Or, The Whale

“I’ve already started underlining meaningful passages in her copy of Moby Dick, if you know what I mean.”

—Heathers

In The Whale, by director Darren Aronofsky and writer Samuel D. Hunter, Brendan Fraser stars as an English teacher, Charlie, trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The film takes place entirely in Charlie’s apartment because Charlie is too overweight to go anywhere else.

I can honestly say it’s been a long time since I’ve been so utterly gutted by a film as by The Whale. Maybe it’s that I’m fat: not like Charlie in the present but more like Charlie in the past, one heartbreaking tragedy away from weight-related self-destruction. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen someone close to me take their life, not with food, but then what’s the difference how you go when decide it’s time? Food, a jump, a bullet; it all ends the same.

Charlie dwells almost ritualistically on a particular essay about Moby Dick. The words give him comfort as he approaches his imminent death. The significance of Melville’s novel is apparent: obsession, pursuit, adrift in a small apartment like a ship on the sea. Or maybe it’s just the whale.

Fatness is something we’re not supposed to talk about. Not really, anyway. We talk about it in hushed tones, knowing it’s supposed to be a source of shame. We medicalize it, a disease to be eradicated at every level, whether a person is healthy at their weight or not. We laugh at ourselves and each other, call people names and compare them to animals: elephants and hippos, perhaps. Or whales.

But a serious, frank discussion of fatness is missing. In particular the experiential nature of fatness is sorely lacking from a medium that has helped create a visual economy in which thin is good and fat is, at the very least, funny as to be dismissed or at the worst disgusting as to be rejected. In broader society fatness is seen as a moral failing: this is in part because cinema (among other arbiters) has decided that fatness is not as visually appealing. It’s all about what the (thin) observer thinks they want to see.

What makes The Whale so potent is the straightforwardness of the presentation of Charlie’s body. Aronofsky is not in denial of the existing biases of the camera eye (or rather the implicit viewer’s eye), but the director plays with the way we are expected to react to Charlie (and the way his camera is supposed to react to Charlie) and subverts those expectations. The Whale is a transgressive take on the fat body because it actually takes on the fat body.

In doing so, we can see Charlie for who he is. Not beyond or outside of his body, but through it, living in it, as we all must.