The Conversation - When obesity becomes a monster

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its Oscar nominations on Tuesday, Brendan Fraser’s nomination for best actor came as no surprise. The actor has received widespread praise for his portrayal of Charlie, a morbidly obese man who’s essentially confined to his home, in “The Whale.”

Yet after seeing the film, Drake University English professor Beth Younger left the theater shaken. As someone who researches fatness in popular culture, she’s written about how overweight characters usually must lose weight in order to gain acceptance or to be loved.

But Charlie, she notes, “does not lose weight … he gets bigger and bigger, suffering a slow and painful physical breakdown.”

In “The Whale,” she sees parallels to a subgenre of horror called body horror, which depicts the destruction and degeneration of the human body. She wonders: What does a film that fixates on the horror of obesity say about our culture’s fear of fatness?

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