National Post (National Edition)
Why a woman’s body of work in film is so often measured in pounds.
ACTRESSES WHO TRANSFORM BODIES FOR ROLES TREATED FAR DIFFERENTLY THAN MALE PEERS
Black coffee and chicken soup, 80 cigarettes a day and pills every four hours. This was the diet Judy Garland was placed on when she was just 16. In a series of memos from as far back as 1936 — when Garland would have been all of 14 — MGM executives referred to her as “a fat little pig” when discussing her weight. She went on to develop a crippling drug addiction, succumbing in 1969 to a barbiturate overdose.
Garland stands among the more tragic stories of keeping up appearances in Hollywood, but her story is hardly unique. Actresses were contractually obligated to maintain their weight within just two to three pounds in the studio era, and upcoming starlets were put on starvation diets in order to achieve a svelte Hollywood silhouette.
While actresses have come a long way from subsiding on coffee and cigarettes, just last month Vulture put together a list of 50 famous female film characters, as they were originally described in movie scripts. While some of the characterizations leap off the page, most are interchangeably defined: always young, pretty and thin. Compared to their male counterparts, who are defined by personality, the descriptions of cinema’s greatest female characters are reduced to their physical appearance.
Women’s bodies have always been of the utmost concern in Hollywood, pushing actresses toward unrealistic body types from the beginning. We see this perhaps most clearly in the difference between how actors and actresses handle physical transformations for roles. Men go to the extreme — bulking up like Chris Hemsworth or slimming down like Christian Bale. Women go to ordinary — Renee Zellweger transforms into an average woman to play Bridget Jones.
This is what happens when the standard for a woman’s body is already extreme. And of course, the actors who undergo physical transformations are celebrated for their artistry while for actresses, their transformations are discussed in relation to their attractiveness when they’re not being infantilized by the supposed health concerns of the public (an irony, considering the pressures they face to reach the Hollywood standard).
In one of the first heavily publicized weight transformations of the past 30 years, Zellweger gained 30 pounds to play the titular character in Bridget Jones’s Diary. In a kind of reverse engineering of the performance, magazine writers were more interested in how Zellweger was able to shrink back down to her Hollywood shape than the performance she gave in the film. The reception to the role was seemingly framed around desirability. As a character, Jones ultimately learns that weight is just a number, the public discourse instead asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to look like Zellweger before she gained 30 pounds?”
In 2003, Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. She, too, gained 30 pounds, and with the help from a skilled hair and makeup department, one of the most beautiful women in the world became an ugly duckling. While Theron’s performance lies in her quivering lip and bugged out eyes, it is her weight transformation that is singled out as the essential factor in her deglamorization.
Theron’s work in the role has gone on to become synonymous with the cliché that to win a big award, an attractive actress needs to go “ugly.” Theron’s performance is harrowing, but contrast the reception to it with both Christian Bale and Jared Leto, who also went through dramatic weight changes for their Oscar winning roles. Her male colleagues are celebrated for their dedication to a craft, while Theron has been reduced to a punchline.
In another, more recent, transformative weight gain, Theron gained 50 pounds to play a new mother suffering from postpartum psychosis in the recently released Tully. Early reviews praised the film for representing the mundane but unseen realities of the postpartum body. However, the film is increasingly being criticized for its depiction of the mental health of new mothers. It’s as though critics are suggesting the realism of Theron’s post-pregnancy body carries an added responsibility for audiences: if this is an accurate representation of postpartum health, then that reality better extend to all aspects of the film. As a result, Theron’s physical transformation is beholden to moral and political questions related to the representation of mental health at the centre of the film, as though her portrayal is solely responsible for any potential harm or misinformation it might instigate.
Recently, while appearing at the 35th anniversary screening of Scarface for the Tribeca Film Festival, Michelle Pfeiffer — who plays Tony Montana’s cocaine-addicted wife, Elvira — was asked rather bluntly by the moderator about her weight while filming the movie. The question, which was unnecessarily prefaced with the moderator explaining his concerns with body image as “the father of a daughter,” showed little regard for Pfeiffer’s process or motivation in bringing the role to the screen. Instead, it positioned the performance as an act of public endangerment, presupposing that Pfeiffer somehow holds the moral responsibility for the audience’s reception to her transformation into a rail-thin cocaine addict. The framing of the question around her specific weight further serves the idea that actresses are defined by their BMI rather than their acting ability.
A recent Netflix film, To the Bone, also prompted a similar discussion when actress Lily Collins lost weight in order to play an anorexic character (her appearance was also exaggerated through CGI). Collins, who suffered from an eating disorder in the past, felt it was integral to show on screen what this type of disease really looks like. Despite the fact that Collins never glamorized her weight loss by revealing how much she lost (and a stern health warning was included in the film), the reception to the movie was drowned in condemnation. While the film is about young people seeking help for their disordered eating, cultural critics wrung their hands as they worried it would have an adverse effect and potentially inspire thinspiration bloggers. Collins’s transformation, rather than celebrated as a male colleagues might have been, was roundly condemned as dangerous.
Instead of addressing the cultural conditions that prompt Hollywood to uphold an unrealistic standard when it comes to a woman’s body, the critical response instead shifts blame to the actresses themselves. Even as female performers take themselves off the pedestal of controlled perfection in order to portray ordinary and average, they are upheld to a different standard than their male counterparts. Their bodies are politicized and torn apart — which only further contributes to a narrow definition of screen beauty.
CLICHÉ THAT TO WIN A BIG AWARD, AN ATTRACTIVE ACTRESS NEEDS TO GO ‘UGLY.’