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280 33 Seeing Through the Layers Fat Suits and Thin Bodies in The Nutty Professor and Shallow Hal Katharina R. Mendoza In November 2001, audiences flocked to theaters to see actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s famously thin figure encased in a latex and foam fat costume in the romantic comedy Shallow Hal. Once novel, the fat suit is now just a regular part of the U.S. entertainment industry’s repertoire of special effects. Calling this phenomenon the “new minstrel show,” Bitch magazine writer Marisa Meltzer observes, “Fat people are now America’s favorite celluloid punchlines” (2002, p. 19). The steadily growing list of film and television actors who have suited up in fake fat stretches from “Weird Al” Yankovic parodying Michael Jackson in the music video for “Fat” (1988) to John Travolta’s sadly un-Divine Edna Turnblad in Hairspray (2007); from Courtney Cox in Friends (1995) to the entire cast of the sitcom My Wife and Kids (2001). Hollywood’s preoccupation with creating fat bodies for the big screen seems incongruous in a cultural climate that values thinness and feeds a billion-dollar weight loss industry. Drawing on drag, camp, and blackface, LeBesco has theorized the disruptive potential of fat suit performances. Just as drag can denaturalize essentialist gender identities, “the power and possibility of fat drag, it seems, comes in denaturalizing the thin ‘original’ body of the actor” (2005, p. 233). As yet this disruptive potential remains largely unrealized, and LeBesco, like other critics, finds that “whatever critical consciousness might emerge in the form of a ‘size prejudice is bad’ vibe of a Shallow Hal or The Nutty Professor ultimately finds itself sacrificed for cheap laughs at the expense of fat people” (2005, p. 237). Obviously there is more to the fat suit phenomenon than simply making mock, and so I extend reading fat suit performances to the narrative arcs that contain them, which I find undermine that potential critical consciousness in ways more insidious than cheap fat jokes. As cultural objects that create a visibility for transgressive bodies that only seems anomalous, fat suits in film are demonstrative and constitutive of normative discourses on fatness and weight loss. This is particularly evident in the films Shallow Hal and Eddie Murphy’s 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor, which I have singled out not because they use fat suits, but because they are movies that use fat suits to tell stories. Both films feature Seeing Through the Layers 281 protagonists who are fat in their diegetic worlds; therefore “disguise” narratives, like Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma movies (2000, 2006), or even films like Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), where the fat suit is used to enhance Perry’s black matriarch drag, are outside the scope of this analysis. Meltzer (2002) points out that in many fat suit films the simple fact of a character’s size passes for comedy— though I must point out that, on occasion, a film does require more, such as when The Nutty Professor’s Klump family members perform great feats of flatulence. But any discussion about the role of fatness in contemporary American culture is also a discussion about weight loss. By looking at how the fat suit is deployed in the service of a narrative—and not just to make a fat joke—we can see how such films are just the latest manifestations of the “inside every fat person is a thin person” trope so often found in weight loss discourse. As in countless diet and exercise product advertisements featuring “before” and “after” photos, in most fat suit films the fat body does not appear by itself: its presence is always contingent on and shaped by the presence of its corresponding thin body. The fat suit enables a disorienting representation of a single character who either simultaneously inhabits two bodies at opposite ends of the size spectrum, as in Shallow Hal, or instantaneously morphs from one body into the other and then back again, as in The Nutty Professor. These coexistent bodies are presented as having an unequal relationship with each other in which the thin body, not surprisingly, dominates . These two films can be considered unusual in that they both feature fat romantic leads whose happy endings do not ultimately depend on makeovers or diets, as do so many “ugly duckling” narratives. This does not, however, prevent Shallow Hal and The Nutty Professor from enacting fantasies of weight loss: instantaneous and effortless in the former...

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