STEREOTYPED ILLNESS
BEFORE To the Bone was released today, a trailer for the Netflix film – about a young woman’s struggle with anorexia nervosa – had already been getting mixed reviews.
Part drama, part dark comedy, To the Bone stars Lily Collins as Ellen, a young woman who, after multiple stays in inpatient treatment programmes, grudgingly agrees to live in a group home run by an unconventional doctor (Keanu Reeves).
It premiered to generally positive reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where Netflix purchased the global rights for a reported $8 million (R108m).
Netflix posted the trailer on June 20, prompting an intense Twitter debate around whether the film glamourised anorexia and whether it could be harmful or a trigger for those with eating disorders. The company sparked a similar conversation in April after releasing the drama series, 13 Reasons Why, which caused concern for its graphic depiction of a teenager’s suicide.
Director Marti Noxon and supporters of the film say it’s an authentic departure from the slew of made-for-TV movies and TV show sub-plots that have made eating disorders look like trends instead of life-threatening illnesses.
But the trailer shows elements of the film – Ellen ticking off calorie counts for the items on her dinner plate – that highlight the challenge of portraying eating disorders on-screen in a responsible way.
Critics of the trailer have zeroed in on the film’s protagonist – a young, thin, white woman with anorexia, a prevailing narrative in pop culture despite the fact that eating disorders vary (binge-eating disorder is actually the most common in the US) and affect people of all backgrounds.
“It reinforces stereotypes about what an eating disorder is and looks like,” one survivor told Teen Vogue. “That imagery is everywhere, and it is actually celebrated in our culture.”
Noxon, the veteran writer-producer behind Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, Unreal and later episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, based the film on her own battle with anorexia and bulimia, which began in her early teens.
She was aware of the film’s potential to be a trigger for some people and, as a result, tried to be “really conscientious in the way we approached how (Ellen) looked, how often we showed her body and in what context.
“You want to help other people understand and have compassion for something they’ve never experienced, but you also want people who have experienced it to feel understood and seen and to give people hope,” she said. “At the same time, we want it to be entertaining.” Noxon wanted to avoid one trope in particular: “This idea that the perfectionist quality of anorexics is their most defining trait,” she said. Noxon wrote To the Bone a few years ago, inspired by another project that required her to think a lot about her childhood.
“I think if you’ve recovered from a traumatic illness… sometimes you just think of yourself as being sick. But I remembered that I still had my personality. I still had a lot of humour to me,” she said.
That realisation gave Noxon a clear idea of how she wanted to approach the film, which she wrote in just six weeks. “The character was going to have life to her,” Noxon said. While To the Bone focuses mainly on Ellen’s recovery, it features a woman of colour battling an eating disorder and a male character with anorexia. Cynthia Bulik, the founding director of the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, has not yet seen the film, but said those inclusions were encouraging because Hollywood and news outlets often failed to show that eating disorders also affected people outside the stereotype.
Bulik was among the collaborators on a document titled Nine Truths About Eating Disorders, which inspired last year’s public service announcement featuring the cast and crew of To the Bone.
“Eating disorders affect people of all genders, ages, races, ethnicities, body shapes, weights, sexual orientation and socio-economic status,” Noxon says in the video.
It caught the attention of Liana Rosenman and Kristina Saffran, who met as teenagers while receiving treatment for anorexia. They co-founded Project Heal, an organisation geared toward helping eating disorder sufferers afford treatment.
Project Heal recently hosted screenings of To the Bone in New York and Los Angeles, but it has faced sharp criticism from members of their community on social media for supporting the film amid the trailer debate.
Rosenman and Saffran continue to stand by it.
“I thought it was very powerful,” Rosenman said. “There is a sense of humour and wittiness in it as well as just understanding what it’s like to have an eating disorder.”
Saffran doesn’t think the film glamourises eating disorders, but rather “captures how serious these illnesses are.” Another concern around the film is that Collins, who has been open about her own struggle with eating disorders, lost weight for the role, which experts say can lead to relapse for those with a history of disordered eating.
For her part, Collins has described the film as a cathartic experience.
“It was a new form of recovery for me,” the actress told Shape magazine. “I had to remind myself that they hired me to tell a story, not to be a certain weight.”
Claire Mysko, the chief executive of the National Eating Disorders Association, said she was encouraged by the dialogue sparked by the trailer.
“Thirty million Americans struggle with eating disorders at some point in their lives,” Mysko said. “This is something that needs to be talked about.”
Mysko hasn’t yet seen To the Bone, but said she hoped Netflix would provide resources for viewers who may be vulnerable. Asked if she might have benefited from seeing a film like To the Bone when she was struggling with her eating disorder, Noxon paused.
“Yeah,” she said. “If I had seen where it leads, that no matter what you’re going through… ultimately it becomes a question of ‘How do you want to live?’”
To the Bone begins streaming on Netflix today