini tops and shorts, men in suits... all of them fat.

And in the fancy wine club that the Triplets are performing at: fat people there to enjoy wine and music.

This shot, with this fat man grooving and this elegant woman playing with her pearls... I love it. I love this shot so much. I cannot explain to you how much I love this, seeing fat bodies dancing, taking pleasure in music, moving. I know it's meant hatefully, but...

I honestly cannot help but be delighted by it, by our very overwhelming PRESENCE in the animated cast. Usually in cartoons, we become so erased, so elided, or we come to represent one bad thing. Chomet thinks Americans are all fat... and so in Belleville, we reign supreme.

I don't know, y'all, that's really special to me, even if it's meant in a harmful way. The intention is bad, but damn I do love seeing so many of us, young and old, poor and rich, on one screen.

A friend told me once that we steal our representation when we're marginalized, that we take what we can where we can and we make it what we need, and I think that's probably why I've always loved Belleville even if Chomet doesn't like me.

Anyway, this was a short thread, but consider buying me a hamburger, I'm v poor and your tips make these threads possible. Thank you and thanks for learning with me!

paypal.me/kivabay

and if you do buy me a hamburger i'll come back and talk about gilman and the understanding of fat as a western or distinctly american trait

Bumping for the morning crowd