Fat Shaming Has No Place in Hollywood Anymore

At a time when Hollywood is attempting to promote socially appropriate images and becoming politically correct, it is still common to hear audiences laughing when an overweight person pops up on the screen.

Fat shaming continues to be demeaning on and off the screen, in Hollywood and elsewhere.

Various movie genres traditionally use physical appearance as a means to engage the audience, using height, race or weight imbalances to boost the entertainment factor.

In the article “Tyler Perry, Spike Lee and Negative Media Imagery”, published in Psychology Today, Melody T. McCloud criticizes several film makers for their excessive use of stereotypes in their films. “Sometimes people are not laughing with you, but at you” McCloud said.

“These movies can demote a person’s psychological status and lead a person to get a darker vision of what they are living,” Professor of Practice at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Mervat Abou Oaf told The Caravan.

There are various ways other than mockery to make things funny but using weight as a material in movies is insensitive against people’s feelings, Abou Oaf added.

A great example of a movie that tried to use fat shaming to invoke laughter, was the movie Norbit. The movie’s poster shows actor Eddie Murphy under his overweight wife, with the caption “Have you ever made a really big mistake?”.

The “really big mistake” can actually be watching the movie which scored 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, a website for critical reviews of films and content. To some people, it could be funny when the trailer says “Meet a nice guy… With a huge problem”, but to others, it may be flat out bullying.

Eddie Murphy played another “fat| role in the movie Nutty Professor where he was an overweight professor with a big heart, and he took a chemical to become slim.

But his thin alter ego is considered a jerk by everyone he comes into contact with.

But the danger here is the message that fat people are not accepted and have to resort to chemicals in order to be of a physical norm visually and psychologically comforting to the audience.

But it is the 2001 comedy Shallow Hal which is guilty of the most despicable forms of mockery against overweight people while it still tries to keep up a pretense of positivity and progressiveness.

Gwyneth Paltrow was heavily criticized for wearing a fat suit as it was offensive to many people, and many people viewed it as fat shaming.

The movie portrays two friends, Hal played by Jack Black and Mauricio played by Jason Alexander, who seem to be petty enough to only be attracted to women with utter physical perfection from their perspective.

The movie gives an insight into what it’s like to see people for who they are on the inside instead of allowing their appearance to be the first and only factor. Black gets hypnotized and that’s when he sees Rosemary (Paltrow), who is an oversized woman, as “ideal”.   

Shallow Hal used a lot of stereotypical comments to ridicule obesity, such as “is she behind the rhino?” in a scene where Hal was introducing the girl he likes to Mauricio.

When Rosemary jumps in the pool, all the water splashes out, and a kid lands on a tree.

This is not a sci-fi movie; there is no reason to exaggerate actions to produce good content. The films encourage people to laugh at the difficulties people face due to their weight, which is a direct form of bullying that is employed for lack of artistic and creative content.

This restricts the vision of the audience from seeing that there’s more to them than what they see on the screen, McCloud stated.

It’s also dangerous, Psychology Today says, because Hollywood ends up perpetuating some of the schoolyard bullying targeting overweight children who aren’t motivated to lose weight but instead fall prey to eating disorders, depression and in some cases, suicide.

Another example that promotes the concept of “being thin is being beautiful” is a movie meant to be for children, who are formulating their perceptions on what is considered ideal. Red Shoes and the 7 Dwarfs is an animated movie showing an oversized Snow White.

There was a billboard sponsoring the movie, which included two versions of Snow White. The thin one was standing tall in her magical red shoes that helped into her transformation, however, the plus-sized version of her was placed next to the text: “What if Snow White was no longer beautiful and the Seven Dwarfs not so short?”.

But Hollywood does have its moments raising the banner for people with mental and physical differences

The latest frenzy with superhero movies implicitly tries to encourage acceptance to people’s differences. This is particularly visible in the late Stan Lee’s comic book series X-Men which earned billions at the box office..

By creating superheroes and making them use their differences to help save the world, many people started to change their ideologies and even wish to be different.