Director Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Whale is being accused of “fatphobia” for casting actor Brendan Fraser as an overweight gay man.
In The Whale, Fraser — who wears a fat suit and other prosthetics while portraying his character — plays a 600-pound gay man who “attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption,” according to the film’s IMDb page. The film premiered recently at the Venice Film Festival, where it reportedly received a more-than-six-minute standing ovation.
“No matter how well a slim actor might portray a fat person in a dramatic role, they can still, at the end of the day, zip out of that fatsuit and reap all the benefits of having a societally-accepted body type. They can absorb the praise of being fat when it suits them, but can shed that skin at will,” lamented Charlotte Colombo of The Digital Fix.
Colombo, however, acknowledges that falling under attack over the film is unavoidable, as casting an actor who actually weighs 600 pounds for a role in which the character is “eating themselves to death” might not be good for the actor’s mental health.
Writer Aubrey Gordon echoed those sentiments, tweeting, “It’s so telling that so many only see fat people as ‘humanized’ in media that shows us doing exactly what they expect: living short, small lives; ‘eating ourselves to death’; feeling sad & regretful.”
“All reminders of how tragic it is to be fat, and how superior it is to be thin,” she added.
Gordon was responding to another Twitter user, who wrote, “It makes my skin crawl to think about how many people are going to walk out of the theater mistaking their own feelings of pity and condescension for a newfound insight into the humanity of the obese.”
Another Twitter user wrote that simply watching the movie will “be harmful to me and others.”
“I really love Brendan Fraser and I want him to get to bask in the glory of his return but I think watching The Fatphobic Dehumanizing Movie will actually be harmful to me and others?” the Twitter user wrote.
“I truly want to support Brendan Fraser’s comeback so bad, I just wish it wasn’t in the form of this fatphobic film,” another tweeted.
Comedian Guy Branum reacted by tweeting, “The most exciting part of the release of The Whale is getting to read all the ways film critics will apply the full might of their BA in English to the task of describing how gross bodies like mine are!”
In his tweet, Branum shared a purported screenshot of a character review of the film, which read, “The slopping jowls that consume his neck, the big wide back and gigantic jelly belly that spills down over his crotch, the arms and legs that are like meat slabs.”
Polygon writer Katie Rife reacted by describing the film’s director as sadistic, adding that he challenges viewers “to find the humanity buried under Charlie’s thick layers of fat.”
“It proceeds from the assumption that a 600-pound man is inherently unlovable,” Rife writes. “Audience members get to walk away proud of themselves that they shed a few tears for this disgusting whale, while gaining no new insight into what it’s actually like to be that whale. That’s not empathy. That’s pity, buried under a thick, smothering layer of contempt.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.