Alright. It's been a fun summer vacation. But okay. Let's actually do a #FatStudyGroup thread on the various wrongs of fat suits and talk about why thin people need to shut the entire fuck up. #Insatiable, this is for you and all your defenders.
So let's start with Katharina R. Mendoza's essay Seeing Through the Layers: Fat Suits and Thin bodies in The Nutty Professor and Shallow Hal in the Fat Studies Reader.
Mendoza focuses on Shallow Hal and The Nutty Professor because, like Insatiable, this is a fat suit being used to tell a story. These are stories about, presumably, fat characters who become or are perceived as thin, unlike movies like Big Momma where the fat suit is diegetic.
(In Insatiable, the fat suit is not diegetic. This is not a character wearing a fat suit, but rather an actor wearing a fat suit to play a fat character.)
"[A]ny discussion about the role of fatness in contemporary American culture is also a discussion about weight loss." (pg 281)
Mendoza adds. "As in countless diet and exercise product advertisements featuring "before" and "after" photos, in most fat suit films the fat body does not appear by itself; its present is always contingent on and shaped by the presence of its corresponding thin body." (281)
The fat suit, Mendoza explains, "enables a disorienting representation of a single character" and further, "[t]hese coexistent bodies are presented as having an unequal relationship with each other in which the thin body, not surprisingly, dominates." (281)
Indeed, Mendoza points specifically to the "fantasies of weight loss: instantaneous and effortless in the former; fraught and effortful in the latter. Upon closer examination, the recuperation of fat characters in these films hinges on the presence of their thin personas-
on the literal, diegetic narrative demonstration that inside all that fat there is indeed a thin person just waiting to get out." (281)
Via LeBesco, Mendoza on Shallow Hal. "Surely the *fiction* of fat is a large part of what draws audiences to the box office. Images of fat are everywhere, but the "obese" woman in Shallow Hal is unique because we know that somewhere inside that costume is Paltrow, size 0." (282)
"Whether the audience gets satisfaction or relief at the juxtaposition of real Paltrow and fat suit Paltrow, the film itself contains a curious subtext of fantastical weight loss in which it is the illusory thin body that achieve the status of the real." (282)
One of the things that bothers me personally so much about Insatiable is the tired story of the sad, useless fat victim becoming the strong, thin SUBJECT. This is really important. The fat character is never a full subject in weight loss stories.
It is only in the shedding of the fat suit that the thin character is able to take revenge, act out, ACT as a subject. The fat body is portrayed as passive, a repository of abuse until it can become thin.
"By the end of the film, all nuances of character- even those behaviors coded as "fat"- have been vacated from Fat Rosie and assigned to her thin self; Fat Rosie has become superfluous." (283)
This part. "[T]he desire/disgust dynamic ... can arguably be found in representations of most any marginalized group, what is interesting about the fat-body-as-grotesque is its potential, literalized by the fat *suit*, to become the thin body that it opposes and threatens." (284)
"The composite body of actor and prosthetic costume represents the fat body in a way that exposes the interaction between desire and disgust while also driving home the point that only normative bodies are allowed to cross the boundary dividing fat and thin" (284)
Let's go ahead and end this with this little bit from the end of this essay here, because it's important and everyone, especially people like Alyssa Milano showing her whole skinny ass in her attempts to defend this series, should pay attention to.
"Before Shallow Hal was released in theaters, its producers and stars were very vocal about the film's message that inner beauty trumps outward appearance (Miller, 2001).
"meanwhile, The Nutty Professor's claim to progressiveness was that Murphy had agreed to star in the film on the condition that the film address society's ill treatment of the very fat (Witt, 1999) ...
"The point is not so much to create an authentic-looking fat person, but to create the convincing illusion of weight loss or weight gain; whatever happiness a fat character may have is always already contingent on the presence of her corresponding thinner self." (287)
Anyway, I hope the incredibly fucking arrogant cast and crew of #Insatiable does a little fucking reading and then maybe learns to just shut their fucking mouths? Imagine. Imagine if thin people just learned to shut the fuck up.
lmao someone just accused me of typing my feelings too loudly so thin people shouldn't have to shut the fuck up on subjects they know NOTHING ABOUT.
Every day some fucking twitter rando comes into my mentions to whine about being made aware of fat hate. Shut up, Karen.
Every day some fucking twitter rando comes into my mentions to whine about being made aware of fat hate. Shut up, Karen.
Thankfully, twitter comes with a built in "shut the fuck up" feature, the mute button.
L M A O I just got told that since thin people are the minority in America, they're the ones who are actually silenced.
That is definitely a collection of words.
That is definitely a collection of words.
Imagine thin people shutting the fuck up. How peaceful. How lovely.
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