Amazon.com is sponsoring a series of rather dull, boring short movies that then try and “make money” by advertising products seen in the short. They’ve got one up with Minnie Driver called “Portrait” in which the office fat girl – who’s seen eating in *every damn scene* – at a modeling agency gets her photo taken at a Glamour Shots type of place that says she’ll have her “inner beauty” revealed by the photographer.
At work, she’s looked down on by all the thin-bitch-women who’ve screamed their way to the top, and she’s always walking three steps behind everyone. She’s a sloppy dresser, hesitant, unnoticed, and flighty. Did I mention she’s eating ALL the time? Nobody seemed to realize that lots of overweight women actually don’t eat in front of people – yea, there are binge sessions at home, but most of them don’t consist of enough food to take up THE ENTIRETY OF THE COUCH AND COFFEE TABLE. And hello, jerk-offs, skinny people binge too: they either have happy metabolisms that slough it back out, or they vomit it up. Don’t throw your fat girl stereotypes at me.
So, after having her photo taken, our heroine wakes up the next morning, and ta-da!!
She’s thin.
Yes. That’s right. Her inner “goodness” has shone through and sloughed off all the fat that was hiding the “good” thin woman inside of her! Now, she goes to work wearing stylish clothes, tosses her hair a lot, flirts with guys at the watercooler, gets a better job, and becomes the envy of the thin-bitch-women.
Imagine me screaming in the background, “What the fuck is this???”
As someone who’s gone up and done the sliding size-scale from a 12-22 (since I was twelve years old – yea, that’s right I was a size 12 at 12, again at 16, again at 20, and likely will be again at 25 – see a pattern here?) and back again, once, twice, working on three times down the size loop again, I can tell you this: I’m the exact same person at a 22 as I am at a 12. I guess this must mean that I’m not a “good” person on the inside, as I’m not thin and blond, and really don’t have much desire to be.
I think what always offends me so much about thin actresses going around in fat drag is that the women who do it may have a deep, deep fear of being fat, but they’ve never *been* fat. They don’t realize that life goes on, that you’re the same person, that the world doesn’t end. For most actresses in Hollywood, and in the minds of some ridiculous amount of women, being fat is the absolute worst thing that can happen to them. How can you have people who think this giving us the popular media idea of fat women? How can you so blantantly tell people that “goodness” means being thin, and “badness” means being fat?
And how come fat girls have to dress like shit, and walk five steps behind everybody? Why can’t they laugh out loud and dress really great, and not be flighty and stupid? Why do they have to show fat women gorging themselves at work all the time?
These writers and directors and actors need to move the hell out of Hollywood and go write something from the real world.
