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If rated PG. Hi, this is Willa.

0:31

Before we start, this episode contains some

0:33

adult language. In

0:41

the late 90s and early aunts, Katie Shepherd,

0:43

one of Dakota Ring's producers, was a teenager.

0:46

Specifically, I was a fat

0:48

teenager. Even more specifically,

0:51

a fat teenage

0:53

girl. Not that anyone used

0:55

the word fat to Katie's face. Don't

0:57

get me wrong. People could be mean.

1:00

I got the worst of it from my

1:02

grandmother, who'd purposefully buy me pants two sizes

1:05

too small. But most of

1:07

the time, people would just say things like,

1:09

I was a big girl. But

1:11

on TV and in the movies, well,

1:14

fat was another story. Some

1:16

girl ate Monica. There

1:18

was fat Monica on Friends. Shut up.

1:20

The camera adds 10 pounds. So

1:23

how many cameras are actually on you? There

1:26

was the horny, grotesque, fat bastard

1:29

in Austin Powers. Come here.

1:31

I'm gonna eat you. I'm

1:34

bigger than you. I'm hiring the

1:36

food chain. Get in my belly.

1:39

And there were all of the fat characters

1:41

Eddie Murphy played in the Nutty Professor movies.

1:43

You know where that come from? Watching

1:45

that damn TV. Every time you

1:47

turn it on, they got somebody in there talking about Lou's

1:49

way. Get healthy, get in shape. I

1:53

guess you could say these roles and

1:55

many others like them brought fatness to

1:57

the forefront. But from Courtney Cox

1:59

to Mike Myers to Eddie Murphy,

2:01

the people playing these roles weren't

2:04

fat themselves. I wasn't

2:06

really watching fatness on screen. I

2:09

was watching the puppet version of fatness.

2:11

I was watching the fat suit. I

2:14

don't know why everybody trying to lose weight in the first

2:16

place. Ain't nobody supposed to be the same, sir. We're supposed

2:18

to be all different. I

2:21

see more fat actors on screen today than when

2:23

I was a teenager. But

2:25

there are still a lot of fat

2:27

suits. And so just like when

2:29

I was a teenager, I find myself

2:32

wondering, what's the deal with

2:34

all the fake fat people? This

2:44

is Dakota Ring. I'm Katie Shepherd.

2:47

A fat suit is a custom-made costume

2:50

with one goal, to make an

2:52

actor appear fat without them actually having

2:54

to be fat. It's typically

2:56

a unitard filled with foam and other

2:59

wiggly jiggly bits. But

3:01

it's also so much more than that,

3:03

an embodiment of all of our cultural

3:05

hang-ups about fatness. In

3:07

today's episode, we're going to consider the fat

3:10

suit from all angles. How it's

3:12

made, how it's changed, and why it

3:14

continues to exist. So

3:16

today on Dakota Ring, why

3:19

can't we ditch the fat suit? Thank

3:39

you for listening to Dakota Ring, Slate's

3:41

podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. You

3:44

can hear new stories ad-free every week on

3:46

Amazon Music, where you can find Dakota Ring

3:48

and all your Slate favorites without the ads.

3:56

I've spent an unfortunate amount of time in the

4:00

my life being shown ways to

4:02

lose fat from workouts to meal

4:04

plans to supplements. But Don

4:06

Dininger teaches a class on how to put on

4:08

fat. So I put the belly. I

4:11

just kind of held it up to the body form. Kind

4:15

of drew a circle real fast and

4:17

then made it nice and

4:19

symmetrical once I got it down. This is her

4:21

class from the Stan Winston School on how to

4:23

make a fat suit. And if you don't cut

4:26

something out right the first time, you can just

4:28

always keep adding to it. That's

4:30

the nice thing. You can glue it together. Don

4:32

has helped build creatures for projects like the

4:34

Shape of Water and the Mandalorian. But

4:37

she's also worked on several fat suits.

4:39

She explained to me there are a number

4:42

of specialists involved in making even just one.

4:44

The people who ran the silicone, the people

4:47

who made the mold, the people who sculpt

4:49

it, the people who paint it, the fabricators,

4:51

like it is a whole village it takes

4:53

to make a suit. It's kind

4:55

of crazy. Don's a fabricator

4:57

herself. She's the person who

5:00

makes the bodysuit element of a costume. She

5:02

told me her first suit was for Kenan

5:04

Thompson in Fat Albert. He's

5:07

not a Finn guy, but he wasn't big enough

5:09

to be Fat Albert. Hey, hey,

5:11

hey, it's Fat

5:13

Albert. Every fat

5:15

suit is built on a base

5:17

layer, an undersuit that fits the

5:19

actor. And that's almost like a

5:21

spandex unitard. And then I

5:24

have to cut out all these muscles.

5:26

But then sometimes you need something to

5:28

like have a little movement. So like

5:30

Fat Albert's belly. So

5:38

then you'll have different types of little

5:40

pellets. You might make

5:42

in like almost like a moon-shaped

5:44

spandex bag. Styrofoam pellets

5:46

and spandex are just some of the

5:49

materials used on the suit. They

5:51

use batting, which is what they use in

5:53

quilts. And we have like mattress

5:56

foam. I happen to have

5:58

mattress foam here because I was making some cushions. And

6:00

so you just cut your shapes out of here.

6:04

It's wild to me that the fat suit

6:06

is basically the same cushion that I put

6:08

my butt on to eat dinner with. Yeah.

6:10

Everything changes all the time too. Like the

6:12

material is like, oh, this is better now

6:14

than this. Everything's always

6:16

evolving and every job is different.

6:21

The fat suit we see on screen is

6:23

an intricate and complex piece of modern equipment,

6:25

but one that avails itself of everyday

6:27

materials. And that's something, it

6:29

turns out, the fat suit has been doing

6:32

for hundreds of years. But it wouldn't

6:34

have been called that. Royce Best is

6:36

a lecturer at the National Technical Institute

6:38

for the Deaf who researches disability

6:40

in the work of William Shakespeare.

6:43

Usually the word that was used was bombast. It's

6:46

used in elites and noble fashion

6:48

in the 16th and 17th centuries

6:51

in England. You know, sometimes

6:53

you'll see like a, kind of like

6:55

a skirt piece that's stuffed with cotton

6:57

and sawdust and what was called at

6:59

the time bombast. Royce

7:01

believes bombast would have been

7:03

worn by actors playing Shakespeare's most

7:06

famous explicitly fat character, the

7:08

Mary Vane Knight, Sir John Falstaff,

7:11

played here by Orson Welles. A

7:13

goodly poorly manifested in the corpulence

7:16

of a cheerful look, a pleasing

7:18

eye and a most noble carriage.

7:21

So many of the jokes at Falstaff's

7:23

expense have to do with bombast.

7:26

There's lots of references to Falstaff

7:28

being made of nothing but

7:30

bombast. If you break his body apart, there's

7:33

nothing else there. Falstaff's

7:35

fatness is a kind of visual

7:37

metaphor, all tied up with

7:39

his vitality, his desires, his excess, qualities

7:42

that make him the comic relief, a

7:44

character you laugh with and at. In

7:48

the centuries that followed, fat characters

7:50

continued to occupy this ambiguous space.

7:53

Audiences were encouraged to mock them and

7:55

enjoy them. Sometimes fatness

7:57

was even seen as admirable, a

7:59

sign of wealth and power and plenty. Really

8:03

that started to change by the end of the

8:05

19th century. Fatness really

8:07

starts to be denigrated. Amy

8:09

Farrell is a professor at Dickinson College and

8:11

the author of the book Fat Shame. She

8:13

says the shift came when bogus race science

8:16

began to take hold in the 1800s. And

8:19

with that came new attitudes about

8:21

what a so-called superior human looked

8:23

like. Fatness became

8:25

a marker of an inferior

8:28

body, of one that was out

8:30

of control, one that was less civilized.

8:33

And it was really connected to

8:35

race as well. So the dark

8:38

skin was connected inferior to the

8:40

white skin. But body size

8:42

was as well. Thinness was the sign

8:44

that you had control over your body.

8:47

And by having control over your body, your

8:49

mind could flourish. Amy

8:51

found that when thinness started to be thought of as

8:53

a virtue unto itself, fatness became

8:55

a failing. And you can

8:58

already see that in magazines from the

9:00

19th century, which were filled with cartoons

9:02

mocking fat people. Not just as

9:04

being this kind of butt of a joke because

9:06

they broke a chair or did something like that,

9:08

but actually as being

9:10

represented as being incapable of functioning

9:13

in a modern world. In

9:15

the 20th century, these jokes burst

9:17

on the movie screens. There's

9:20

a short silent movie from 1905 called, Eri

9:23

Fairy Lillian tries on her new corset. And

9:26

it's exactly what it sounds like. A

9:28

fat woman tries to put on her corset and she can't

9:30

do it. She gets a man to

9:32

help her who collapses from the effort. So

9:35

from the beginning, the fat joke

9:37

was built into Hollywood's sensibility. But

9:40

Eri Fairy Lillian seems to have been played

9:43

by an actual fat person. Stars

9:45

like Oliver Hardy and Fatty Arbuckle

9:47

were actually fat too. So

9:49

how then did we get from them to

9:52

fat bastard? Well,

10:02

that's thanks to the magic of

10:04

prosthetic makeup. It's alive! It's

10:06

alive! It's alive! It's

10:09

alive! It's alive! By

10:12

the 1930s, makeup artists devised

10:14

ingenious ways to craft terrifying

10:16

creatures like Frankenstein by applying

10:18

cotton and collodion of liquid

10:20

plastic to an actor's face.

10:23

And they quickly realized the techniques could

10:25

be used for more than monsters.

10:27

Ross bird. When

10:30

25-year-old Orson Welles was making Citizen Kane,

10:32

he needed his character to grow old

10:34

over the course of the movie. So

10:36

he turned to a makeup artist who made a cast of his

10:39

head. These casts allowed artists

10:41

to create prosthetics, saving hours in

10:43

the makeup care. But

10:45

in the 1960s, when a much older

10:47

Orson Welles played Shakespeare's Falstaff, like

10:49

you heard earlier, and had to

10:51

play a fat person, he was

10:53

still just putting on what amounted

10:55

to, basically, bombast, as he explained

10:58

on the Dean Martin show. This

11:00

is padding. It's always gratifying

11:02

to have to put on a few phony

11:05

pounds for us chubby,

11:08

Phagidians. By

11:11

the 1970s and 80s, though, special

11:13

effects techniques in makeup got more advanced

11:15

in a hurry, thanks to movies

11:17

like The Exorcist and An American Werewolf in

11:19

London. In the years

11:21

that followed, makeup artists realized the

11:24

same skills used to turn actors

11:26

into werewolves and demonically possess children

11:28

could also make them look fat.

11:31

They honed those skills until the fat suit

11:33

became a work of art. Hello!

11:36

Ah! Oh,

11:38

I'm sorry to frighten you. You're I must

11:40

look like a Yeti in this get-up. In

11:43

1994, Mrs. Doubtfire won an

11:46

Oscar for Best Makeup. In the

11:48

film, Robin Williams' character transforms into

11:50

a frumpy, older British nanny by

11:52

using, in part, a fat suit.

11:55

And that fat suit is not hidden or

11:58

secret or unmentioned. the

12:00

plot, right out in the open. Before

12:03

this, fat suits had been used for

12:05

sketches and scenes, but Mrs. Doubtfire ushered

12:07

in an age when entire films were

12:10

built around fat suits. An

12:12

era I can only describe as

12:14

the fat suit boom. This

12:17

was when I was a teenager and fat suits

12:19

seemed to be everywhere. And

12:22

I mean everywhere. In

12:26

addition to all the examples I've already

12:28

mentioned, there was Martin Lawrence in Big

12:30

Mama's House, another movie where a man dresses

12:32

as a fat woman for laughs. Oh, so Granny

12:34

thinks she got gay? Oh yes, I got gay.

12:37

You're too fat to be balling. Say what? There

12:39

was Martin Short's host persona, Jiminy Glick. Are

12:42

you saying that you never went

12:44

to a period where you sweated too much or you were 300

12:46

pounds overweight? And then there

12:49

was Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal, a

12:51

fat girl convinced she'll never find love.

12:53

Can I get a double pizza burger, chili fries

12:55

with cheese, and a large chocolate

12:58

milkshake? These

13:00

fat suits and plenty more besides were

13:02

made possible by advances in makeup. But

13:05

the real engine of this trend? It's

13:08

how we felt about fatness itself, which

13:11

was, you know, complicated.

13:15

More on that when we come back. When

13:31

it comes to your finances, go for the credit card

13:33

that's always there for you. With

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with Discover. Limitations apply. See

13:59

terms at Discover. This

14:05

episode is brought to you by Fail

14:07

Better, David Duchovny's new podcast with Lemonado

14:10

Media. On Fail Better,

14:12

David, who's experienced both low and

14:14

high-profile failures throughout his life, explores

14:16

the vast world of failure, how

14:18

it holds us back, propels us

14:20

forward, and ultimately shapes our lives. Each

14:23

week, he'll chat with guests like Ben

14:25

Stiller, Bette Midler, and more about how

14:27

our perceived failures have actually been our

14:29

biggest catalyst for growth, revelation, and even

14:31

healing. Through these conversations, he

14:33

hopes listeners can learn how to embrace the

14:36

opportunity of failure as Fail

14:38

Better together. Fail Better

14:41

is out now wherever you get your

14:43

podcasts. Starting

14:51

in the mid-1990s and extending into the

14:53

aughts, when the comedic fat suit seemed

14:56

totally inescapable, fatness was

14:58

also all over the news. As

15:01

we go into the next millennium,

15:03

undoubtedly obesity will become the number

15:05

one major health problem. In

15:08

1997, the World Health Organization

15:10

introduced the term obesity epidemic.

15:13

Obesity is a health issue. It's not

15:16

a cosmetic issue. It's clearly related to

15:18

heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes.

15:20

So it's of course of great concern

15:22

to public health officials. The

15:24

term epidemic has never made much

15:26

sense to me here because you

15:28

can't like, catch fatness. But fear

15:31

of fatness swelled. Much of

15:33

the coverage tried to position itself as helpful but

15:35

in the way of here's what you need to

15:37

know to avoid this horrible

15:39

unhealthy fate. I would

15:41

have spent way too much time being fat. I would

15:44

go up and down and up and down.

15:46

Look at me. I lost over 50 pounds

15:48

on this one fat plan. It was a

15:50

really fraught moment. Hazel

15:52

Sills is an editor for NPR

15:54

who has written about fat suits

15:56

for Jezebel. Maybe fraud is too light

15:58

of a word. It was a really traumatizing time

16:00

to be anyone growing up in

16:03

that culture, but especially like a

16:05

young woman who's like constantly fielding

16:07

a singular idea of

16:09

what it means to be a beautiful

16:11

woman in America. You only have

16:13

to look around to see what the

16:16

idea was. If you turned on like

16:18

One Tree Hill, if you turned

16:21

on like the OC, if you

16:23

opened up any tabloid magazine or

16:25

like turned on MTV, you would

16:27

see extremely skinny people.

16:31

Personally, I was fixated

16:33

on Britney Spears' abs. For

16:37

rock solid, perfect abs.

16:40

Abs I didn't have. I

16:47

wrote over and over in my journal how I'd

16:49

give anything to look as good as her in

16:51

a crop top and low rise jeans. I

16:53

asked Hazel if she shared my Britney Spears'

16:55

ab envy. Wait, it's so funny

16:58

that you say this because I

17:00

had a Britney Spears doll and

17:02

if you pressed her belly

17:05

button, she's saying, which

17:07

is messed up. Culture

17:11

was communicating its strong preference for

17:14

thinness. And if that meant paying

17:16

more attention than ever to fat people, it

17:18

was mostly to be totally freaked out

17:20

about and disgusted by our existence.

17:23

And this kind of raging ambivalence, it's

17:27

actually kind of good material or

17:29

at least any Murphy thought so. Going

17:32

into it, I knew that the movie was going to

17:34

be a drag physically.

17:36

I knew that I was going

17:38

to be five hours in makeup

17:40

every day and a really uncomfortable

17:44

40 pound, 50 pound fat suit sweating all

17:46

day. This is Murphy talking about

17:48

his 1996 film, The Nutty Professor. This

17:55

movie was a remake of the original Nutty Professor

17:57

from 1963, which was written,

18:00

directed by, and starred Jerry Lewis.

18:03

The brilliant thing that Jerry did with

18:05

Nutty Professor was to realize

18:07

the comic possibilities and the whole Jacqueline

18:09

Hyde thing. And then said, now

18:11

let's take those brilliant things that Lewis already did and

18:13

put a contemporary spin on it. In

18:15

the original, Lewis plays a nerdy professor

18:18

who creates a potion to transform himself

18:20

into a suave charmer. The

18:22

remake, however, has one key difference. Murphy

18:25

plays a nerdy fat professor who

18:27

creates a potion to transform himself

18:30

into a thin suave charmer. That

18:33

was the contemporary spin. And

18:35

in the 90s, people are obsessed with

18:37

looking a certain way and having

18:39

a certain body. One

18:42

of every three people is out

18:44

of shape in this country, trying to

18:46

get in shape. Everybody wants to look

18:48

like a model. Murphy

18:51

is connecting the dots. He's

18:53

saying anxiety about being fat was

18:56

so culturally omnipresent that he could

18:58

make it funny. If

19:00

you're going to eat nasty stuff like

19:03

this, you realize that there's a gene

19:05

in your DNA that wraps this straight to

19:07

your fat cells because of all sorts of

19:09

unsightly conditions. Case in point, this woman is

19:12

suffering from what I like to call jello

19:14

arms. You notice the arm is taking on

19:16

a gelatin sort of vibe and it's quite

19:18

nasty. We were anxious

19:20

and freaked out and judgmental and

19:23

sneering about fatness. And

19:26

what's one way to deal with what you're

19:28

totally conflicted about? Laugh

19:30

at it. Looking

19:36

at it this way, the fat suit

19:38

trend seems to have almost a simple

19:41

explanation. But I remember

19:43

how I felt being in the room

19:45

when people were laughing at fat suit

19:47

movies like The Nutty Professor and that

19:49

wasn't simple. I think I

19:51

smiled at some of the jokes. I didn't want to

19:54

ruin the fun or call attention to myself. It

19:56

was also the closest I could get to observing

19:59

what everyone really thought. thought about fatness

20:01

and figuring out how I felt. There

20:04

is a sort of a paradox at work

20:06

here because the overweight characters were

20:08

themselves the center of the narrative. So

20:11

they, you know, they were the protagonists.

20:13

Mia Mask is a professor of film

20:15

at Vassar College. But the films were

20:18

really poking fun at the

20:21

overweight characters and so the

20:23

films were deeply contradictory in

20:26

terms of the messages that they

20:29

conveyed about what it means

20:31

to be overweight, the social acceptance

20:33

or lack thereof, that overweight people

20:36

experience. And

20:38

these contradictory messages were

20:41

emerging at a time when there

20:43

were a lot of other contradictory themes sort

20:45

of in the society at large. I'm

20:48

not saying that all this was flashing through

20:51

my mind as a teenager, but

20:53

an inarticulate version of it was. On

20:56

the one hand, these were stories about

20:59

fat people as main characters that I

21:01

could see. And that

21:03

was something. But these

21:05

movies, they weren't thoughtful about fat

21:07

people or the experience of being fat.

21:10

And they didn't even start real fat people.

21:14

There were a few outliers, typically

21:16

fat men, who were also usually

21:18

in comedies. I'm thinking of

21:20

actors like Chris Farley, always on the

21:22

edge of being out of control, making the joke and

21:24

letting himself be the butt of the joke at the

21:26

same time. But

21:36

Farley was an exception to the role. Most

21:38

people letting themselves be the butt of the joke had

21:41

no skin in the game. They

21:43

were in fat drag. And as

21:45

Mia Mask noted, there were often specifically

21:47

black men in drag as fat black

21:49

women. This trend of Eddie Murphy,

21:51

Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry, to

21:54

name a few who had starring

21:56

roles in fat suit comedies. I

21:59

mean, obviously, this film. are meant

22:01

to be entertaining and

22:03

enjoyable and funny. But

22:06

what we find funny, you

22:08

know, is often also reveals

22:10

a lot about the culture,

22:12

a lot about our anxieties,

22:14

our fears, tensions in

22:16

the society and what we value,

22:19

what we don't value, what

22:22

we despise. All these

22:24

movies highlight that we have an issue

22:26

with fatness, especially with fat

22:28

women. And that issue hasn't just

22:30

been made clear to the people who

22:32

watch movies, but to the people

22:34

who make them. Histories of

22:37

Hollywood are full of stories of

22:39

actresses forced by the studios to lose weight

22:41

or lose their jobs. This

22:44

pressure was really brought home to me by

22:46

an anecdote I heard from the Oscar-winning makeup

22:48

artist Matthew Mungal. I'd look back on

22:50

my career and I look at the

22:52

dates here of the fat suits and

22:55

all at once there's a

22:57

trend for fat suits. Matthew

23:00

ended up making a ton of fat suits

23:02

for TV shows like How I Met Your

23:04

Mother, New Girl, and Desperate Housewives. And

23:07

he told me about an experience he

23:09

had in the 90s, working on a

23:11

made-for-TV biopic about Elizabeth Taylor. Early

23:14

in her career, Taylor was considered the most

23:16

beautiful woman in the world. When

23:18

she gained weight, she endured public ridicule. So

23:20

the actress playing Taylor had to wear a

23:22

fat suit for part of the filming. And

23:25

Matthew remembers what happened after she put

23:27

on her costume and makeup. She

23:29

was sitting in front of the mirror

23:33

and she just started bawling.

23:36

She didn't want to

23:38

see herself that way, fat. So

23:41

from then on, we couldn't have a

23:43

mirror around. She couldn't see herself. She

23:46

just had to rely on us to

23:49

make her look good

23:52

as a fat person. And

23:54

to an actress especially

23:56

who's always looking good,

23:58

that's... a traumatic

24:01

experience. My

24:04

first reaction to this story and others like

24:07

it is that I really understand the pressure

24:09

to be thin. A pressure

24:11

that in Hollywood is likely higher than

24:13

just about anywhere else. I

24:16

can also think of plenty of times I've

24:18

stood in front of the mirror and hated

24:20

everything about myself. But

24:22

also, give me a

24:25

break. Fat is not the

24:27

worst thing a person can be. And

24:29

at the end of the day, these actors

24:31

can just take the fat suit off. Hazel

24:34

stills again. I think the thing that happens is

24:37

when so much media

24:39

attention and emphasis is put on the prosthetics

24:41

and the fat suits that are being used

24:43

in these roles. What it really

24:45

does is it just like immensely highlights the fact

24:47

that this person doesn't look like this in real

24:50

life or that their body doesn't look like this

24:52

in real life. Our

24:54

culture is obsessed with this idea that

24:56

inside every fat person is a thin

24:58

person trying to get out. And

25:01

the fat suit emphasizes this. But

25:04

just because that's how it is doesn't mean that's

25:06

how it has to stay. When

25:09

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25:11

positivity arrives and shifts the whole culture's

25:14

attitudes towards fatness and changes

25:16

the fat suit yet again. This

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Prices vary based on how you buy. As

28:19

the 2000s became the 2010s, the

28:21

obsession with weight did not falter,

28:24

but it did start to change. And

28:26

you could see that in commercials. Re-touching?

28:30

Never. We're all perfectly

28:32

imperfect. Body positivity? Always

28:35

and forever. That

28:37

suddenly became a word that wasn't whispered behind

28:39

my back or used to put me down.

28:41

It wasn't something to

28:43

be ashamed of. It

28:45

was meant to be reclaimed, accepted, even

28:48

celebrated. To be honest, it

28:51

all gave me whiplash. I'd

28:54

rarely seen a body like mine depicted

28:56

in a positive light. And now I

28:58

was supposed to feel totally fine about

29:00

myself. And besides,

29:03

the corporate version of body

29:05

positivity didn't necessarily seem to

29:07

be coming from some enlightened place.

29:10

Americans had gotten larger. Now

29:12

companies could turn a profit off the

29:14

same people they'd excluded. They

29:17

were pandering. We spend

29:19

a lot of time as women analyzing

29:21

and trying to fix the things that

29:23

aren't quite right. And we should spend

29:25

more time appreciating the things that we

29:27

do like. On

29:29

the upside though, now most stores had pants that

29:32

fit me. This

29:34

new stance towards fatness inevitably had some

29:37

bearing on the fat suit, according

29:39

to the makeup artist Matthew Mungle. If

29:41

I had somebody say, you know,

29:44

let's do a fat suit, I'd say,

29:46

well, let's think about this

29:48

for a little bit. Why are you doing this?

29:51

Online a debate about the fat suit

29:53

began to rage. Some accused

29:55

fat suits of keeping people with different body

29:57

sizes out of work. Some

30:00

people defend the fat suit as just a

30:02

tool to allow actors to do their job.

30:05

Others argue that if actors want to play

30:07

fat roles, they should just gain weight. Amidst

30:11

all these opinions, filmmakers have to

30:13

be much more careful about using the fat suit

30:15

now. I think the

30:18

producers and the studios have

30:20

to analyze a project so much

30:22

to say, how much backlash are

30:25

we going to get with this

30:27

project? And this concern

30:29

has had consequences. Actors like

30:31

Gwyneth Paltrow have expressed regret for wearing a

30:33

fat suit, while fat suit jokes

30:36

that do still come out are often more

30:38

self-aware, like when the character Michael Scott wore

30:40

one in the office. Now I

30:42

know a lot of you are probably asking yourself, why

30:45

are you dressed in a plus-sized suit?

30:47

Because you're kind of doing Michael Klump. How

30:50

do you know Michael Klump? Because it's your making

30:52

fun of fat people character. How dare you? Michael

30:55

Klump is a celebration of

30:57

fat people. I think of him as more like

30:59

a monster. But mostly what's

31:01

happened is that fat suits have moved

31:03

from comedies into dramas.

31:06

That means famous actors wearing prosthetics to

31:08

look more like real people from history.

31:11

Think of Christian Bale as Dick Cheney,

31:14

Viola Davis as Ma Rainey, or Tom

31:16

Hanks as Elvis' manager, Colonel Tom

31:18

Parker. Without me,

31:20

there would be no Elvis

31:23

Presley. But there's one recent

31:25

example where the extra weight can't be excused by

31:27

the need for so-called historical

31:29

accuracy. I'm talking about

31:31

The Whale, a movie about a

31:34

600-pound man played by Brendan Fraser. If

31:36

you don't graduate, then... Are you actually trying to parent me

31:38

right now? No,

31:40

I'm sorry. I just

31:42

thought that maybe we could spend some time with each other. I'm

31:45

not spending time with you. You're

31:47

disgusting. You'd be disgusting even if

31:49

you weren't this fat. I

31:52

remember first hearing about The Whale. I

31:54

thought, finally, some art about the emotional

31:56

complexity of binge eating, which I'd never

31:58

really seen to pay. But

32:01

then I saw the whale, and

32:03

I saw a costume packed with the

32:05

same stereotypes and bias I always see

32:07

attributed to fat people, pathetic

32:09

and disgusting and depressed. But

32:12

Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for his

32:14

performance. I was baffled by

32:16

all the accolades the whale got. It

32:19

seemed like fatness had become a way

32:21

for serious actors to show off their chops,

32:24

to take on a part heralded as brave. Like

32:27

it's so hard and miserable to

32:30

be like me and millions of other

32:32

people living full whole lives despite

32:34

not being thin. It

32:37

seems like fatness had moved from being

32:39

something we should laugh at to a

32:41

very special issue. And

32:43

somehow, famous actors taking on these

32:45

roles were still understood as the

32:47

real actors, while fat

32:49

actors are seen as just, well, fat

32:52

actors. We all

32:55

recognize that it's problematic in some ways

32:57

to have an Al Pacino playing a

32:59

blind character or a Dustin Hoffman playing,

33:02

you know, an autistic character. Film

33:04

professor Mia Mask. So after

33:06

we've given a person that award and

33:08

said, wow, you did a great job

33:11

playing somebody who was blind or autistic,

33:13

right, we recognize, well, why didn't we employ somebody

33:15

who was actually blind or autistic to play

33:17

those roles? There

33:20

are talented people who are fat who could play

33:22

fat characters. We're well aware

33:24

of this with actors like Kathy Bates, John

33:26

Goodman, Melissa McCarthy, Philip Seymour Hoffman,

33:29

Dave Vine Joy Randolph. But

33:32

for all the lip service to body inclusivity, it's

33:35

still incredibly rare to see fat people

33:37

making it in Hollywood. Like

33:39

the issue was a really very simple

33:42

but problematic issue of the

33:44

lack of access to opportunity,

33:47

right? And as long as the long as that exists, you're

33:49

going to need a fat suit. You're

33:51

going to think they need to brown up,

33:53

yellow up, black up, fat up. But

33:56

if you create access to opportunity for folks,

33:58

that will go away. And

34:02

if this were to ever happen, I think

34:04

something else would change too. The

34:06

characters. These fat

34:08

suit parts are often so shallow.

34:13

They imagine the only thing at the center of

34:15

a fat person's life is their

34:17

fatness. Instead of that just

34:19

being one facet. And so if

34:21

real fat people were given many of these fat

34:23

suit roles, they would alter them. I

34:27

think they would make them more than fat suit roles.

34:30

Because how could they not? What

34:32

if that person want to be fat bastard? Would

34:35

they want to be fat Monica? Would

34:38

they want to be the guy in the whale? If

34:41

fat people were asked to play these roles, typically

34:43

handed over to the fat suit, wouldn't

34:46

they have to be different roles? Change,

34:50

deepen, less the meanings? Starting

34:55

on this episode, I found myself accepting that

34:57

the fat suit will never be just

34:59

what it is. Mattress foam,

35:02

makeup, and nowadays CGI.

35:05

There may be nothing inherently horrible about

35:07

the materials that go into the fat

35:09

suit, but there is all the

35:11

stuff we pile onto the fat suit. Which

35:14

is all the stuff we pile onto fat

35:16

people. All the ways we make

35:18

them a prop. A punchline. A

35:21

problem in their own lives. It

35:25

all made me think a lot about my 15 year old self.

35:28

Watching Courtney Cox and Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat

35:30

suit. Hearing about obesity every

35:32

time I turned on the TV. Longing

35:35

for Britney Spears abs. I

35:38

doubt that the fat suit will go away anytime

35:40

soon. I just hope the next

35:42

round of teenagers feel empowered to see it for

35:44

what it is. A

35:46

projection. And decide for

35:48

themselves what fatness means to them. Thank

35:55

you. This

36:03

is Decoder Ring. I'm Katie Shepherd. And

36:06

I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any

36:08

cultural mysteries you want us to decode,

36:10

please email us at decoderring at slate.com.

36:13

This episode was written and produced by Katie

36:15

Shepherd. It was edited by me. We produced

36:17

a coder ring with Evan Chung and Max

36:19

Friedman. Derek John is executive producer.

36:22

Merit Jacob is senior technical director, and

36:24

we had mixing help from Kevin Bendis.

36:27

Little thank you to Mike Marino, Jackie

36:29

Lucy, Gina Tonic, Kate Young, Barbara Miller,

36:31

and the Museum of the Moving Image.

36:34

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our

36:36

feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your

36:39

podcasts. And even better, tell

36:41

your friends. And if you're a fan of the

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show, I'd also love for you to sign

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36:56

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