Larger Than Life
The last roll of fat had barely
stopped jiggling on the corpse
of ursine funnyman Chris Farley
– widely described, in a rare
burst of journalistic
objectivity and accuracy, as
"blubbery" and "sweaty"—when
the media pounced on the death
as a cautionary sequel: Wired 2
– Tommy Boy Clogs an Artery.
For the press, the two
"tragedies" had more ominous
parallels than any pair of
deaths since the Lincoln and
Kennedy assassinations: "Farley
died young, like his comic idol,
John Belushi," ran the typical
lead. Both were 33. Both died
from speedball-slamming or
Both came out of
the "famed Second City
comedy troupe" (a group whose
reputation seems remarkably
unconnected to the actual
performances of its alumni) and
Saturday Night Live (a show
whose reputation seems
remarkably unconnected to the
box-office performances of its
alumni). Both were
clowns. Both had film careers
that, despite some success, were
best described as degrading to
actor and audience alike. The
main point of comparison, of
course, was that both were
Weight Watchers washouts (as one
paper euphemized, "both had a
hearty appetite for food, drink
and drugs….").
But such facile comparisons
obscured a 42-ounce-sized steak
difference between Belushi and
Farley. A difference that forces
us to face a disturbing, barely
palatable truth about
pre-apocalyptic American
society. A truth as dark, rich,
and artery-clogging as a Godiva
soccer ball. The simple fact is
that compared to Farley (who
shuffled off his chafing,
cellulite-ridden mortal coil at
over 300 pounds), Belushi (the
undisputed fat-slob comic of his
day) practically looked like a
supermodel. Sure, Belushi lacked
washboard abs, but Farley needed
his own ZIP code.
This is all about rising
standards of corpulence, of
defining fatness upwards. While
our society seems content to
lower expectations with regard
to general civility, the SAT,
and the behavior of the Kennedy
clan, it has continued to raise
the bar, to push the envelope,
to bust the britches of what we
consider fat. Indeed, the
Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company, which publishes
standard weight-and-height
charts, has over the years
simply upped the allowable
poundage to accommodate a fatter
America.
As Farley's
bury-him-in-two-piano-cases
example suggests, this trend is
particularly apparent in the
entertainment world: Who would
you bet on in a game of Red
Rover between celebrated suets
of the past and their
contemporary counterparts? Team
up any three indisputably
fat-in-their-day characters –
say, the beloved, barrel-shaped
skipper of the S. S. Minnow;
gruff, husky newsman Lou Grant;
and beer-bellied gumshoe Frank
Cannon. Could all three combined
withstand an attack from any one
of a latter-day trilogy of
tallow consisting of, say,
Roseanne, John Candy, or John
Goodman (who, in playing Babe
Ruth a few years back, bore an
obovoid resemblance to
McDonaldland's Grimace whenever
he ran the bases)? And chew on
this: Only 20 years ago, the
Mary Tyler Moore Show could
believably pass off Mary's
anorexic attic pal Rhoda
Morgenstern as the fat one.
Of course, none of this is to
deny that there were true,
elephantine lard-asses in the
past: Who could forget
gargantuan songstress Mama Cass
Elliott, whose plurality of
chins belied a tragically petite
throat—one simply unable to
accommodate the architecture of
an unchewed ham sandwich? Or the
underwater shot of Shelley
Winters in The Poseidon
Adventure, where she thrashes in
the water like a rare West
Indian manatee? It's a fair bet
that Canned Heat's Al Wilson
could have held down his end on
a see-saw with Blues Traveler's
John Popper. But the trend is
indisputably onwards and
upwards: Whatever you could say
about, for example, Orson Welles
or Marlon Brando at any given
moment, this much is true: They
were even fatter the next year.
The mainstreaming of fatness –
according to 1996 data, about 75
percent of Americans exceed
their maximum recommended weight
– is due to an increase in
eating. As journalist Michael
Fumento, a self-admitted former
tub of goo, points out in Fat of
the Land: The Obesity Epidemic
and How Overweight Americans Can
Help Themselves, we are besieged
by an "attack of the giant
killer food." Portion sizes have
vastly increased over the past
decades. An original McDonald's
hamburger, writes Fumento,
weighed in at 3.7 ounces (bun
included); the Arch Deluxe tips
the scales at 9 ounces. Fumento,
like other scolds, is quick to
shift the debate to moral
grounds: "Gluttony and sloth
need to be demonized to the
extent that cigarettes have
been."
Such critiques—and such
solutions as "sin taxes" on
Twinkies, pork rinds, and other
fatty foods (proposed by Kelly
Brownell, director of Yale
University's Center for Eating
and Weight Disorders) –
exemplify what (admittedly
chubby) Cornell University
professor Richard Klein calls
the "shrill voice of skinny."
Indeed, despite Fumento's
suggestion that fat is where
it's at these days—that we've
accepted plumpness as an ideal
as easily as we slip on
relaxed-fit jeans, our ideals of
beauty still revolve around
virtually impossible thinness
achieved only by bulimic
supermodels and junkie rock
stars.
Hence, "thin dream" flicks like
The Nutty Professor and Thinner.
Or the fact that the video for
Sir Mix-A-Lot's paean to
ample-assed sweethearts was
populated exclusively by models
with buns of steel shaking their
shapely booties for the camera.
When a Latin-American drug
kingpin died last year after
attempting to change his
appearance via massive plastic
surgery and liposuction, it was
hard to shake the feeling that
the fat reduction measures were
done less out of necessity and
more out of vanity (even
all-powerful coke lords want to
look good in a tight pair of
pants). After 50 years, it's
still preferable to be the
98-pound weakling in Charles
Atlas's gamble-a-stamp comic
book ad than to be a
flop-breasted man on the beach
desperately hoping for
old-fashioned, full-body
swimsuits to make a comeback.
But critiques like Fumento's
also miss another, more crucial
point: Overconsumption doesn't
happen by accident; obesity is
not foisted on starving people.
As Klein writes in Eat Fat, "We
ought to consider that what is
actually happening might just
have some good reason to
happen." Indeed, quite possibly,
overconsumption is the American
dream—quite possibly, we have
always been a nation of fat
slobs trapped in skinny bodies.
The difference is that, now, we
can afford to pig out like
there's no tomorrow; the whole
world is an all-you-can-eat
buffet. The line between
Manifest Destiny and Wendy's
"Biggie" menu (cheerily pitched
by multiple-heart-attack
survivor Dave Thomas) is perhaps
shorter than we think. Like the
dog that licks its own balls, we
now chow down to excess not
necessarily for the flavor, but
simply because we can.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.