Fat on Film
Specifically, fat on television.
Tuesday night I’ll be giving a brief presentation on my term paper, which will discuss fat women (and the absence of fat women) on prime time television. Some of the characters and shows I’m focusing on include Sookie St. James Bellevile (Gilmore Girls), Isabelle Hodes and Heylia James (Weeds), and Callie (snerk) from Grey’s Anatomy. Why the snerk? As I’ve posted about before, I’ve read that Sara RamÃrez, the actress who plays Callie on the show, is actually only a size 10 or 12 - not plus-size by any means in most stores, and smaller than the average American 14 for a woman, but juxtaposed against the other extremely thin actresses, she looks plus-sized. I’ll also be looking at the top 10 ranked television shows of the season, and the absence of fat from those shows, and what that signifies.
I know I’m missing some fat women from television, but for the life of me I can’t find a comprehensive list anywhere. Who are your favorite fat chicks on TV? Who are your least favorite? I’m interested in shows that are still airing, mainly, but I’d love to hear about women from shows that have gone off-air as well.
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The criticisms of my students would serve as a good warning to visitors of Seeworthy: she talks too fast, she's too hard on us, she assigns too much work, and you have to be a dyke to get a good grade.
In other words, I'm a big, fat, queer, feminist meanie, and I am totally out to get you. Graaagh!
Ellenor on “The Practice.” I didn’t watch the show much, but I always liked her character and Camryn Manheim.
In TV past, there was Lesley Boone’s character on the late, not-lamented Ed, who was very three dimensional. I liked her. There was also Camryn Manheim’s character on The Practice, who was fairly insulated from the asexual fat woman thing (although she did date a couple of psychos, that had nothing to do with their fetishizing her or her body) and was always presented as an exceptional woman and attorney. There’s also the young actress that just did the 3 questions interview with Paul on BFB, whose name (and bonafides) I cannot recall/do not know.
In film (though she’s done TV) there’s Conchata Ferrell, who is a great actress but who has allowed herself to be degraded on film too often than I can stomach. (She’s the secretary who was told by Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich to “Bite me, Krispy Kreme.”) She shows the bad side of what it means to work as a fat actress. I love her as a person and as a performer, I hate what the roles she’s taken have meant. There’s also Rusty Schwimmer who has shown up here and there, but has mostly avoided being degraded due to her weight alone. (She was the put-upon sister of Miss Minchin in the remake of The Little Princess, amongst other roles.) I really like her.
On the downside, there’s Yvette Freeman, who played the nurse Haleh on ER, and received kudos on the show (though only in three or four lines in one episode) when she lost ~100 lbs. on OptiFast. She’s disappeared from the show, I don’t know if she was fired, if she quit, or if she chose to disappear herself when the weight came back.
There’s also Roseanne Barr Arnold Whatever, who has openly advocated WLS and called it a “cure” for the “disease” of obesity in the not so distant past. But! She was on one of the entertainment TV shows just yesterday admitting that she eats constantly, thinks of food constantly, and is gaining weight again and points out that obsession with food goes hand in hand with the surgery because you have to think about it so much in terms of eating frequently enough, eating proper amounts, getting vitamins, etc. She’s an interesting case.
I’m going to stop now.
I personally disliked Camryn Manheim, but as I said, it’s personal.
On thing for something that might really really annoy and bother people is the second (I think) episode of Smallville focused on a fat girl who ended up using kryptonite milkshakes to get thin. Then she ended up sucking the fat off of people or something. It was grotesque and horrid, and I stopped watching the show because of it.
*thinks* There’s some good commentary on Firefly about how they made Jewel Saite gain weight to play Kayleigh, not that she was fat by any means, but hearing Joss say he wanted a girl that looked like she enjoyed a good hamburger was nice.
Honestly, in my favorite shows I can’t think of anyone overweight, but I watch Science Fiction where it’s a little more out there about how they portray women anyway, you could do term papers on that. (Actually, I have done presentations on women in sci-fi and fantasy, but I digress).
I can think of bad examples aplenty. But I can’t think of any good ones, and how sad is that? My major problem has been and always will be that 90% of the time they say “Look, she’s good IN SPITE OF being fat!” instead of just, “Here’s a character, do you like her?”
But that’s going into a whole other ball game. Sorry I couldn’t be more help, normally this is where I’m really good and helpful!