Fat Friendly

I have a tendency to get hooked on movies sometimes, and I can end up watching the same one - whether it really deserves it or not - on an almost daily basis if I'm in the mood.  Lately, the mood I've been in has called for a daily dose of "Evolution", a science-fiction comedy by Ivan Reitman, in the spirit of his classic, "Ghostbusters".

The story is fairly simple - a metor crashes in the Arizona desert, and is discovered to contain organic material from another world.  The evolutionary rate for this material, however, is incredibly fast - the aliens can achieve in a few hours what it took our world 2 billion years to produce.  Left to their own devices, they'll be able to take over the world within in a matter of weeks. It's up to our rag-tag band of heros - a down-on-his-luck biologist; his best friend, a geologist who "thinks he's an athlete"; a nice but dim-witted "townie" who works at the local country club, but dreams of being a firefighter; a doctor from the CDC; and 2 brothers who have maybe one brain cell between them, but happen to know a key bit of information - to stop the aliens while they still can.

The movie itself isn't going to be a comedy classic, but it is a nice, funny bit of fluff that won't rot your brain too much and can fill a couple hours when need be.  My fondness for the movie, however, comes, at least in some small part, from the two brothers - "the Donalds" - because of the way they help defy a common Hollywood stereotype.

As noted in some of my earlier bits, I'm a fat woman, and one thing that has had a devastating impact on me has been the way the media - both in entertainment and the news - treat the obese.  In entertainment, fat people are typically the butts of the jokes, generally shown stuffing their face with food on a near-consistant basis, obsessed with talking and thinking about food, easily distracted by food, and so on. 

On an episode of ER, a man who'd recently had his stomach stapled to help him lose weight came to the hospital because of abdominal pain.  Now, for most people, after a stomach stapling, it's best to liquify and drink food, rather than eating it, as it's easier to digest that way.  This character had, apparently, liquified and drunk an "entire Christmas meal" (as opposed to the normal 2 or 3 tablespoons of food or drink a person who has had gastro-intestinal surgery is able to eat for a meal).  Another scene had the doctors trying to figure out how to pull the guy out of the wheelchair he'd gotten stuck in, but the greatest part of the man's humiliation was yet to come. One of the nurses discoveres that 5 dinner trays are missing, and, following a trail of food crumbs, they find the man passed out in a closet, having eaten the 5 dinners and become so engorged that he passed out and puked.  He had to be taken for emergency surgery, and Dr. Benton made a point of identifying each bit of food as he pulled it from the man's system.

Monk featured an episode centered around an 800-lb man who was confined to bed because of his weight.  Anytime another character was in a position to see any of his abdominal flesh exposed, their reaction was universally one of disgust to the point of almost needing to throw up.  The character was shown constantly being served food - nine corn dogs, or a mixing bowl sized "serving" of spaghetti.

Third Watch contributed an episode with a woman who, like the character from Monk, was so fat she was confined to her bed, and in order to get her to the hospital, a wall from her appointment had to be removed.  As the paramedics came in through the house, a view was given into the family kitchen which was filled (and I DO mean FILLED) with cakes, cupcakes, candies, snack food and other such items.  I will give Third Watch credit for at least having one of the characters acknowledge that the woman deserved to be treated with reasonable dignity.  It's too bad the show itself could have done that for the character.

The news media is, in many ways, is even worse.  In the cases where a fat person does get trapped in their home, if a wall of their home has to be removed to get them out, the newspapers in the area will cover it, and frequently, it'll make the national "odd" news wires. I remember several years back when I had a very bizarre accident and inded up running over my own leg with my car (no serious damage, though, just a big bruise on the back of my calf with the clear impression of the tire tread in it), I was absolutely terrified that, because I am a very large woman, and because the accident itself was so weird, it was somehow going to end up in the news.  I've even told my husband that if - Gods forbid - we ever do have trouble getting me out of the house, that I'd rather die in the house than become the subject of a news report on another fat freak.  And when doing stories on obesity, TV news stories are ALWAYS illustrated with pictures of fat people's torsos.  No faces - just people walking in crowds, shown only form the base of their neck to their knees.

So, given the general treatment that fat people get in movies, when I first saw the characters of "the Donalds" in one of the opening scenes, I resigned myself to being innundated with yet another rounds of these kinds of sterotypes and to see the guys always with food in hand and so on.  I was, however, pleasantly surprised.  No mention is made at all about the guys' size in the film and the characters are rarely, if ever, shown with food.  They don't talk about food, there's no scenes of them being distracted by someone talking about food or showing pictures of food.  Nothing like that at all.  And while some may argue that having the guys be so dumb is an insult to fat people (and therefore makes the movie unacceptable), it must be noted that they aren't the only really dumb characters in the film.  Two other characters - one of our main trio of heros, and a minor female character - are both a dumb as a bag of hammers, if not dumber, and they are both what would be considered conventionally attractive. 

What we end up with are two characters, who happen to be fat, but who are not defined as being "fat people".  There are no fat jokes, and, in the long run, they end up helping to save the day.  They are simply treated the same way any other character in the movie is, and while that may not sound like reason for celebration, it is extremely rare.  The characters could easily have been played by thin people, and not a single thing about them would have to be changed.  

So, while part of me feels sad that this is actually something I find reason to be happy about, most of me is just happy that the film was made the way it was, and that for once, the fat people were just part of the local colour for the setting of the movie, and not the punchline to every other joke.