Critics Blubber Over ‘The Whale’ Rejecting Narrative That Obesity Is Healthy And Normal

Mainstream critics are furious that a director would dare to portray obesity as a negative.

They’ll never come out and say that explicitly. Instead, their reviews of “The Whale” starring Brendan Fraser are full of evasive criticism, claiming director Darren Aronofsky’s passion project is a “cruel spectacle” and that it helps to “reinforce the dehumanizing ways in which many people understand fatness.” 

The movie portrays Fraser as a homebound 600-pound English teacher named Charlie who is slowly eating himself to death. It’s revealed that Charlie is depressed following the death of his partner and copes with his emotions by binge eating. Like the director’s previous effort “Requiem For A Dream,” the film explores the subject matter with an uncomfortable intensity.

But while Aronofsky insists he handled the character of Charlie with compassion, that’s not enough to assuage the critics who fear some viewers will see overeating as a vice and morbid obesity as less than ideal.

Fraser wears extensive body and facial prosthetics for his role. Aronofsky, who resists the use of the term “fat suit,” explores the reality of Charlie struggling to perform simple tasks while fat in a way that’s deemed “exploitative” and “voyeuristic.” Roxane Gay of The New York Times called it “gratuitous, self-aggrandizing fiction” that was barely a step above the films of decades past that used fat suit clad actors as a punchline.

“The disdain the filmmakers seem to have for their protagonist is constant, inescapable,” Gay writes in her review. She recalled being personally offended by the subject matter considering that she too is gay and fat. For that reason, the NYT writer resents how obesity is portrayed as “the ultimate human failure, something despicable, to be avoided at all costs.”

“A movie like this will only reinforce the dehumanizing ways in which many people understand fatness,” Gay concludes. “It’s a carnival sideshow. Come look at the freak, the movie beckons.”

Some critics also took issue with the intimate depictions of Charlie binge eating. They couldn’t believe Aronofsky would dare to explore the specific actions that led to the character’s health failure and eventual death.

In one scene, Charlie is shown gorging himself on greasy pizza that’s smeared all over his face even as he flings open the refrigerator door searching for more. Another clip shows the character wolfing down a bucket of fried chicken. His clothing is described by one reviewer as “tent-like … threadbare, perpetually soaked in sweat” only highlighting “the rolls of his stomach spilling over his thighs.”

A reviewer from Buzzfeed News criticizes the binge scenes as well, writing, “the score swells while Charlie reaches for a pizza and candy bars, and we’re forced to watch him wheeze, sweat, and beg for forgiveness for his mistakes — the foremost of which, the film illustrates, is his obesity.”

They chastise Aronofsky for “treating [Charlie] like an imposing monster in his own horror film rather than a human being.”

“You can’t really make a feel-good body-horror movie,” David Sims of The Atlantic declared.

Podcaster Aubrey Gordon, who is fat, also laments the reality that “The Whale” forces audiences to face, namely that being obese can be a symptom of deeper psychological issues and that it’s statistically likely to lead to an early death.

“The number of people who describe this premise as ‘humanizing’ is so disheartening,” she shared on Twitter. “If the only way you can ‘humanize’ a very fat person is to watch them humiliated, terrified, ashamed & killed off in a stereotypically stigmatizing way, it’s time to do some serious reflecting.”

The controversy of actors wearing fat suits also came up during most reviews. While this tactic was often employed for comedic value in the past, (think “The Nutty Professor” and “Shallow Hal”), it’s since become a lot more thoughtful and intentional if it’s used at all. 

Besides some mainstream actors coming out against fat suits, the Buzzfeed News writer said “the major Hollywood studio roles for fat people, or queer people, or trans people come along so rarely that it feels doubly insulting to then have actors of those communities miss out amid a drought of those roles.”

The director has addressed criticism over his selection of Fraser for the lead role rather than an obese gay actor that would match the character he created. 

“Actors have been using makeup since the beginning of acting — that’s one of their tools,” Aronofsky told Yahoo News. “And the lengths we went to to portray the realism of the make-up has never been done before. One of my first calls after casting Brendan was to my makeup artist, Adrien Morot. I asked him, ‘Can we do something that’s realistic?’ Because if it’s going to look like a joke, then we shouldn’t do it.”

“People with obesity are generally written as bad guys or as punchlines,” he continued. “We wanted to create a fully worked-out character who has bad parts