Buy Walking VideosMTV Addresses the Fat Suit
I’m shockingly impressed by MTV’s review of the fat suit trend in Hollywood.
They were really hard on Shallow Hal, which was one movie that I really thought the fat suit looked more real than any other and had a good moral ending to the “lookism” problem. There were a lot of cheap shot fat jokes in it, but I actually liked the movie a lot.
This article was obviously initiated because of the release of the movie, Just Friends, in which the main character plays a fat kid who loses the weight and goes back to win the heart of his first love. I wish Hollywood would let me write that story. That girl who wouldn’t even consider him dating material when he was fat isn’t worth his time. She was too shallow to love him when he wasn’t “perfect,” why should he try to win her over now that he is?
I want to see the story of the girl who loved him so much for who he was that he eventually believed in her vision of him. He lost the weight because she convinced him that he should take care of himself, live a healthy life and have the body he deserved. That’s the movie that I want to see. Either that, or the revenge scenario where he realizes that she’s not worth winning after he becomes thin (or before, for that matter).
Hollywood doesn’t understand the complicated issues of fat because it’s an industry that surrounds itself with thin. Hollywood understands thin very well. Anyone who has seen The Machinist can attest to that, but they have no comprehension of what fat is like. It’s going to take a movie from an independent to tell the world what fat is really like. Just like Napoleon Dynamite was able to tell the world what a rural teen experiences, there is a director and writer out there who can truly tell Hollywood what it’s like to be fat and when they do, they’ll be a blockbuster because everyone who has ever experienced this will flock to the theaters.
Until then, don’t let Hollywood convince you that being fat means that you have to be lonely. Loneliness is caused by isolating yourself from people, not from your body shape. If you are lonely, it’s not because you’re fat. Promise yourself that you will do something today to alleviate your loneliness (join a club, call an old friend, volunteer your time). Then, when you get to goal weight, you won’t have the shocking discovery that thin people get lonely too.
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