Time to stop feeding into skinny obsession
Emma Thompson says the skeletal-actress culture is evil, but we have embraced it as the new normal, writes Sarah Caden
EARLIER this month, only a few days after the Oscars in LA, Nicole Kidman appeared at the Goldene Kamera Awards in Hamburg. At the German awards, she wore her hair down, she wore a similarly pale and frothy dress to the one she’d worn in LA, and yet she looked different and this was widely commented on.
In Hamburg, compared to Hollywood, Nicole Kidman looked rounder of face, softer of jaw, generally a little more puffy in appearance. There was speculation in newspapers that Nicole had some work between award ceremonies, but it was only speculation. What it invited, however, was of course comparison.
While Nicole undeniably looked a little different in Hamburg, like someone who’d overslept and then spent an hour sobbing, that wasn’t the really startling thing. What was startling was how you suddenly saw how utterly gaunt she looked at the Academy Awards.
Not that anyone really talks about extreme thinness anymore. We talk about anorexia and other eating disorders, but only in terms of dramatic, brink-of-death cases.
We don’t consider the culture of food control and deprivation to be the same thing, we don’t think that the modern obsession with glorifying thinness is anything to worry about, we don’t recognise the massive body dysmorphia that lies at the heart of so much social-media postings.
In fact, we barely register the degree to which a lot of these postings are tweaked and touched up, until perhaps someone takes it too far — as in Katie Price’s abnormally long leg bones in a posted snap from her holidays last week.
We call foul when it’s all gone too crazy, but we’ve stopped seeing the daily crazy; the extreme thinness that we now take for normal.
Last week, actress Emma Thompson spoke up on Swedish TV about actresses “who simply don’t eat”. She knows them, she works with them, she sees it up close. We all see the thinness, but sort of fail to see it at the same time, but she has seen how it is achieved.
It is achieved by not eating, Thompson said, but it is fed by the culture that dictates that actresses must be stick-thin. And their ability to be stickthin, she said, is as important as their ability to act.
Or maybe, let’s be honest, more important. If you can name a super-successful actress who is normally proportioned, you are probably also talking about someone who is funny. Like, say, Amy Schumer, who is frank about being considered plus-size by Hollywood. If you are Schumer’s size, a normal woman’s size, you can be an actress but only a funny one.
It’s called bubbly. But it’s not the stuff of an A-list leading lady.
Thompson told a story about when she was working on the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. An actress in the cast, she recalled, was asked to lose weight.
Now, inevitably, you read that and you think: “Oh, which one?” And you go and take a look at her female co-stars, Felicity Jones, Hayley Atwell and Greta Scacchi, and wonder which one of them it was. Maybe it wasn’t one of those leads, maybe it was another actress, but you still look over their faces and bodies and you see them differently; as sort of not quite right.
Our idea of right is weird, though. Our idea of right is actresses whose legs don’t look strong enough to hold up their bodies, whose heads are too large for the proportions below their necks.
And these features, disturbingly, look okay on camera. Eyes too big for your face are perversely appealing for how piercing they are. Cheeks that are hollow take make-up so, so well.
Indeed, make-up is a friend to the too-thin because it masks the gauntness and lifts the pallor.
Further, facial fillers are the very best friend of the toothin because then the body can do one thing, while the face does another.
The body loses all softness, but the face retains it. Or, more accurately, artificially restores it.
Oddly, we don’t really see that contradiction anymore, because we have grown so accustomed to it.
We accept abnormal at the expense of normal, though. It’s this that leads to the notion that our homegrown Irish models are what you might call ‘fine girls’ by international standards.
Now, if you’ve ever seen an Irish model up close, the likes of Rosanna Davison, Roz Purcell, Sarah Tansey, you’ll know that they are exceptionally slim and exactly what fits the bill of a lean and leggy model-type figure.
Their faces fit their bodies, though, and that’s what’s out of step about them in an age of extreme thinness. They are slim, but not to the point of starving their faces, which they then have to replenish with make-up tricks and fillers.
Above and below the neck add up to a cohesive whole, but side by side with an international stick-thin, that’s going to look, well, fat.
“It is evil what is going on out there and it is getting worse,” Emma Thompson said last week. She added that the weight pressure was part of the reason she never moved to LA.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Can you imagine? Every time I go to LA I think, ‘Oh God I am too fat to go there.’ I think they are saying to me when I arrive, ‘You are fat and you are old. Go home’.”
She’s not fat and she’s not old, but Emma Thompson has a normal body and a face that matches it in terms of being the same age and, weirdly, the same weight.
It’s an oddity in a world at odds with itself.
And take a look at an ordinary person’s Instagram to see it’s not limited to A-listers.