Brendan Fraser’s comeback film The Whale has grabbed a lot of headlines thanks to people’s excitement over its return to screens. He’s received emotional standing ovations at film festivals, reunited with former co-stars, and spoken candidly about his life and career during his press tour. And yet The Whale, published by A24 and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is very bad.
In the film, Fraser plays Charlie, a gay, fat man who is estranged from his teenage daughter and makes a living teaching writing classes over Zoom. He loves to write and read, although we never really see him do it. No, Charlie’s days consist of teaching his classes with the camera off, waiting for his friend to bring him food, and eating the food. In the opening scene, he masturbates while watching gay porn, leading to a heart attack that is only stopped when a door-to-door missionary reads his favorite essay, which, of course, is about “Moby Dick.” It’s a bad start for a film that never gets better.
Fraser and Aronofsky have both talked about how they wanted to use The Whale to show the plight of homebound fat people. And yes, there are countless fat people who, like Charlie, stay at home because of fat phobia and the inaccessibility of the outside world. Ask a fat person finding a table in a crowded restaurant how inhospitable external structures can be to our bodies, and how the taller a person, the worse these obstacles are.
And yet, if visibility really was one of the filmmakers’ goals, wouldn’t they have picked someone whose weight is closer to Charlie’s? Fraser, as he has pointed out, is a big person and I wouldn’t discount his experience of gaining weight in an industry that can be seriously fatphobic. But his experience is nothing like Charlie’s. Screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the play the film is based on, said the story was inspired by his own experience as a fat kid and the weight he gained in early adulthood. He’s not fat anymore. Also, Hunter’s story has absolutely nothing to do with Charlie’s in the film. While all fat people are discriminated against, it’s the taller ones who are marginalized the most, and neither Fraser nor Hunter know this firsthand.
Aronofsky seems to think that someone as tall as Charlie would not have been physically able to endure a single day on set. “It’s unaffordable from a health perspective … It’s impossible to get a real person dealing with these issues to fill the role,” he said diversity in October. But that’s Aronofsky’s own fat phobia; There are people who weigh 500 or 600 pounds who can handle acting in movies, who can handle full-time jobs and their own full-time lives. They wouldn’t have spontaneously dropped dead from the stress of filming. The cast and crew have admitted they went to great lengths to accommodate Fraser’s bulky suit; It was hours before he donned it and the accompanying facial prosthesis, and on December 10th diversity published a story about how Fraser had to use five cones of ice a day to keep cool. Certainly hiring an actor who didn’t have to wear heavy, dangerous prosthetic limbs would have saved time, energy, money and, quite frankly, looked better. I’ve never seen a fat suit that makes an actor look like a really fat person. Fraser could get housing for his fat suit, but Aronofsky couldn’t imagine housing a fat actor.
But perhaps hiring a fat person like Charlie would have alerted them to the damaging stereotypes the film repackages as a plot. Charlie refers to himself as disgusting several times and the camera agrees. The viewer is invited to stare at Charlie; Every time he rises from the couch, the music swells like he’s literally the movie title’s whale, soaring above the waves. Charlie’s apartment is depressing. His clothes are always sweaty and greasy. His hair is terrible. He has accessibility devices to help him get through his routine, but they’re all cobbled together and look like they’re falling apart. He is condemned for using them at all. Every time Charlie screams or laughs or grunts or moans, it turns into a coughing fit.
Aronofsky tells vanity fair in August: “Unfortunately, so many characters portrayed in the media who live with obesity are treated horribly — either they’re humiliated, they’re made fun of, or they just live in misery.” “The whale,” he said, wasn’t like that . I have to wonder if he’s seen his own film.
Charlie doesn’t feel like a real person — just a shell of a man made for an unclear political point and meant to make a thin audience cry.
Then there’s Charlie’s obvious health issue. At the beginning of the film, his girlfriend Liz (Hong Chau), who happens to be a nurse, tells him that he has heart failure and needs to see a doctor. It’s very serious; he is actively dying. But aside from her warning and Charlie’s frequent chest pains, this isn’t built into the plot at all. As heart line explains, a common side effect of heart failure is severe nausea and vomiting. But that doesn’t affect Charlie, who manages to eat a large sandwich (which he eats so fast he almost chokes) and a giant bucket of fried chicken, one of the most weary, fat-phobic stereotypes out there.
Charlie refuses any medical treatment despite having thousands of dollars in his savings account. It would be one thing if he didn’t want to go because he was afraid of fat phobia at the hands of medical staff, a real issue that keeps many fat people from getting medical care. But no – it’s because he’s saving all his money to give to his estranged daughter, who his ex-wife cut ties with when he left her for a man who has since died. I spent most of the film asking someone to call an ambulance. Heart failure is not a death sentence.
In The Whale, Charlie is the good-hearted fat man who must suffer and die in silence. But don’t worry – no matter how much people may hurt and abuse him, he will always have the best of people in mind. Even when his Zoom students finally see him and literally act in exaggerated shock, he still sees the good in them (and of course, none of those students are fat themselves).
That’s also part of the bigger problem here. It would be one thing if Charlie and The Whale were just one character and one movie in a rich tapestry of movies and TV shows about fat people. But even in supporting roles in current media, fat people are so few. Next time you watch a crowd scene, pay attention to how many background characters are bold. It’s an incredibly small number. So when Hollywood decides to spotlight a story about a fat person, and it’s that fat person, it sucks. Defenders of The Whale’s prosthetics have said there isn’t a famous or talented fat actor like Charlie who could have played the role. But that’s also a reflection of Hollywood’s fat phobia.
But somehow it all makes sense since Aronofsky and Fraser kept implying that this isn’t a movie for a fat audience. “The hope is that we can change hearts and minds about how we treat each other or don’t treat each other, how we dismiss each other simply because of how we appear to each other,” Fraser said Reuters earlier this month. Aronofksy has repeatedly referred to it as an “exercise in empathy”. What is implied in these statements is that it is intended to have this effect on thin people.
Charlie’s struggles affect really fat Americans every day: fat phobia, ableism, accessibility issues, poor health care, and discrimination in the workplace. But The Whale doesn’t want us to question society and why so many fat people are in distress. It does not imply that thin people are the cause of the difficulties fat people face. Instead, it’s just meant to be a sad story about a guy who always sees the best in people, even when they’re mean to him. A guy who thinks he should be punished for being gay and fat and chooses to punish himself even more for those two things. Charlie doesn’t feel like a real person — just a shell of a man made for an unclear political point and meant to make a thin audience cry. But I don’t cry for him.