A recent piece from Gawker is certainly raising eyebrows in some circles. We already knew Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale” was going to provoke many reactions, just from the title alone.
In case you didn’t know, the film is about a 600-pound gay man who decides to eat himself to death. Gawker writer Olivia Craighead is pointing to certain red flags that might irk critics and audiences to no end.
I’m not a betting woman, but I would put a lot of money on this film — whether it’s good or not — sparking at least a month of nearly unreadable Twitter discourse about fatness, queerness, and religion.
Primarily, this specific representation of a fat person on screen. Charlie (Fraser) has gained weight following the death of his partner, a process that Hunter described to the Times as a “a long-form suicide.” On stage, the role is usually performed by a thin man in a fat suit, which is its own bag of worms. In this adaptation, Aronofsky has cast a relatively big guy in Fraser, but also put him in a fat suit. People are already mad about that.
What I don’t think people realize yet is that Fraser is also playing a queer man, which will probably spark another round of “Who gets to play queer characters?” discussion. I’m sure that will be awesome.
I get what Craighead is saying here, and I’m certainly not going to be one of the people offended by the “fat shaming” or “queer blind casting.” However, she does have a point, the Samuel D. Hunter stage play the film is based on was already the target of certain critics, receiving four different write-ups from the New York Slimes, err, Times.
This certainly is a provocative statement from Aronofsky, despite it, supposedly, being a chamber piece that takes place entirely inside an apartment. The fact that the main character is being played by Brendan Fraser is a positive, but all this talk about him wearing a 300 pound prosthetic fat-suit is … interesting.
I’ll be catching “The Whale” next weekend when it screens at the Toronto International Film Festival.