The Whale is an anti-fat film in none of the ways you would expect. Is the fat man callously mocked for his fatness? No. Maybe that would have made for a better movie. Darren Aronofsky’s film does something much worse to the fat man: it pities him.
Brendan Fraser sucks up this pity like a vacuum by playing every line with the same glassy-eyed bewilderment, no matter what’s happening. As every well-deserved admonishment and punishment is rained down on him by the supporting cast for all of his repulsive behavior, he reacts with a rote Elmer Fudd “bwuhh??” expression that slowly pans around the room, as if saying, “how did I get here?” Oscar!
Fraser, as the morbidly obese Charlie, trudges befuddledly through every claustrophobic scene, normally sinking into a fetid couch, but occasionally walkering himself, protruding fat jiggling in hyper-realistic VFX as subwoofers groan, like a scene out of Arrival, to some other destination inside his apartment.
Charlie seems totally impervious to the suffering he’s caused to those around him. He has alienated everyone in his life, and stuffed himself with junk food along the way. The decrepit premise of the movie is, basically: are the two related?
He forces his best friend, who is miraculously a nurse, to give him free hospice in his hopelessly engorged and motionless state. Her diagnosis of his fatal heart disease gives him a week to live– cue a “Monday… Tuesday…” countdown reminiscent of The Ring, but much less exciting. Spoiler: he dies at the end. Charlie has ignored the existence of his daughter and ex-wife for years, then wonders why his best friend/nurse is mad he wants to leave $120,000 to them, and nothing to her. He drones on pedantically about revising and re-revising essays to his University of Phoenix-ass online students, knowing full well it is an utterly useless skill for all of them and his harsh pedagogy is actually impairing them from getting on with their lives. What exactly did his composition skills get him? A suicidal boyfriend. I mean, anyone can get one of those. He strings along a Mormon-esque twink missionary, implying he is ready to be another tick on his Roman numeraled prison wall of saved souls, but never delivers.
All these characters cluster around him for one reason: the moral absolution they will feel for having lessened the pain of a fat man dying. Everyone magically wins. Both Charlie and his supplicants get what they want. It’s a transactional exchange. No one is selflessly motivated; everyone is selfish. Here, we briefly get closer to the anarchic house party spirit of Aronofsky’s Mother!, but that alchemical reaction is evanescent; perhaps, even tragically, accidental. Instead, we get the feeling Aronofsky wants us desperately to feel bad for Charlie; but why should we? Because he’s fat?
At some terrifying point between 2009 and 2021, when Aronofsky had written the film but had not yet found a suitable producer, the director role was attached to Tom Ford, with James Corden as The Whale. Clearly, God exists because this did not happen.
The Whale tries to weasel its way out of its anti-fat veneer by establishing quickly that “The Whale” of the title isn’t about the main character– how fatphobic of you to assume so!– instead, it’s referencing an essay about Moby-Dick Charlie desperately recites each time he feels like he’s dying, which it later turns out was written by none other than his daughter. What Moby-Dick has to do with anything that happens in the movie is a mystery to me, personally. Maybe there is some sophomoric metaphorical doubling going on, story-within-a-story, but I’m not a media studies MA student and I don’t think that’s a very interesting analysis.
But, if I was going to write that, I’d have a line like, “then what is The Whale’s whale?” What is Brendan Fraser, as the morbidly obese Charlie, monomaniacally searching for, leading to his death? Forgiveness? He is, if anything, an anti-Ahab, resigned to spiraling self-pity and corpulence as opposed to Ahab’s bending of reality around his will. The point isn’t that the whale is a meaningless goal, it’s that Ahab has a goal at all.
Ahab is a kind of a vitalist character, even though the satirical undertone of Moby-Dick is, if I can remember it, basically: who gives a fuck about this whale? The broader point is that Ahab has a life purpose, while Ishmael is relegated to recording the chronicle of a greater man, and buttfucking Queequeg.
In a spiritually impoverished world, Ahab becomes the hero of Moby-Dick. Melville wanted us to laugh at him, but actually he is us. It used to be that everyone had a purpose, and there were bad purposes. Now no one has a purpose and any purpose is a good purpose. Good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, etc.
But Charlie resists death, despite all the advantages to him and those around him it would provide. Really, everyone would be better off if he was dead. As everyone castigates him for the ways in which he has betrayed them, he remains unperturbed. He is optimistic despite being fat, because the film is trying to teach us that being optimistic is not extrinsically good, it’s only good when you’re suffering. And if life is going good, so good you decide to snuggle up and watch a movie, say, The Whale, then the virtuous response is to feel bad. I feel so bad for the fat man! A true slave morality.
The idea that fatness, or at least Charlie’s fatness, stems from his grief at his boyfriend’s suicide is a neat excuse. But, consider, for a moment, if this film was called The Lush and featured Brendan Fraser as an unrepentant alcoholic. This would clearly be a better movie, and yes, Casavetes already made it several times. AA’s cultural saturation has made us understand that alcoholism is a disease, not a simple overindulgence of particular substances. People have a predisposition to compulsive behavior, which finds its expression in the drippy, walls-closing-in tunnel vision euphoria of alcohol. No “excuse” is provided in a film like Opening Night for why Gena Rowlands is an alcoholic. And dare I say she takes alcoholism to heretofore unknown heights of glamor. Of course, glamor is not an endorsement, and in some ways glamor is always unflattering. Opening Night is like the opposite movie of The Whale. It actually treats alcoholism with sympathy and respect. Are people alcoholics because something bad happened to them? No. Plenty of bad things happen to people who don’t become alcoholics. But The Whale tries to say: Charlie is morbidly obese because his diminutive Asian BF killed himself.
It’s because obesity has been vacuumed up, Kirby-style, into the demented logic of our times: being fat is an identity. Being an alcoholic, having peaked in the era from 1950-80, is a disease. Many such “identities” of today are “diseases” of the past— but which is the most useful lens? Now, fat people are a protected class, but alcoholics are not. Being overweight is celebrated on TikTok, but getting shitfaced and embarrassing yourself in front of all your friends is not.
If Charlie had forsaken a few pizzas and lived to see the birth of Ozempic, things might have turned out differently. It’s ironic the film has become technologically obsolete in the year of its final release. Obesity is a switch in the brain, as is alcoholism– not a state of victimhood. Yet the film indulges fatness as a status to wallow in. Charlie repeatedly asks if people are disgusted by him, goading them to say yes. He is actually delighted by both responses. The people who deny being disgusted by him— his best friend, the missionary— reinforce his victimhood and learned helplessness. Those who reveal they are disgusted— his daughter, his students, the pizza delivery guy— trigger his compulsive behavior, in one case leading to a satisfyingly baroque session of pizza guzzling, along with everything else in the fridge. Either way, he wins, he gets what he wants. He lives in a pristine mental state.
And he is genuinely flummoxed why no one will forgive him. But he doesn’t seem troubled, either, when he is temporarily denied this forgiveness, because his ultimate weapon is pity: pity me because I’m fat and dying. His conversations with his best friend, daughter and ex-wife don’t go anywhere, resolve nothing, until they are interrupted by his death rattles. Then they capitulate. He gets what he wants. He forces everyone he’s wronged into submission to his will.
The movie answers the question, “why should I care that this guy is dying?” with: because he is FAT! FEEL BAD! We need to feel BAD about FAT people and through feeling BAD we understand we all must DIE, so the movie is about all of us. Actually, I would rather watch a movie about an unapologetically fat person, an unrepentant fat guy who loves being fat and rubs it in everyone’s faces. This is almost that movie, in some scenes, except that Aronofsky is actually trying to make a movie about a sympathetic fat person. And he ruins a perfectly good film about a truly detestable fat guy in doing so. What is so odious about Charlie is not his fatness but his lying and hiding and whimpering, that he asks us to feel something for this pathetic behavior.
I recently watched Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. A line from the film goes like this: “There’s something arrogant about worrying about those you consider less fortunate”. The context was a reaction against some kind of shallowly felt champagne socialism sentiment, but I had to pause the movie to write it down because it’s applicable to so many things. Sentimentality is a liberal trait. There’s something arrogant about feeling bad for someone because they are fat and dying. As if there was no value to living that kind of life. Hey, we all die. Why should I feel bad this guy is dying? In other movies, I feel bad when someone dies— because those movies are well written. But why this guy? Because he is also fat? But, he is also a jerk and makes everyone around him’s life worse. He is a man without qualities, an emotional vampire sucking energy from everyone else. Even his boyfriend thought their life together wasn’t worth living— and he wasn’t even as fat then!
Maybe Charlie is the anti-Ahab: trying to stuff meaning into life by doing absolutely nothing, not changing, an anti-Einsteinian method of doing the same thing, expecting different results. The kind of insight every therapist sics on you the first session. Or maybe he is Dark Ahab: his single-minded pursuit is to make everyone feel sorry for him; his white whale is forgiveness. When he has emotionally blackmailed everyone he cares about into giving him absolution, he dies, floating off into heaven, light as a feather. He is the Last Man.
I wonder if Darren Aronofsky meant to make the movie I saw, or if it is pure accident because he failed miserably at what he was trying to do. There do seem to be some in-jokes to this effect in the film, like how Charlie’s daughter’s essay about Moby-Dick actually sucks but he writhes in fits of ecstasy whenever he thinks about it. Then again, in an interview Aronofsky basically says, “this can’t be an anti-fat movie because you feel bad for the fat guy. He’s just like us!”
Honestly, if you accidentally make a movie that is actually more interesting than the movie you thought you were making, you are kind of a good artist anyway. The artist doesn’t need to intend anything. The movie I saw is an indictment against its own audience: why do you feel good about yourself for feeling bad about a fat man dying?
The Whale is like a 2 hour SPCA commercial in which a man’s fatness is laundered to elicit sympathy for an otherwise contemptible character. It’s a big ass insulin spike to the bleeding heart, because he’s just like me, for real— because we are all fat, spiritually.
March 2023
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