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I am going to be so honest with you. I am really going to miss The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It seems like just yesterday that I was watching Midge perform her first show at The Gaslight. But alas, all of the incredible cast is moving on to other projects and commitments, so long story short, the show has had a really great run and I’m so glad they got to have this show. So to get you caught up if you haven’t watched the show yet, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a show on Amazon Prime that takes place in the 1950s, and it’s about a middle-class Jewish woman named Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) living in New York City with her parents, Abe and Rose (Tony Shaloub and Marian Hinkle), and her husband, Joel (Michael Zegen) and their two kids, Ethan and Esther. Joel is an aspiring comedian but his jokes aren’t all that good and he copies them from the other male comics. Midge comes by to show him support and drop off a brisket she made. The owner of The Gaslight, Susie Meyerson (Alex Borstein), doesn’t care about Midge’s enthusiasm and tries to shrug her off. Then the night of Yom Kippur, Joel packs up and announces to Midge that he is leaving her because he is having an affair with his secretary, Penny Pan. She drinks an entire bottle of wine, and goes over to The Gaslight and does an unprompted standup routine where she talks about how her husband cheated on her with his secretary. Susie takes quick notice and is impressed by Midge’s snappy wit and fierce jokes, and the audience is also impressed by this newcomer, so Susie decides to become Midge’s manager. At first entering the business is challenging because Midge’s jokes sometimes get laughs and other times not so much, and Midge has such high expectations but also there are times when she loses her self-confidence. Meanwhile she has to keep her comedy career (and her new day job at B. Altman) a secret from her parents, especially because this was a time when there was a lot of sexism and female comics were often not seen as funny. But she learns about resilience and how to bounce back from rejection, failure and all other kinds of challenges, and she ends up having a successful career even with all its ups and downs. And her and Susie weather those ups and downs together.

In season 5, the Sherman-Palladinos wrap everything up and we see Midge’s career in retrospect. In episode one of the season, Esther Maisel in sitting in a therapist’s office in the 1980s talking about the challenging relationship she had growing up with her mother, Midge. Then Shirley and Moishe have dinner with Joel, Midge, and Midge’s parents and they share big news. Shirley and Moishe announce they are getting a divorce, and this causes friction throughout the dinner. When Joel tries to intervene, Moishe verbally hits back at him by telling him to share some of his own news. Joel reveals that he and Mei (Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu) are going to get married and that Mei is pregnant. In an earlier season, Joel goes to a gambling parlor run by a family of Chinese immigrants to start his own comedy club and he meets the family’s daughter, Mei. They fall in love and become a couple, and Mei ends up pregnant with Joel’s baby. There is friction and I thought they were going to have the baby, but then Mei shows up at Joel’s apartment and tells him she got an abortion and is moving to Chicago to become a doctor, which was one of her dreams. He tries to talk her out of it, but she leaves and tells him she can’t have it all (i.e. be a mother and follow her career as a doctor.) He falls into a depression and one night at the club he drinks himself silly and his friend, Archie, tries to get him to calm down but Joel launches into a drunken tirade and hits on women at the club. He goes down to the gambling parlor downstairs and confronts Mei’s father about Mei leaving him, and the father gets some guys to beat up on Joel for disrespecting him. Joel is left curled up in fetal position with severe bruises. Meanwhile, Susie is doing all she can to get Midge connected to Gordon Ford (played by Reid Scott.) Early in the episode she wakes up sick because she was in a snowstorm and saw a bulletin board for The Gordon Ford Show. But Mike Carr, Gordon’s talent booker, hates Susie, especially because she persuaded his kids to watch a violent film called Spartacus and she insults his Christmas tree, so he refuses to book Midge for a job on the show. Midge performs standup at the strip club where she worked as a comic in season 4 and Susie sees Gordon Ford and tries to get Midge a job with him. Gordon meets her and invited her to work on his writing team, but Midge hesitates and tells Susie that she is a comedian, not a writer, but Susie tells her this opportunity will lead to better opportunities, so Midge accepts the offer. Episode 2 shows how she navigates her first few weeks on Gordon’s writing team as the only woman in the writer’s room.

In episode 2, Midge is being interviewed at a later time in her life about her long career. It was a really bittersweet moment for me to watch and it made me think of when I would watch veteran actors like Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep and Sally Field and how they had such long and prosperous careers, and I’m sure there were many ups and downs but they worked so hard in their careers and as a young woman it was inspiring to watch this part where Midge is interviewed. She recalls the good times, and the bad times, and doesn’t provide super personal details to the interviewer but at the end of the interview she shows all of the clothing that she is giving away as part of the nonprofit she started in Ethan and Esther’s name to provide services to children in need. It shows all the outfits she wore on the road as a comedian and at home, and everything she wore is in style. Joel is staying with his parents and is still recovering from his injuries, and Midge visits him to check in on him. Joel tells Midge about breaking up with Mei and that Mei got an abortion and moved to Chicago, and Midge tries to comfort him, but Joel refuses because he is still processing the breakup. Meanwhile, Midge is taking the subway to her new job at Gordon Ford’s office, only to be followed by a guy she dated in a previous season (played by Milo Ventimiglia.) In the episode she met a dashing man in the park and they hit it off and started dating, but then she goes back to his house and sleeps with him, and the next morning his wife walks in the bedroom and finds her husband sleeping with Midge. This doesn’t age well, especially because Midge brings it up in one of her most important comedy gigs. She is given an opportunity to perform at a luncheon for Jacqueline (Jackie) Kennedy, the first lady and John F. Kennedy’s wife. As I learned from watching The Crown and the biopic Jackie, and reading some articles, JFK had a lot of extramarital affairs. So when Midge is trying to come up with new material for the gig, she talks about sleeping with a guy who is married, and Jackie breaks down crying because it reminded her of her husband’s infidelity. In episode 2 of the final season, the ex-date confronts Midge in the New York subway station and she tries to get away from him but he keeps running after her to apologize and ask for her forgiveness, but she wants nothing to do with him after that. He finally catches up to her and explains that him and his wife are getting a divorce but she is not interested in dating this guy again. He understands though and asks if they will see each other in the park again, and they say their goodbyes.

Midge enters the new workplace at Gordon Ford’s office and finds that she is the only woman on the writer’s team and that it’s a bunch of boys, a boys’ club. When she first enters, the secretaries (all female) give her a hard time but she finds Mike Carr, and he confronts her about Susie being rude to him. She tries to explain but he tells her to give Susie a message and flips her the middle finger, which is what Susie did to him when she booked Midge a gig on Gordon Ford’s show to prove Mike wrong. When Midge enters the writer’s room, they are reluctant to welcome her, seeing as how this is still the 1960s and women were still not seen as having potential as comics. None of their jokes are remotely funny, but when Midge writes new material and tries to share her own jokes, they interrupt her with singing whenever one of them uses the bathroom in the office. And they grill her about writing new material. However, they are all under fire and facing the stressful wrath of Gordon, who Midge finds out is not a nice guy. He basically rips up everyone’s writing material if it doesn’t meet their standards and everyone has to cook up fresh material within minutes of Gordon going on the show. It reminded me of the movie, Late Night, with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling. Emma Thompson plays an acerbic late night host whose show is decreasing in ratings because many people don’t find her style of humor funny, but everything changes when a young optimistic comedian from Pennsylvania named Molly (Mindy Kaling) joins the writer’s room because Molly is a woman of color and she wants more diversity in the all white male writer’s room. It is a serious challenge and Molly faces a lot of discrimination from the beginning. The writer’s room is full of men, and Katherine is heading it, but she doesn’t praise Molly’s efforts and often ignores her. The men on the writer’s team think she is the office assistant rather than a new member of the writer’s room and give her administrative tasks like getting them coffee and treats, but she has to remind them over and over of her place in the writer’s room. One night, Katherine attends Molly’s stand up comedy show and overhears her talking about how mean Katherine is to her, and she begins to value Molly’s ideas and her show gets bumped up in ratings. Eventually, Katherine recruits more women and people of underrepresented groups to join the writer’s room and has Molly promoted to help lead the team.

Meanwhile, Rose is walking and talking with her friend and then finds a bunch of firetrucks outside and we see that the building where she visited her fortune teller burned down, and she calls her son Noah, who used to work for the CIA but now got new work as an analyst, and asks if they can put out a search party because she thinks that the mean clique of competitive matchmakers set the fire. In an earlier season, Rose becomes a professional matchmaker, but she is confronted by three other matchmakers who do everything in their power to stop Rose from doing her work. Rose always met with her fortune teller and she would have her predict Midge’s future with tea leaves, but then the fortune teller left and was replaced with a new lady who doesn’t do tea leaves and instead has Rose eat pizza and watch TV. Abe meets with a woman at his workplace (he works as a columnist for a newspaper after losing his job at Bell Labs a few seasons ago) and they are having a great conversation, but then the lady flirts with Abe and puts her hand on his knee in a suggestive way. He feels conflicted and asks his coworker if what that lady did was sexual, and his coworker tells him to not tell his wife, Rose, about his encounter with the lady. Abe keeps it a secret but it pains him to do so, and he brings Rose out to dinner and does the same gesture that the lady did to him: putting his hand on her knee. She is surprised but she lets him do it, and he wants to because he really loves Rose and doesn’t want an affair with that other woman.

I can’t wait to watch episode 3!

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.

I lay on your lap

Under a myriad of stars

Mosquitoes buzz in our ears

And we sit in each others’ embrace

Intoxicated by kisses and the warmth

Of our bodies on one another

Music blares from the vehicles

Below the roof upon which we sit

And I kiss you and say your name

Again and again

My Australian love

I know we are leaving each other in a week

To go back to our homes

But I will always keep you in my heart

Until death do us part.

Your blonde shaggy hair

And cerulean eyes

Peer down into my face

And my heart rushes ferociously

Beating rapidly against my chest

Until I cannot take a breath

Because you sucked it all away

With your tender kisses.

When you danced with me

Until the wee hours

Us alone

It was magic

My first real romance

Happening right before my eyes

Heartbreak is a killer

But I go through the grief

Of not being in your proximity

And eventually I make peace

With the love we once shared

And find closure.

Thank you for a beautiful moment

Of love.