Last year I heard Brendan Fraser was going to be in a new movie and was making a comeback. I hadn’t seen his famous movie The Mummy but I saw him in George of the Jungle as a kid. I was pretty excited, but then I saw some headlines saying that the role he was playing was going to be controversial and I wondered, What’s the controversy? because I don’t have Twitter and wasn’t aware. Then I read some articles about the movie and I thought, Maybe I shouldn’t watch it because of all the backlash. If you haven’t seen The Whale yet, it’s about a morbidly obese English teacher named Charlie who is housebound and is trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The movie received a lot of acclaim and Brendan Fraser won for Best Actor at the Academy Awards this year. However, before I had read about any of the acclaim the film got, I mainly heard that the film received significant pushback for being fatphobic, or for pushing this idea that fatness is a tragedy or something to be abhorred. Hollywood has a history of putting actors in fat suits or not casting actual fat actors in movies that portray fatness. I didn’t really know much about how harmful fatphobia is until I got to college. In middle and high school, fatness was often viewed as a punchline or something disgusting. But then I got to college and I joined a feminist club meeting and there was a young woman who talked about fat feminism and about the discrimination fat people face on a daily basis. It really changed my perspective. Of course, I didn’t become perfect in educating myself. I still would watch media that was fatphobic in nature. But it really took me a long time to consider whether to watch The Whale or not because I had read so much in these reviews that Hollywood often depicts fatness as a punchline rather than in an empowering way. n At first I wasn’t going to watch it because after reading up on articles around fatphobia and how the film depicts fatness, and after seeing more positive depictions of fatness in the media and listening to fat people’s experiences, I honestly wondered if I should watch the movie since a lot of people says it depicts fatness in a negative light. But at the end of the day, I am responsible for renting the movie. Honestly, I still need to educate myself on fatphobia and body positivity, but reading these articles about the controversy around the film helped me better understand when coming in to watch the movie that this was not going to be a positive or empowering portrayal of fatness. And honestly this blog post won’t do justice to more accurate voices in the discourse around fat acceptance and historically problematic portrayals of fatness in movies and TV shows, so after watching the film I read some more opinion pieces about the backlash surrounding the film to gain a deeper understanding, such as Roxane Gay’s piece on the film.
The movie opens with a shot of a lonely road and a bus pulling off to drop someone off. The movie takes place in Idaho but we don’t actually get to see much of the outside because the main character, Charlie, doesn’t get to leave his house because his health is declining and he is also grappling with the trauma of losing his partner. We see him at the beginning talking with his students about their arguments for their papers (he is an online English teacher) and then he is masturbating to gay porn on his laptop. When he reaches orgasm he has a near fatal heart attack, and a young man named Thomas comes into his house. Thomas says that he is a missionary for a church called New Life, and he has come to convert Charlie to the church. However, Charlie’s friend and doctor, Liz, comes in to check on Charlie and tells Thomas that New Life killed someone that Charlie loved. They offer to take Charlie to the hospital but he refuses, and Charlie apologizes to Liz and she gets really upset with him for saying sorry. She tells him he needs to go to the hospital because his blood pressure is 238/134 and he has congestive heart failure. He looks up about congestive heart failure and falls into deeper despair. Ellie, Charlie’s estranged daughter, arrives at his home and he asks her how she is doing and she tells him she got suspended from school. Even though Charlie tells her to go back to school, she doesn’t listen and tells him how angry she is that he left her and her mother when she was eight. Charlie promises Ellie that he will give her all the money he has if she will just let him ask her how she is, and he promises to write her essays for her.
Charlie is later sitting on the couch eating two meatball subs that Liz got for him (she keeps bringing him food and he orders a lot of pizza from Gambino’s) and he chokes on his food and Liz has to do the Heimlich maneuver on him and then shouts at him for not eating his food properly.
Wednesday, Charlie meets with his class again online and tells them to think about the arguments of their essays. He continues to keep his camera off because he is ashamed about his body and thinks his students will be disgusted when they see him. Charlie is correcting Ellie’s essay on Walt Whitman and pointing out her errors, but she tells him she doesn’t care and continues to spend time on her phone. He tells her she would actually like “Song of Myself,” the Whitman poem she is writing about, if she actually would just read the poem. Ellie then goes off on him, telling him how she really hates Whitman and calls him the f-word. She then opens up to him about how her and her mom moved to another part of town when she was eleven, and then she asks him how he gained so much weight. He tells her that someone close to him passed away, but she tells him she knows that it was his boyfriend that passed away and that when she was younger she would see Charlie cook steaks for his boyfriend when Mom was visiting family in Montana. Ellie doesn’t want to forgive Charlie because she didn’t have a good loving relationship with him growing up, and she is upset that he wants her forgiveness. Thomas, the missionary, comes back to the house and tries to convert Charlie to New Life again, but Liz comes back and she isn’t having it. She tells Thomas to come out on the porch with her to have a little talk even though Charlie doesn’t want Thomas to be called out. Liz tells Thomas the full story of the toxic relationship they have with New Life. Her dad was very involved with New Life, and so was his son, Alan. He wanted Alan to marry a woman he had arranged for him, but he ended up with Charlie, and his dad completely disowned him and kicked him out of New Life. Alan became severely depressed and took his own life, and that’s why Liz said that New Life killed her brother.
Charlie is sitting at home, and the pizza delivery guy from Gambino’s comes to deliver Charlie’s two pepperoni pizzas. Charlie can’t leave the house to give him the money, so he calls out that he left the money outside for the delivery guy. The delivery guy figures Charlie is lonely and introduces himself as Dan. He offers to help Charlie, but Charlie refuses to take his help. Charlie reads the journal entry he encouraged Ellie to write, but she wrote three lines talking about how she hated her dad’s home and her life. He laughs, but even laughing is a challenge because he ends up feeling severe pain and wheezing. The next day Charlie finds out that Ellie put an insulting photo of him on Facebook. He thinks he is the only one that she put a photo of, but when his ex-wife, Mary, arrives, she tells him Ellie wrote insulting things about her on Facebook, too. Mary calls out Ellie for saying derogatory things about Charlie, but then Charlie admits about how he gave all his savings to Ellie and none for Mary, and Mary and Liz are angry with him for doing this. Charlie recounts his experience going on the beach with Ellie when she was young and Mary is so moved that she starts crying. He admits to Mary that he is dying and doesn’t have much longer to live, and she tells him “fuck you” and leaves. He feels even worse about himself, and yells that he wants to know he has done one right thing with his life. Dan later comes that night to deliver the pizzas and checks in on Charlie even though he can’t go into the house. Finally Charlie wheels himself to the door and goes outside, and when Dan sees him he looks in disgust and storms off. Again this is really painful to watch because everyone seems to look down on Charlie because he is fat. Charlie ends up eating all the pizza in one sitting and binge eats other things in the house because he is dying and feels hopeless about his situation. He writes a furious message to his students (and I am paraphrasing) along the lines of “fuck these stupid assignments and essays. Just write something honest.” He eats himself until he is literally sick and vomits in a trashcan and breaks down and cries. Earlier on, Thomas confessed to Ellie that he smoked pot and stole money and so he got kicked out of the New Life missionary work so he thought he could do his own missionary work but now he feels hopeless. Ellie records his confession without him looking and also snaps photos of him smoking pot when he visits their home. Thomas visits Charlie again, and we actually find out that he is homophobic and think Charlie and his late boyfriend, Alan, are sinners for being gay and that he can save Charlie by converting him to New Life, the same church that disowned Alan and led to him taking his life. Thomas reads Charlie a passage from the Bible to persuade him, but Charlie is still deeply traumatized by the pain and hurt that New Life caused his boyfriend, and he opens up to Thomas about him and Alan’s love for each other. Thomas is uncomfortable and begs Charlie to stop, but Charlie continues to say negative things about himself and asks if Thomas thinks he is disgusting. Thomas blurts out that he does think Charlie is disgusting, and Charlie tells him to go home to his family and holds up the Bible that Alan used to read from when he was part of New Life Church. Alan takes the Bible with him and finally leaves. Earlier Thomas went into Charlie’s room and saw Alan’s copy of The Bible, and took it from his room, but now Charlie doesn’t want it because New Life is homophobic. When Liz and Ellie both arrive, they find out that Charlie is dying and it’s a painful moment for everyone. Charlie asks Ellie to read him the essay about Moby Dick that one of his students wrote because he is about to die, and she pushes back and tries to run away, but then he stands up and walks over to her and hugs her while she reads him the essay.
Honestly I wondered why I didn’t have such a sympathetic outlook on the movie when I was watching it, and I felt bad because it’s a drama and I found myself wondering, Should I feel pity for the main character even though I know the critiques around the film? I understand that he lived a pretty traumatic life: his partner took his own life, and his close friends call him disgusting and demean his self-worth. However, having read what I did about the film, this film can’t and shouldn’t speak for all fat people. Of course not everyone hated the film; a lot of people loved the movie and I understand Brendan Fraser probably worked really, really hard and it was an emotional moment for him as an actor considering all he went through through his career and life. But I also had to understand coming in that this wasn’t supposed to be a movie that spoke for all fat people’s experiences and that Hollywood has traditionally portrayed fatness as a punchline or a monstrosity to be feared, so I had to be careful about getting too maudlin about the movie.
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