1940s

April 2016 Roundup

I’ve had a busy week, but better late than never! Here’s a summary of fat characters in films I saw over the past month but didn’t write about.

The Lady Eve (1941, dir. Preston Sturges)

Classic screwball romantic comedy in which con artist Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) tries to swindle wealthy nerd Charles (Henry Fonda) and loses her heart in the process. Two father figures in the movie are fat men: the Colonel (Charles Coburn), Jean’s partner in crime who pretends to be her father, is debonair yet heartless; Horace (Eugene Palette), Charles’ tycoon father, is a blustering blue-collar type who made a fortune by brewing the Ale that Won for Yale.

Midnight Special (2016, dir. Jeff Nichols)

In this moody sci-fi drama about a Kid with Powers, there’s a small role of a child psychologist (Dana Gourrier) who is a competent, serious professional who does her job in an intense, high-security military setting and just happens to be fat. And that’s it. Which is fine by me.

Faces (1968, dir. John Cassavetes)

Dang, this is a good movie. A cinema verite look at a crumbling marriage over the course of a night, as Richard (John Marley) spends the night with Jeannie (Gena Rowlands) a sex worker he frequently patronizes, while his wife Maria (Lynn Carlin) picks up Chet (Seymour Cassel) a playboy she and her friends meet at a club. Although all the characters in the film are portrayed as lonely people desperate for some way to remedy the emptiness of their lives, a few fat minor characters come across as particularly pathetic. Maria’s friend Florence (Dorothy Gulliver) practically begs Chet to pay attention to her, while two of Jeannie’s other clients (Fred Draper and Val Avery) become angry to the point of aggression when threatened by Richard’s presence in Jeannie’s home.

Ma Vie en Rose (1997, dir. Alain Berliner)

This is a sweet film about Ludo (Georges du Fresne), a transgender 7 year old who wants to be accepted as a girl. Unsurprisingly, this is easier said than done, as her family and community react to her love of dresses and dolls with confusion and disapproval. The repercussions of transphobia on her family as a whole largely come from Albert (Daniel Hanssens), a fat man who is Ludo’s father’s boss. He is rather conservative, and is scandalized when Ludo holds a play-wedding wherein she “marries” his son Jerome (Julien Riviere), putting her father’s job in jeopardy.

Roundup: February 2016

A summary of fat characters in films I saw over the last month but didn’t write about.

This is Spinal Tap (1984, dir. Rob Reiner)

Reiner inserts himself in this classic mockumentary as documentarian Marty diBergi, both a dorky outsider to the world of rock and the frequent reminder of the real world outside the band’s bubble where they aren’t the hallowed rock gods they position themselves as. Other fat characters include the band’s creepy keyboardist Viv Savage (David Kaff).

Groundhog Day (1993, dir. Harold Ramis)

Buster Green (Brian Doyle Murray) is the master of ceremonies for the Groundhog Day ceremony who becomes part of Phil’s time loop routine when he chokes on a piece of steak and must be saved via the Heimlich maneuver (presumably many, many times). Gus (Rick Ducommun) is a blue collar townie with whom Phil gets drunk (also, presumably many, many times).

Hail, Caesar! (2016, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

A fair number of fat characters are in this sprawling cast, from a beleaguered bartender in the sailor dance number “No Dames!”(E.E. Bell) to a nefarious extra (Wayne Knight) to professional person Joseph Silverman (Jonah Hill).

Toy Story 2 (1999, dir. John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich, Ash Brannon)

Al (Wayne Knight) is the main antagonist of the film. Although he owns a toy store, he hates children, is greedy (stealing Woody from the yard sale even after Andy’s mom insists he isn’t for sale), lazy (complaining about having to drive to work that is literally across the street from his building), and represents a misguided approach to toys (wanting to preserve them in pristine condition instead of loving and playing with them). The Prospector/Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammar) is also an antagonist, wanting to go along with Al’s plan to sell the toys to a museum in Japan because he’s never been taken out of the box. Keeping toys in the box is positioned as wrong or sad in the film, but for the Prospector, it’s the best option.

Drag Me to Hell (2009, dir. Sam Raimi)

Christine (Alison Lohman) is the typical thin, blonde protagonist of a horror film. Although the plot focuses on her struggling against a demon summoned to stalk her by a curse, her defining character trait is attempting to reinvent herself and run from her past as a fat girl who grew up on a farm in the South.

On the Waterfront (1954, dir. Elia Kazan)

This classic film follows the struggle of dock workers under the thumb of a mobbed-up union boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), one of whose thugs is a fat man.

Casablanca (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz)

Fat characters include Carl (S.Z. Sakall), a good-natured waiter at Rick’s cafe, and Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet), who runs the black market in Casablanca and has access to highly desirable exit visas.

carl casablanca

Roundup: August 2015

(CN sexual assault) A summary of films I saw over the past month with fat characters that I didn’t write about.

Super (2010, dir. James Gunn)

Mr. Range (Don Mac) is a powerful drug dealer who does business with Jacques (Kevin Bacon). Jacques has procured several women to entertain Mr. Range during their transaction, but Range insists on being alone with Sarah (Liv Tyler), who is high. Jacques allows Range to take Sarah into a bedroom. After she tells him she doesn’t want to have sex, he attempts to rape her. Frank (Rainn Wilson) kills Mr. Range. During Frank and Jacques’ climactic showdown, Jacques refers to Range as “that fat n—–.”

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, dir. John Ford)

Ma Joad is portrayed by Jane Darwell, who was also in The Ox-Bow Incident. The neo-Biblical feel of Steinbeck’s story features characters who are drawn very simplistically. Ma is a pretty typical matriarch of a rural family in a lot of ways, but she is portrayed with dignity, as the Joad family’s strength and emotional center.

Confidential Report/Mr. Arkadin (1955, dir. Orson Welles)

The great man himself as the titular Mr. Arkadin, a powerful, wealthy criminal who can’t remember his own past. Fat bit players include an indignant chef and a cigar-smoking retired general.

Mommy (2015, dir. Xavier Dolan)

The great thing about Mommy is how it centers and humanizes characters who are often written as obnoxious cartoons, namely Steven, a teenage boy with behavioral issues (Antoine Olivier-Pilon), and Diane, his foul mouthed, fading beauty mom (Anne Dorval). However, most of the other characters in the 2+ hour film are roughly drawn, more aides or impediments to the main characters than characters in themselves. One of these characters is a fat woman who has assumed her husband’s position as editor of a magazine where Diane works. The woman takes sadistic pleasure in firing Diane, telling her that she has no talent as a columnist and was only hired because her husband found her attractive.

F for Fake (1973, dir. Orson Welles)

The last film Orson Welles ever directed was a frenetic documentary about forgery and deception, featuring Welles himself as the narrator and master of ceremonies. Until this point I haven’t written about fat documentary subjects I’ve come across because their weight has been purely incidental, but Welles’ role in his film was intentional (even if it was in part due to his ego). He appears as an erudite and mischievous dynamo in a fabulous black cloak and hat: performing magic tricks, spinning glorious tales for the audience (both watching the film and situated around him at a fine restaurant and on a picnic) while at the same time reminding us that we can’t always trust what we see and hear.

PeeWee’s Big Adventure (1985, dir. Tim Burton)

There are a handful of fat characters in this film, all of whom pose a threat or impediment to PeeWee (Paul Rubens) to some degree: Francis Buxton (Mark Holton), a snotty rich kid who pays to have PeeWee’s bike stolen; Large Marge (Alice Nunn), the ghostly trucker who gives PeeWee a ride and a scare; Andy (Jon Harris), a trucker who wants to hurt PeeWee because he’s jealous of his relationship with his girlfriend Simone (Diane Salinger); and some members of the biker gang who want to torture and kill PeeWee, until he wins them over with his dancing:

Hangover Square (1945, dir. John Brahm) and the Tragedy of Laird Cregar

(CN dieting, death)

Art that foreshadows the death of its creator– especially the death of a younger artist– contains an emotional gravity that’s hard to put into words. This is certainly true for artists who intentionally create art to communicate their pain and self-destructive tendencies, like Elliott Smith or Amy Winehouse, but for a film actor, a particularly significant last work can retrospectively take on an element of particularly poignant, even eerie, tragedy. I have never seen this phenomenon unfold quite like Laird Cregar’s performance in Hangover Square, which I saw last night at the Noir City Film Festival.

Laid Cregar, in a publicity still for Rings on Her Fingers (1942)

Laird Cregar, in a 1942 publicity still.

Hangover Square is a haunting Victorian tale of George Bone (Cregar), a composer who suffers from stress-induced, murderous fugue states. Despite his formidable, brooding physical presence, George is gentle and sensitive, vulnerable to the opinion of others by the very nature of his vocation. His friendship with his pretty blonde neighbor Barbara (Faye Marlowe) would be romantic in any other film, but is chaste in this one. George lives a life of solitude, obsessed with his art. Although his life’s work is classical music and he is hard at work on a concerto commissioned by Barbara’s father Sir Henry (Alan Napier), he is distracted by femme fatale Netta (Linda Darnell), who manipulates him into composing popular songs for her to perform. Netta leads him on for the sake of her own rising star, but has her eye on svelte theater producer Eddie (Glenn Langan) as a mate.

Hangover Square was Laird Cregar’s only starring role. He had a successful career as a character actor, his 6’3″, 300 lb body contributing to effective portrayals of villains, his characters often significantly older than the twentysomething actor. He performed with and has been compared to Vincent Price. However, Cregar grew tired of being typecast. He wanted to be a leading man, but saw his weight as a barrier, describing his character type as “a grotesque.” Starting in 1942, he crash dieted and used amphetamines to lose over 100 lbs. In 1944, he starred in The Lodger, a horror film about a man who may be Jack the Ripper, followed by his leading role in Hangover Square. Not satisfied with the results of his diet, Cregar opted for weight loss surgery in late 1944. The stress that the operation caused his body led to a fatal coronary a month later, two months before the release of Hangover Square. He was 31.

Laird Cregar in Hangover Square

As one might expect from a film whose protagonist kills people, Hangover Square doesn’t end well for George. Trying to arrest him for Netta’s murder, Scotland Yard follows him to the debut of his concerto. He starts a fire in an attempt to evade them, which rages out of control. Everyone must evacuate the building before the performance is complete, despite his attempts to force the musicians to continue. In desperation, he sits at the piano and continues from where the fleeing orchestra has left off. The last image of the film is of George playing his masterwork as he is consumed by smoke and flames.

Cregar’s performance of George Bone serves as a grimly appropriate memorial, struggling with his mind that both created and destroyed, just as Cregar himself struggled with a career that allowed him to pursue his art but confined him in stock character roles due to his appearance. The role he was slated for after Hangover Square went to Vincent Price. We’ll never know if Cregar’s career could likely have been as fruitful and celebrated as his colleague’s.

Roundup: June 2015

Although it’s my intention for most of the posts on CPBS to be less about analyses of targeted fat characters and more about my experience as a viewer randomly coming across these characters as I watch films in a more organic fashion, I end up seeing a lot more fat people in film than those I write about here. In what will hopefully be an ongoing monthly feature, here’s a summary of films I saw over the past month that feature fat characters I didn’t write about.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)

There are a few fat people in this landmark horror film. Franklin (Paul A. Partain), one of the main characters, is fat and in a wheelchair. Although not the most nuanced character or performance in the history of film, he is given more screen time, dialogue, and personality than the other members of his group. Once scene follows him as he struggles to navigate his chair through an abandoned house, while his friends’ laughter can be heard from the second floor. I was impressed by this, considering that characterization in slasher films is usually pretty sparse, and that fat and disabled characters are usually not shown in a light that leads the audience to empathize with them. Leatherface is arguably fat as well, especially when compared to his family members; his size adds to his menace, and he is able to keep up with Sally (Marilyn Burns) pretty well during the chase scene, especially considering that he is carrying a chainsaw. In a minor part, a fat man of color driving a semi in the last scene runs over the Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) before he can kill Sally and helps her escape.

The Set-Up (1949, dir. Robert Wise)

This film centers on a boxing match: one of the competitors (Robert Ryan), who is unwilling to accept that he’s past his prime, has been instructed to take a fall. Unfolding in real time, we see the fight from the differing perspectives of a large cast, including several anonymous spectators. One of these spectators is a fat man (Dwight Martin) who is shot from a low angle, emphasizing his girth. He laughs at the violence taking place in the ring, although his schadenfreude is not outstanding relative to other characters in the audience. He shown eating every time he’s on screen, going through several different food items over the course of the competition. I saw this film at a theater; by the last half of the film, a good chunk of the audience was laughing whenever the fat man was shown with a new food item.

Blue Velvet (1986, dir. David Lynch)

Set on terrorizing Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) as revenge for having sex with Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini), Frank (Dennis Hopper) forces the two of them to come on a joyride with his crew to a brothel run by his associate Ben (Dean Stockwell). The scene is consummate Lynch, a tense and menacing tableau that incorporates elements of mid-century American bourgeois culture. Part of this tableau are three fat women. Dressed in a conservative manner, they don’t have names or speak, except for one who Ben refers to as “darling” and requests that she fetch glasses for their guests. Their function is to give Ben’s house an uncomfortable tone.

Martin & Orloff (2002, dir. Lawrence Blume)

A comedy about Martin (Ian Roberts), a man who attempts suicide, and the unorthodox psychiatrist Dr. Orloff (Matt Walsh) who forces him on a bizarre journey of self-discovery, strongly influenced by improv and sketch comedy and featuring a dream team cast of improv actors and comedians (Amy Poelher, Tina Fey, H. Jon Benjamin, Andy Richter, the list goes on). When Patty (Amy Poehler) falls in love with Martin, her boyfriend Jimbo (Sal Graziano) falls into a jealous rage. Jimbo is a large, fat man with an absurdly large penis who spends most of his screentime threatening to beat up Martin, often squatting like a sumo wrestler and charging. Through Dr. Orloff’s incidental help, Jimbo connects his anger to his thwarted football career, and decides to ally with Martin.

When Marnie Was There (2015, dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi)

Anna, a 12-year-old struggling with asthma and her sense of self-worth, is sent to live in the country with her foster mother’s relatives for the summer to improve her health. One of her temporary guardians, Mrs. Oiwa, is a fat woman. She is a laid-back maternal figure who treats Anna with kindness and respect, even if she doesn’t always have a bead on the girl’s emotional needs. She is often shown in relation to food (snacking, cooking, and tending her vegetable garden), and connects with Anna over the latter two activities. Another fat character in Marnie is Nobuko, a girl who lives in Mrs. Oiwa’s neighborhood. Mrs. Oiwa tries to encourage a connection between her and Anna, but Nobuko’s extroverted personality makes Marnie uncomfortable. When Nobuko asks Anna some overly personal questions, the quiet girl becomes overwhelmed and calls her a “fat pig.” Nobuko retaliates with some insults of her own before suggesting they drop the matter, but Anna runs away in embarrassment. Before she returns to her home in the city, Anna apologizes to Nobuko, who accepts her apology by forcefully insisting that Anna join the neighborhood trash pickup next summer.

Unfinished Business (2015, dir. Ken Scott)

Dan (Vince Vaughn) is the founder of a startup sales firm and has the poor work-life balance of every white collar American dad in every comedy ever. One of the family problems he doesn’t have time to pay attention to is that his teenage son Paul (Britton Sear) doesn’t have any friends and is being cyber-bullied by his classmates because he’s fat. That plotline resolves with Vince Vaughn giving him a pep talk about being himself. Another notable fat character is Bill (Nick Frost), one of Dan’s clients. He is revealed to be a gay man in the leather scene who, because of his commitment to his job, has stopped working out and doesn’t get attention from men anymore. If you’re not at work, here’s some evidence of how there are no gay men in the world who think Nick Frost is a total babe. No siree. He also is spineless when dealing with his boss (James Marsden), but Dan inspires him to go behind his boss’ back (so he can help Dan out).

The Master (2012, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

In the beginning of the film, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is directionless and animalistic. Drunk at his job as a portrait photographer at a department store, he harasses a fat client (W. Earl Brown) to the point that the man engages him in fisticuffs. He then meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a fat man who is the charismatic leader of a pseudo-scientific religion. Dodd, called the Master, preaches that humans are above animals, and have forgotten their true elevated nature. He makes Freddie’s redemption his pet project; this relationship makes up the bulk of the film.

Happy 100th birthday, Orson Welles

He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?

–Tana (Marlene Dietrich), Touch of Evil

A few months ago, I saw a theater production called Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play. Mr. Burns is three snapshots in three acts of life in the United States after a catastrophe that causes the nation’s electric grid to shut down. We see society rebuilding itself from the detritus of our contemporary world through the lens of performance art, specifically the survival and evolution of The Simpsons episode “Cape Feare.” As the timeline progresses two, ten, then eighty years out from the disaster, “Cape Feare” evolves from a Simpsons episode being recounted by two fans to fellow survivors around a campfire, to a highly stylized opera in which characters and stories have synthesized various aspects of culture, such as Mr. Burns in Joker makeup giving a version of Robert Mitchum’s speech about the battle between love and hate from Night of the Hunter.

I bring this up not to brag about the best play I’ve ever seen (okay, maybe a little bragging), but because it’s such a vibrant illustration of how pieces of history and culture survive through being contained within newer works. For instance, I will be watching Cape Fear for the first time this week in preparation for a Director’s Club bonus episode, but I have a basic understanding of the plot and characters thanks to “Cape Feare,” which was probably in turn the most exposure some of my Simpsons-watching peers who didn’t have classical music as a presence in their lives had of Gilbert & Sullivan.

I bring all this up as a precursor to my experience of Orson Welles, who was born May 6, 1915. I was 1 when Welles died, so I have no memories of him as a living person. My first exposure to Welles was caricatures of him in later life, as in 1994-1995’s the Critic:

I knew him as an glowering old man who embodied fat stereotypes. I’m sure a lot of my memories of this images of Welles are mixed up with similar jokes about Marlon Brando. I found out somewhere along the way that he had created the War of the Worlds radio play, but it was difficult enough to wrap my brain around a play that was limited to sound and had the power to drive people to hysteria, let alone the man behind it. (This was before Welcome to Nightvale, kids.)

My image of Orson Welles was changed as a teenager when I saw Cradle Will Rock, featuring Angus MacFayden’s portrayal of Welles as a leonine artistic genius on the vanguard of modern theater, and again as an inspirational vision in Ed Wood (played by Vincent D’Onofrio and voice by Maurice LaMarche, who also provided the voice acting for Welles in The Critic):

Two seemingly disparate images of a dynamo and a has-been, both large but the latter cartoonishly fat, and neither quite adding up to a full, real artist and human being. Welles is, of course, best known for his association with Citizen Kane, usually found at the top of best-of lists. But this often feels perfunctory, especially being so chronologically removed from Citizen Kane that its reputation far proceeded my viewing of it. Welles feels like the cinematic equivalent of Shakespeare in this respect.

I started watching other films that Welles directed about a week ago, hoping to find something to write about for CPBS and not realizing it was almost the 100 year anniversary of his birth. (I like to think this is a sign that I am part of a brilliant fat person hive mind that transcends the limits of death.) I’m not usually automatically enraptured by well-regarded classic films, so hopefully this comes across as more than a cliche reaction: I was completely blown away by Welles’ mastery of the camera in The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil.

Wow.

WOW. (This clip is violent, be forewarned.)

At the end of Touch of Evil, Welles’ character Captain Quinlan is proven to be right in his hunch about the perpetrator of a crime, although the other characters have been disregarding him because of his reputation as a corrupt drunk. It’s nearly impossible to eclipse one’s reputation. It may be foolishly idealistic, but given the sheer brilliance of his work, I hope that Welles’ legacy as a great director and writer will live on at least as much as the fat jokes about him.

The Problem with Acceptance: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, dir. William A. Wellman)

The Ox-Bow Incident is a Western with a simple plot that takes a critical look at capital punishment, following a posse from a backwater town in Nevada who are hellbent on seeking vengeance for the murder of a local rancher. Our hero is Gil (Henry Fonda), a cowboy who is ambivalent about the ethics of the posse’s brand of justice. The posse forms a motley crew, one of whom is Jenny “Ma” Grier (Jane Darwell), a fat women who is well-liked by the others.

She is outside binary gender categories. The town is characterized in the first scene as lacking women; which is both denied and reinforced by her presence and appearance. Her nickname ties her to womanhood, but when the judge balks at her wanting to be part of the posse because of her gender, she and the others laugh at him. She is asked to cook for the men on the trail– despite the fact that most, if not all, of the men in the posse are able to cook a meal over an open campfire– but also volunteers to take an active part in the hanging of the posse’s suspects, “if no one else will.” As she says this, she looks around at the others in the group, wordlessly accusing them of being sissies. In stark contrast to Ma is Gerald (William Eythe). Gerald is coded as queer; his father Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), formerly of the Confederate Army, is the sternly vicious leader of the posse, and demands that Gerald come along in an attempt to “make a man of [him].” Gerald is sickened at the sight of blood, and tries to oppose hanging the suspects without a fair trial.

Ma is a great example of the layered politics of representation. She’s a fat, gender nonconforming woman who is respected by the other townspeople, speaks her mind with confidence, and effortlessly laughs off sexist comments. It would be easy enough to join Team Ma based on these components, but paradoxically, the degree to which she blends in with the majority of the posse makes it impossible to admire her. Her seeming ability to overcome marginalization doesn’t excuse the unethical nature of her choices in the film. I saw this film pretty soon after reading Tasha Fierce’s great essay The Revolution Will Not Be Plus-Sized, which describes a real-world parallel: by demanding that mainstream clothing lines offer a greater range of clothing sizes, fat people are making a political goal of (further) assimilation into an industry that thrives on exploitative labor practices and “the cultural push to appear normative.” When we demand respect and representation, does that mean we have to compromise ethical stances in deference to the status quo of the oppressive group in order to get what we need?

Fat Guys Trying to Survive Horror Films: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, dir. Charles T. Barton); Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010, dir. Eli Craig)

“I shoulda known if a guy like me talked to a girl like you, somebody’d end up dead.” –Dale, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

“It’s a little past sunset. And if Dracula’s here, he’s gonna want breakfast. And I’m fatter than you, and it ain’t gonna be me.” –Wilbur, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein

The comic duo composed of a fat and thin character is a common trope in Western cinema, and has been for a long time. The thin character is usually smart and quick-tempered; the fat character tends to be meek and simple-minded (either unintelligent, naive, or both), but also tends to be the source of humor, whether through a savant sense for one-liners, propensity for pratfalls, or outlandish eccentricities. One of the most famous and most illustrative pairs of this kind is Abbott and Costello, who started out as a Vaudeville act and went on to star in more than 30 films together. Several of their films are horror-comedy, the first of which is Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, putting the hapless duo in a story filled with supernatural threats. Most of the fun comes from seeing them in way over their heads, coming to the realization that something is up and trying to figure out what’s going on. 62 years later, the same basic dynamic of two disparately-sized Joe Six Packs inadvertently stumbling into a horror film scenario plays out in Tucker & Dale Versus Evil. Although both horror and comedy have changed enough in the intervening years to make some significant differences in the dynamic between the characters, there’s also a lot that hasn’t changed for respective fat guys Wilbur Gray (Lou Costello) and Dale Dobson (Tyler Labine).

Dale and Wilbur are both the sole fat characters in their respective films. Wilbur is directly labeled as the fat guy: his size is directly mentioned in several jokes (e.g. Wilbur says he’s “floating in love,” Chick responds by calling him a “blimp”). Dale’s size is not directly referenced, but is part of a few typical fat-person sight gags (e.g. inappropriately-timed nudity, falling on his friend) and is arguably a part of his insecurities. Chad, his main college kid nemesis, has an athletic physique. Tucker tells his friend to have more confidence, but Dale responds that he’s always had an easier time with the ladies. (It’s never stated directly that Dale is referencing Tucker’s physique, but they did cast Alan Tudyk…)

The dynamic between the two friends at the center of each movie is very similar. Chick Young (Bud Abbott) and Tucker– the thin friends– are both more practical and strong-willed than Wilbur or Dale, and often take the role of leader. Both Dale and Wilbur are more passive, but the films interpret that in different ways. Dale’s lack of assertiveness is due to an “inferiority complex,” as Tucker describes it: if Dale gains confidence, then he will be able to stand up for himself and flirt with women. Tucker acts like an older brother to Dale, giving him advice and emotional support when he feels bad about himself, such as his initial failure to talk to beautiful college student Allison (Katrina Bowden). Dale privileges Tucker over his own interests, such as pretending to like fishing because it allows him to spend time with his friend.

Wilbur’s weakness, on the other hand, is an immutable personality flaw, something that is practically part of his biology. Dracula (Bela Lugosi) is plotting to put a fresh brain in Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange) in order to make him a compliant servant; Wilbur is being targeted as the donor because he has an “obedient” brain with “no will of his own, no fiendish intellect to oppose his master.” Chick acts more like a boss, ordering Wilbur around and trying to rein in his unruly behavior. Wilbur relies on Chick for physical protection, wailing his friend’s name whenever he’s frightened (of course, this results in the monsters removing themselves from the scene by the time Chick arrives).

Dale’s and Wilbur’s love interests are essential to the plots of both films, and both involve them mooning over women who are intelligent and conventionally beautiful, but again we see the similarities end there. At the beginning of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, the differences between Allison and Dale are highlighted. College students like Allison “grew up with vacation homes and guys like me fixing their toilets,” Dale argues early in movie, explaining why he won’t approach her. But just as Allison is convinced by her friends that Tucker and Dale are evil sadists because they look like villains from movies like Deliverance, Dale’s first impression of her is also a stereotype, and he discovers that she is a tomboy who grew up on a farm and likes bowling. Both Dale and Allison are the moral centers of their respective groups; Allison encourages her friends not to judge the locals of the rural area they’re camping in, while Tucker complains that Dale led them into a fiasco by being “a good Samaritan.” The growth of their relationship, as much as the string of mishaps and misconceptions that make the titular characters look like serial killers, are the film’s evidence against judging a book by its cover.

Wilbur’s love life is the inverse. In the beginning of the film, Wilbur is dating the beautiful Sandra (Lenore Aubert). The audience soon discovers that her affection is too good to be true: Sandra is working with Dracula to revive the Monster, and wants to use Wilbur in their experiment. Later in the film, another beautiful woman, Joan (Jane Randolph), also professes love for Wilbur. Without pausing to question her motives, Wilbur blithely tries to juggle relationships with both women, even bringing them to the same costume ball. Joan, however, is also using Wilbur in an attempt to discover Dracula and the Monster’s whereabouts. While revisiting these films to write this piece, I imagined a young Dale watching Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and internalizing that it is foolish for a fat person like himself to consider a viable relationship with someone “out of their league.”

The differing dynamics between friends is also reflected in how the thin friend reacts to their fat friend’s romantic inclinations. Chick repeatedly expresses skepticism that women like Joan and Sandra could be attracted to a guy like Wilbur, and tries to talk Wilbur into “sharing,” despite the fact that both women are disinterested in him. Tucker is occasionally frustrated that his friend chooses to woo Allison instead of help with renovations to their cabin, but ultimately he supports and encourages his friend.

Chick and Wilbur find themselves the victims of an objective threat– Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.) are all very real in their world– while Tucker and Dale are largely threatened due to subjective interpretation: the college kids see a scenario they and the audience associate with horror films and map their ghoulish expectations onto it, fueled by Chad’s prejudice against hillbillies and forceful positioning of himself as an anti-hero. For much of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, Wilbur sees the monsters in their supernatural form and tries to convince skeptical Chick that they are real. Lawrence Talbot (aka the Wolfman) warns Chick and Wilbur of the oncoming supernatural threat, but Wilbur is the one who sees him first in his werewolf form. Wilbur also resists becoming part of Team Dracula, as he twice averts his gaze from a hypnotizing vampiric gaze and narrowly misses becoming part of the Monster when he is saved by Chick and Talbot. Dale, on the other hand, tries for much of the film to be seen as benign when he is misjudged as a threat, even going so far as to sit down for a mediated discussion over tea with Chad to hash out their differences. Eventually, though, he must conform to the college kids’ perception of him as a “psycho hillbilly” in order to save his friends and defeat Chad, who is the real source of danger to the other characters.

Seen in conversation with each other, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil show a progression of attitudes with regards to their fat protagonists. Wilbur is static, as foolish at the end of the movie as he is in the beginning. His body is a marker of his personality traits, marking him as objectively unattractive and inherently less dignified than the other characters. At the beginning of Dale’s story, he perceives himself as the audience perceives Wilbur. However, Dale lives in a world where perception can be changed and corrected. His body and appearance never change, but he is able to change his persona through how he presents himself and how others see him, going from diffident fat friend to “killer hillbilly” warrior to romantic hero.

Fat at a Movie Marathon

[CW: discussions of violence and sexual assault]

There are a fair amount of spoilers in this post; if that’s a concern, click on the provided link to see what films I’ll be talking about.

This weekend I attended [most of] the 10th annual Music Box of Horrors, a 24-hour marathon of horror films from across the world and history of film. It’s only my second time attending, and it’s been great fun both times. Instead of doing a separate post for each movie– which would take a long time and I am so very, very tired– I’m opting to give a brief rundown of fat representation in this year’s lineup, to document my experience as a fat audience member. For extra fun, I’ll include my favorite moments of misandry, as I was pleased to note that a good number of the movies in this year’s lineup had interesting and kickass female characters.

The Phantom Carriage (1921, dir. Victor Sjöström): no fat characters.

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939, dir. Nick Grinde): we skipped all but the last 15 minutes in the interest of getting lunch, but no fat people in the part I did see.

Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur) no fat characters.
Misandry Moment: slimy psychiatrist refuses to stay friendzoned by his patient (ick), she turns into a panther and mauls the crap out of him.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961, dir. Terence Fischer) Leon, the main character, has a fat best friend. Jose is his cheerful, hedonistic coworker; he suggests that the two of them spend their wages at a brothel. Unfortunately, Leon turns into a werewolf and mauls the crap out of him.

The Borrower (1991, dir. John McNaughton) in a group of potentially victimizable young people: a heavy metal (I guess) band is shown filming a music video of a song about how they want to kill their parents. The fat lead singer is an egomaniacal bully; when they hear the neighbor’s dog barking, he goes out to the backyard and sprays it down with the garden hose, laughing all the while. However, the neighbor’s dog is actually the titular serial killer alien, who kills the fat lead singer. (This was a weird one.) His bandmates survive unharmed, while…
Misandry Moment: …the young person who has their shit together enough to load a gun and blast a hole in the baddie is the band’s camerawoman. Also at least three scenes of a female cop shooting and beating up a rapist.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, dir. Werner Herzog) no fat people.
Misandry Moment: this film follows the classic Dracula story, except that Lucy is the one who is solely responsible for killing the vampire, while Dr. Van Helsing is a skeptical milquetoast.

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014, dir. Tommy Wirkola) no fat people.
Misandry Moment: a professional zombie killing team that is two-thirds women, raising the film’s undead Nazi body count with shovels, shears, and homemade fertilizer bombs.

I went home for a few hours’s sleep, but stalwart Patrick stayed the whole night. His not-entirely-awake testimony is as follows:

Nightmare, aka Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981, dir. Romano Scavolini) no fat people.

Shakma (1990, dir. Tom Logan) no fat people.

Don’t Look in the Basement (1973, dir. S.F. Brownrigg) Takes place in a psychiatric hospital; some of the patients are fat.

The marathon also plays shorter pieces in between the features; a short at one point overnight there was a screening of “Space Werewolf”, which features a fat protagonist.

I returned for the last two features:

Just Before Dawn (1981, dir. Jeff Lieberman) My cup runneth over. The bad guys are fat psycho hillbilly twins, terrorizing and murdering a group of sexy young campers. The sexy young campers are given harbingers in the form of a large-bodied park ranger (George Kennedy) who eventually comes to their rescue, and a hillbilly family comprised of a friendly but shy waif daughter, a hostile old dad, and a fat mom in an ill-fitting dress who isn’t given much to do except remind the audience that hillbillies are grotesque, I guess? The first killer twin to die is shot by Ranger Kennedy and falls on top of the Final Girl who he is attacking, leading some of the audience to vocalize disgust. It’s pretty gross to have a bloody corpse fall on you, but I feel like the disgust factor was heightened by the fact that the corpse in question is a fat man who looks like he hasn’t bathed in a while.
Misandry Moment: the Final Girl rams her fist down the second killer twin’s throat and chokes him to death while her traumatized boyfriend cowers in the background. One of the campers is murdered after he mansplains a rope bridge in the forest to the girl who lives in the forest and has presumably had her entire life to figure out the rope bridge.

Audition (1999, dir. Takashi Miike) no fat people.
Misandry Moment: it’s Audition.

There weren’t any surprises as far as representation of fat people goes. While nothing was grossly fatphobic, most of the films didn’t incorporate fat characters, and the fat characters that did appear were pretty typical, and in small supporting roles. Hopefully I’ll end up seeing a horror film with a meatier (ha) role for a fat person that I can write about before Halloween; if I have to resort to writing about Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, one of my favorite horror films, so be it.

Consistent Panda Bear Shape

Fat People in Cinema