'The Whale', The Body, and Darren Aronofsky
Putting Aronofsky's new movie in context of his filmography.
[Spoilers ahead for The Whale]
At first blush, it seems fairly easy to dismiss Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, The Whale. Although audiences love Brendan Fraser and are eager to see his comeback after injuries and sexual abuse pushed him from the industry, they’re less comfortable with the character he’s portraying. Although Fraser is larger now than he was when he was the action hero of films like The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth, for The Whale he puts on a fat suit and prosthetics to play Charlie, a 600-pound man who has shut himself away from the world. Based on the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter (who also wrote the screenplay), we spend Charlie’s last week of life with him as he tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink).
If you look at The Whale in a vacuum, it’s a film that’s doing everything wrong with regards to how it treats fat people. Charlie is a grotesque figure who is basically trying to kill himself by eating terrible foods. He has the money to save himself, but lies to his friend and caretaker Liz (Hong Chau) by saying the costs of healthcare would bankrupt him. In truth, he’s funneled the money into a trust fund for Ellie so that she’ll be taken care of after he dies. Charlie has also grown to his current weight due to his depression over losing his partner, Allen (who was also Liz’s brother). Allen, raised in a religious household, couldn’t fully grapple with his sexuality and ultimately died by suicide. Charlie, having left Ellie and his wife Mary (Samantha Morton) eight years prior to be with Allen, is now trying to atone both by refusing to take care of himself and by leaving Ellie about a $100,000 as “one good thing” he can do before he dies.
The conversation about fat bodies is much different than it was in 2012 when the play was first performed, and Aronofsky clearly hasn’t paid much attention to that conversation. There’s simply not much nuance and care into how Aronofsky depicts Charlie, instead choosing to present a juxtaposition that he intends to reconcile at the film’s climax: Charlie is a gentle soul but his body and lifestyle are hard to look at and also emblematic of his tortured emotional state. Charlie’s body is “bad” because he feels bad and therefore fat bodies are “bad.” It’s only when you reach the end of the film that Charlie has transcended his body through grace and love.
But it’s here we have to hit pause and look at Aronofsky’s movies about bodies and transcendence.
The Fragile Form
A recurring theme in Aronofskys’ work is how people destroy themselves in pursuit of something they may never achieve. This is most clearly rendered when the horrific Requiem for a Dream (2000) where drugs ravage the bodies of the main characters who seek love but only find nightmarish addictions. Aronofsky eases off the gas a bit with the tender 2006 drama The Fountain (one of my all-time favorite movies), but it’s still a movie where the main character refuses to accept that bodies decay and die, and it’s not until he can not only understand but embrace that fact that he transcends the mournful sphere he’s contained himself to.
Where you really see Aronofsky’s thoughts on bodies is in his 2008 and 2010 features, The Wrestler and Black Swan, respectively. As I watched The Whale unfold, I kept asking myself, “Would Aronofsky ever treat a non-fat body with such morbid curiosity?” and the answer is, “He did! Twice!”
The Wrestler and Black Swan are both films about people whose art requires them to sacrifice their bodies. As outsiders, we see a wrestler or a ballerina as physically fit. But both films show how the artistic expression of both lead characters wears away at their bodies. What we would deem “healthy” is for the characters to stop doing the thing that defines them, but the characters realize that to stop would deprive their lives of meaning. They choose death and transcendence rather than resigning themselves to mundane longevity.
Aronofsky then explores the concept of finite bodies on a global scale set against biblical mythos with Noah (2014) and mother! (2017). In both cases, Aronofsky paints an apocalyptic picture of a world that’s arguably beyond saving due to man’s cruelty towards each other and the planet. The director is an atheist and a steadfast environmentalist, and in these movies he sees a world that is finite but speeding towards destruction due to our actions. From this collection of films, you see a director who doesn’t necessarily see death as something to be feared, but would also really prefer it if we didn’t kill the planet and each other. The religious and the decaying body come to occupy the same space in The Whale.
Transcendence without God
The religious aspects of The Whale exist almost as a B-plot. Exposition tells us about the religious sect that drove Allen to his death. We also meet Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young man claiming to be a missionary who believes that he’s crossed paths with Charlie as a way to save his soul. However, we come to learn that Thomas, disillusioned with the missionaries he was working with back home in Iowa, stole their petty cash and ran away to Idaho where he hoped he could do God’s work. However, when confronted with the complexities of Charlie’s situation and that Charlie doesn’t want religious saving, the tables turn when Thomas realizes his family back home has forgiven him yet he can’t show the save kind of forgiveness for Charlie’s homosexuality.
Considering Aronofsky’s atheism, it’s not surprising that he view Christianity as discriminatory, its practioners hypocritical, and its beliefs ultimately harmful to individuals who simply want to live in peace. Furthermore, as an atheist, Aronofsky believes that transcendence (i.e. an assent to a higher plane) isn’t reliant on scripture or belief in God. The religious aspects of The Whale almost feel like they exist so that Aronofsky can clarify to the audience, “Yes, I know my last two movies were based on the Bible, but I am not a religious man and here’s why.”
Instead, Aronofsky is focused more on the body and why Charlie’s physical form represents his inner torment and guilt but shouldn’t define him. And yet this is a case of Aronofsky trying to have it both ways. Whereas in The Wrestler and Black Swan, he’s juxtaposing physical pain against a seemingly pristine form (the audience for these kinds of performers don’t typically see the steroids or the broken bones or the cracked toenails), in The Whale he's playing into a popular conception to give it a facile reversal. Aronofsky wants us to be repulsed by Charlie’s body, to show how much Charlie hates his body, and that his disgust and hatred has forced him into a narrow redemptive arc where he can no longer grasp life beyond the boundaries he’s created. Charlie’s inevitable death is meant to be bittersweet—a senseless tragedy from someone who’s too depressed and self-loathing to make a different choice, and yet oddly beautiful in his determination to express his deep-felt love towards his daughter even if it kills him. In this way, Charlie is meant to resemble The Wrestler’s Randy (Mickey Rourke) and Black Swan’s Nina (Natalie Portman), as people who knowingly destroy their bodies as way to transcend the physical form through the love they feel (Randy and Nina in their love of their performance; Charlie in his love for Ellie).
But where this backfires is that Charlie’s body, unlike Randy and Nina, carries cultural connotations that the film can’t grapple with. The “twist” of The Wrestler and Black Swan is that you have bodies that are deemed beautiful but are actually falling apart. What Aronofsky wants the twist of The Whale to be is that you are disgusted by Charlie’s fat body, but as a person Charlie is empathetic, kind, loving, and complex. Aronofsky wants to indict the audience yet his camera seems to have little empathy for Charlie’s body either. The only difference is that Aronofsky assumes audiences will dismiss a fat person’s inner life and he has come to the rescue so that rather than rest on the idea that Charlie somehow “deserves” his fate, he has taken ownership of it as he embraces death knowing the bond between he and his daughter has been repaired. The journey The Whale seems to want to take us on is that we start out repulsed at Charlie and by the end we view him not as a creature but as a person. That’s a fairly low opinion of the audience.
What’s wild is that the film almost kind of gets away with it! Even setting aside some deeply clunky dialogue (perhaps these lines worked better on stage, but within the bounds of the film they clang around the room), the film sings because of Fraser. Aronofsky is no stranger to getting incredible performances from his actors (Rourke almost won Best Actor for The Wrestler, and Black Swan remains the best performance in Portman’s career to date), so I don’t want to write him out of the story. But I bristle when I hear adjectives like “brave” applied to Fraser’s performance because there’s nothing brave about wearing a fat suit or putting on prosthetics.
Fraser’s performance is incredible because of how he carries the role with quiet grace. The entire film turns on Charlie’s humanity and seeing a man who is choosing to suffer for what he believes are his sins. The deep well of empathy Fraser brings to the performance fully humanizes Charlie and forces the viewer to see him not as “a whale” but as someone fully deserving of our love and grace even though he cannot show those qualities to himself. Far more than Aronofsky’s direction or Hunter’s script, the movie works as well as it does because Fraser is a good actor who knows how to engender our sympathies while never playing to the rafters.
I don’t think The Whale is an evil movie or that Aronofsky is a callous filmmaker. I don’t think he sets out to be exploitative or feels like fat people are inherently broken (or any more broken than people of other body types). But the story he likes to tell about physical decay leading to emotional transcendence through accepting death doesn’t work when applied to fat people because it’s predicated on far too many stereotypes and pre-conceived notions about the inner lives of fat people based on their bodies.
With The Whale, Aronofsky is asking his audience to look inward about their preconceived notions. I would ask that he do the same.
Excellent piece, Matt