Sins of the Flesh
Hey!
Sorry for the long wait, there's been a laundry list of reasons but I'd rather just get on with the thing! Initially, I was going to do a newsletter about the weird response to Gloria, and I had also been planning to do some writing on The Whale and the broader cultural reception of the Brendan Fraser renaissance. Then I realised that there's actually a pretty clear crossover between the two and out of that this newsletter is birthed.
Media Roundup
Like…? - Ice Spice [2023] - A star, an icon! A great start for her establishing herself as an artist beyond being a meme. "Princess Diana" in particular goes HARD.
Saint Omer [2022/3] - Incredible work! Love to see a nuanced and complicated take on generational trauma that doesn't feel like you're being forced into pop psychology 101.
Enys Men [2023] - It's fun to see Jenkin back in his proper horror territory. It's a film full of grief that could be scarier/less obvious at points but is still deeply interesting.
Sins of the Flesh
No-one knows how to be Normal about fat fags.
The release of the music video to Sam Smith's "I'm Not Here To Make Friends" video/the broader body of work Gloria and the response to Brendan Fraser's The Whale have made that abundantly clear. In both cases, the spectacle of fatness has been far more important to everyone than the substance of these works of art.
Before we get onto the cultural response itself, I'll give my two cents on each project.
First, Gloria is painfully average. It’s not a bad album, it’s listenable and this record was made with a palpable love, with Smith pouring their heart out about finding joy and self-worth, especially as a fat queer person.The problem is that on a musical level, it feels like Smith is working too hard to fit in with their contemporaries in the British pop space, where the production trends right now are geared towards making bops from people with mediocre voices.This wastes their talents, when they can easily outsing most of the people that the production on Gloria is trying to exist alongside. Even the most unique-sounding song Unholy with its phrygian mode, does not push hard enough out of being a somewhat interesting earworm.
The same goes for the Tanu Muino-directed "I'm Not Here To Make Friends" video that sparked so much controversy. It was very much giving “beautiful gowns, great gowns”. The cinematography was mid, as was the choreo, neither gave the feeling of bacchanalia that Muino was attempting to evoke.The one thing which really stuck out positively was striking and deeply queer costume design.
While Gloria is a fine album that I wanted more from, The Whale was a fucking embarrasment for near everyone involved. If you want my full review feel free to commision me but here are some quickfire thoughts from my notes:
Put Hong Chau and Brendan Fraser in a better film.
There are so many shots DESIGNED to show how fat he is and what a Great Job the makeup team has done
Hate the constant emphasis on the grossness of his existence. They are going to hell for having the breaths and squeaking of the walker turned up so high in the mix
So much of the film is him being berated???? Like how many minutes of the film is Someone Monologues At Him With Contempt. Like even just from a filmmaking perspective it's just "Charlie sits in one spot and people move around him saying Bullshit"
This is not a film where fatness exists outside of the grotesque. It is a state of being Wrong, and there's nothing that can be done about it. If I wanted to be generous he refers to a smaller fat self without complete contempt, but even THEN it's like.."I wasn't the best looking guy, but Alan saw me as beautiful"
Why is he this tragic figure doomed to die? He is more object than person. Some vague metaphorical whale upon which thin ppl can construct their humanity.
There's a thru line about homophobia but it's like....boo. this film isn't angry enough at the right people!!!! Like it is simultaneously too full of contempt and not angry enough.
Feels like the shithead daughter is being used to make all the fat and gay jokes the audience wants to make but would feel bad for
Why are there no other living fat or gay people in this film?
Why release this film in 2022?
There are two things I will hone in on. The first is the opening, the second is how bad an adaptation this is.
We open on Charlie (Brendan Fraser) on a gross couch in his gross badly lit flat, very awkwardly mastrubating. Before he can finish, he has a heart attack from congenital heart failure related to his weight and is awkwardly saved by a young missionary (Ty Simpkins) at his door. The scene is clearly meant to be bleakly funny, but the comedy falls flat.
This is also the only time the lead is explicitly sexual in the film. Any other point is shut down by a joke from Charlie himself about his disinterest or one of the other characters talking about how gross it would be for him to have sex. For a film so insistent on being about Charlie's humanity, it is notable how unwilling Aaronofsky is to display anything but disinterest or outright revulsion at the idea of a (super)fat gay person having sex.
Darren Aronofsky does not know how to adapt a play to the screen. The whole thing is set in the apartment, and there are ways to make that work. You can play with lighting and sound and framing - even if you are insistent on sticking to naturalism. However, none of that happens. Instead there are two lighting states and they both look like shit. Rob Simonsen’s score is an abysmal attempt to brute force the viewer into being overwhelmed by the tragedy of it all. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is dull at best, not quite being good naturalistic cinematic camerawork, but also not being an effective filming of a stage play either. So we’re stuck enduring meh monologue after meh monologue in Samuel D Hunter’s bad script, all with dull blocking that almost entirely consists of people revolving around and/or talking past Brendan Fraser.
But none of this matters to the majority of the conversation about these films. Instead, the spectacle of fat queerness consumes all. In the case of Sam Smith, there has been repeated weird commentaries on their body and existence swirling around in the past couple of years as they've been more open and comfortable in their not-thin body and with their non-binary identity. Every 6 weeks there's a different semi-viral tweet from a not-particularly-noteworthy Twitter account lamenting how they used to be hot when they were thin and cis presenting - even though (as Smith themself has said) they were very visibly miserable and uncomfortable.
This finally blew up properly when it crashed into the fever of the reboot of the conditions which created Section 28 that the British press and politicians are forcing into existence. Random screenshots from the (I'd argue too tame) music video for "I'm Not Here To Make Friends" were spread and used as evidence of cultural depravity and harming children and all the usual shit with flagrant misgendering. There was also a very specific fatphobic and transmisogynistic emphasis on shots and moments which showed Smith's not-thin body in femme clothing.
I think what was interesting to me was less the venom of the fatphobia/homophobia/transmisogyny (I'm not brand new) but how embarrassingly unequipped the cultural space is to discuss the work of fat gay artists? Like…there was almost no engagement with the artistry involved, what the intentions were (beyond describing the references to particular sex acts), or whether the craft was actually effective. Instead we're stuck asking vapid questions like "SAM SMITH VID: EMPOWERING OR OFFENSIVE"! Even the most progressive of responses is far more of a circle jerk of thin queer people (because the British media sphere does not allow fat people to have platforms) proselytising about how 'we' shouldn’t be mean to fat people and making infographics about how fat people are allowed to be sexy like ‘us’. But again due to the refusal to engage with Gloria/ "I'm Not Here To Make Friends" or platform fat fags - we become Aronofsky/Hunter's whale, an object to be talked about and around but never properly engaged with.
There is an interesting opposite with the reception of Brendan Fraser and The Whale. The first obvious difference is that Fraser is a straight* man playing gay, I'm not hugely interested in litigating that, but the casting is a little indicative of how Aronofsky doesn't know what to do with the queerness within the film. The major problem I've had is that so so much of the discussion around Fraser's awards season as he is aggressively pushed for that Oscar, is that everything is more centred around 'making up for' for how he was blacklisted for over a decade after allegedly being sexually assaulted by the former head of the HFPA. The outpouring of public support from swathes of Hollywood feels very condescending in general, and doubly so when you consider that this support seemed to not be especially present until this awards season.
Crucially it all relies on the construction of Fraser as a teddy bear victim rather than a real person and survivor who is also a very talented actor (reflecting an issue repeatedly raised by abolition feminists about the reliance of the #MeToo movement on the strict victim v monster dichotomy. His situation also specifically reflects the reality that tightrope is even thinner for fat survivors, who are even more quickly deemed to be monsters and sexual threats who should not be fought for (something Da Shaun L Harrison writes about extensively).
Again, there is little engagement with the text of The Whale and while his performance is being praised even by people who don’t love the film, I actually don't think it's especially good? Fraser is certainly giving it his all, using his charm to turn lead into bronze, but much like every other actor In the film he is poorly directed. It is also abundantly clear from start to finish that the terrible fat suit is actually inhibiting his ability to perform! It is impossible to move and be a real person effectively in a naturalistic human physical performance when fat suits cannot properly imitate how real superfat bodies move - even with the helping hand of CGI. But of course since he did the brave and bold feat of appearing superfat on screen, the road to an Oscar is paved for him.
This is already a long enough essay so I won’t spoon feed you the conclusion to all this, instead I’ll leave you with a few questions that I think could be prompts for far more interesting engagement than can found in an infographic:
What does the attack on Sam Smith say about how the fascist politics behind transphobia also engage with fatness? (particularly thinking of how the charges of corrupting the children parallel blood libel type rhetoric)
How do everyday structural violences come into play beyond celebrities? How does the employment discrimination faced by fat people and gender-non-conforming people interact and compound?
Why is The Whale so unwilling to turn its ire away from fatness and onto the repeatedly referenced American healthcare system which routinely sets people up to choose between securing a future for their loved ones and living healthy lives? How do Hunter and Aronofsky so willingly take on hegemonic narratives about weight and health and ignore how these ideas lead to medical negligence that routinely fails fat people and leaves them to die?
What are the specificities and complications of food and eating as they relate to fags? How does The Whale engage with that (if at all)?
Where is the space/resources/time for fat fags to make work that will actually be discussed beyond the spectacle of mere existence?
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.