just show us

November 2013 issue

So, what does Melissa McCarthy have there below her Photoshaved chin and under her coat: an extra limb? Explosives strapped to her chest? A gaping wound? A nest of ducklings she's keeping warm? A sparkly disco ball?

We'll never know, because letting the fat human body take up the space it actually takes up makes people really nervous. In life, and in pictures. Especially, somehow, in pictures.

Most women who magazines choose to put on their covers are close enough to the very narrow range of what's acceptable that magazines can make it work. Everyone gets tweaked -- shaved, padded, lightened, smoothed, sharpened -- until they are the right shape and color and age. Vaguely. But (I am speaking basically about size here) the choice of subject to begin with is very narrow indeed. It excludes extremely thin bodies too, but far more average and fat ones. And the sample is way beyond narrow -- it's a tiny thin line in the population. The debate people engage in about the differences in what they see on magazine covers is a joke. Like prisoners squabbling over minute differences in their daily beige porridge.

Fat bodies, though -- bodies that that lie far, far out on the bell curve past what is considered okay -- bodies that cannot pass: how to handle? They're too big to cut down to fit the usual space.

Usually magazines solve this problem by not showing them. Such as Adele's Rolling Stone cover or Gabourey Sidibe's famously skin-lightened Elle cover last year, here:

Never showing the whole product, for lack of a better term (although on some level that is what we are talking about, when we're talking about what drives this publicity machine), is being challenged more, though. Melissa McCarthy is officially a major box office star, in a way that still charms me, as it almost seemed to happen despite ourselves and our rules about size.

There are lots of ways to look at the decisions driving these Elle covers. You can see dislike, you can see hate, even. You can see bland old ignorance. You can see a lot of fear. You can see stubbornness, an unwillingness to change. You can see blind rule-following.

What I'm starting to see more and more is just: nervousness. The kind of nervousness that leads to hilariously unprofessional and low-quality images such as this:

This is a poster for a mainstream, big-budget, high-grossing film, made by a studio with an army of graphics staff, and McCarthy is a head on a stick! This the best they could do!

They don't know what to do. They're flailing. With challenges on all sides, the power of a extremely codified beauty ideal is still so strong that the purveyors of this image give us something a graphic design 101 professor would mark an F.

That is: at this point the fact of the thinificiation of McCarthy's face/body (please Jebus, don't let her go sleeveless!) is less interesting to me, in part because it's been going on forever, than the flailing and missteps. Somehow the poster for The Heat created more amusement in me than horror -- it's just so bad. Unlike some people I would not argue that the thin beauty ideal is in its death throes, but it is facing new tests. McCarthy bundled up in  her winter coat on Elle shows how amateurish the media is about this -- how much more experience they need in showing people of size. And how clear the path isn't, right now.

Oh, so -- to the media: just do it. Show fat bodies! Let them be. Let us see what Melissa McCarthy is wearing. It will be okay. Really. Fluff the ever-living hell out of the pic -- make it as glamorous as you want. But it's okay to show her. Fashion is not antithetical to size. It does not take away from the former to let the latter be seen.

I have been writing a blog piece called "How to Fix Everything" for about five years now. Isn't that helpful? It isn't done yet, but when it is, it is going to fix everything. Totally. I swear.

In my list of things to do to break the stalemate between size acceptance and whole generations of people raised to believe that fat is the same thing as disgusting ill-health and all the leeway you need to justify your hate (hello Rex Reed), among the top two things at this point -- and maybe even the biggest thing I think we can do --  is provide and seek out more imagery of fat people in our daily media consumption. Much much more.

We need to see fat bodies - average bodies -- all the time. ALL THE TIME. Doing all the things that they do. We don't even know how constantly they are curated out of our sight. Fat bodies are such a departure from an extremely well-established and constantly defended and reiterated visual norm that that it's the first thing people see in an image. Many can't see past it at all. We need to start taking images of people of size for granted.

I have looked at more fat bodies than most people I know (do you have any idea how much fat porn you have to look at to illustrate a sex book?) and I still feel that thunk in my chest when I see a fat person in an advertisement or on television or a magazine cover: OH THAT'S DIFFERENT. That's different. That's not the norm. The pressure of the thin ideal is so strong and hegemonic that I think breaking it will become key to seeing ourselves and others differently in the future.

What we need are images of fat bodies without apology. That coat on McCarthy is an apology -- and a very awkward one, at that. Somebody's nervous as hell.

On Megan in Bridesmaids

I don't know what to say. I saw the movie twice. I took notes. I tried to keep an open mind. I didn't read any articles (because I'm weird like that sometimes, but also) because I wanted to have an unshaped reaction to it all. But ungh. Megan still kind of broke my heart.

I hate calling out Melissa McCarthy, who is great, gets a lot of screen time and in some ways steals the show. I love her--I think she's a great actress and comedienne. And I liked that Megan turns out to be the "together" character. And I liked the movie all right (Maya Rudolph is just wonderful).

But what the fuck. Is this the only way we can let a fat person into a mainstream movie, by making them as out of it, as weirdly-dressed and outsider as possible--arriving in the form of some weird stereotype? Does it make us that nervous to have a fat actress as just a another character?

Megan is definitely the Zach Galifianakis of this movie--the giant clueless toddler with no sense of social norms. McCarthy being a very pretty woman, effort is needed (and expended) to make her to look weird. Her makeup is handled differently than the other female characters--she's made up (or not at all) in harsh ways. Her clothing is unflattering and full of ZG-like touches--arm braces, etc.--as well as being strangely mannish (paired with pearls) and tailored in awkward ways. She gallops around, flops over couch backs, is sexually rapacious in unwanted ways as only fat people are in movies.

Okay, she's weird. Her character has a right to be weird. McCarthy's good at it! But it feels, watching it, as if the makers of Bridesmaids were so nervous at the thought of McCarthy on the same footing as the other actresses who, while all having personality quirks, were allowed to look semi-normal in Hollywood ways, that they make her a freak. The only scene in which McCarthy's makeup and wardrobe is treated as the others is the final scene when she is in bridesmaid wear and it suddenly becomes clear on what a different footing she has been treated through the movie because she looks gorgeous.

The absolute worst part of the movie is the little coda during the end credits of a videotaped homemade sex scene between Megan and her boyfriend. It's a lame sight gag involving a sandwich that makes it clear that people think fat people fuck food, not people. It was just miserable to watch (twice).

I feel like my original guess about the movie was right: McCarthy is miscast. She would have been a great lead and Kristen Wiig would have been a good Megan. I like Wiig a lot, but didn't feel like she had the emotional range needed for the character, ultimately. McCarthy would have been great.

The best thing to come out of Bridesmaids with regards to McCarthy is that she is getting more high-profile work: the Knocked Up spinoff, and another Paul Feig movie with she and John Hamm as "unconventional lovers," about which I don't even know what to think. From where I sit it would make sense to just cast them as lovers, but you know--we'll see.

sigh

I was excited at first to see this photo in People; it's a promo shot from the new Judd Apatow movie, Bridesmaids, and, Mike & Molly aside, I am just a big Melissa McCarthy fan. Kind of hard not to be--she's so pretty and funny and there she is wearing hot shoes and skipping across the street. Go Melissa.

For some reason I had Bridesmaids conflated with another bunch-of-chicks movie and thought Melissa McCarthy had a fun part in it, but then I checked out the previews. Ungh.

I do not think fat actresses shouldn't play grotesque, macabre characters. I do not think fat actresses--any actress--should always have to look pretty or aren't allowed to risk being out there.

But--ungh. Some part of this fat girl died a little inside when I saw McCarthy's outfits. If this is The Hangover for Ladies, McCarthy seems to be Zach Galifianakis: she's the icky one. She dresses in a weird, mannish way, is artless, kinda gross, weird. Bigger people in Apatowian films are like giant gruff babies, unaware of their inappropriateness, barging around, causing problems.

I haven't seen the movie, so I'll shut up for now, but from the previews it strikes me as strange casting. McCarthy is a great comedienne and can do lots of parts (she was in the Groundlings), but she's also very pretty and feminine and not really a second-banana type--she looks more like the lead to me than Kristen Wiig. Not really sure why she gets to be the Alan Garner here, at a squint, other than size. We'll see.