So we started watching The Fall, and it’s very enjoyable. Very professionally done, too.
There is one thing I find obnoxious, though. This is yet another one in a billion shows that depict a very thin woman devouring an enormous hamburger in the dead of night. The endless replay of the bizarre belief that weight is in no way linked to what people eat is simply annoying.
Yes, there are people who are very sick and who can eat tons of food while remaining emaciated. I’ve known such people, and they look nothing like Gillian Anderson. They look sick.
In The Fall, this was just a single short scene. But remember Gilmore Girls? The writers of the show seemed possessed by the need to prove that gorging on tons of junk food every day leads to remaining skinny and fresh-faced. After several seasons, it started to seem like the writers were mentally unstable. And there are millions of such shows.
I’m thinking there must be something cultural to this very Anglo refusal to see causal links. And you observe this in many different areas of life, not just food. There’s also the bizarre belief that intelligence just happens and is not a result of years of learning. And so on.
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This is a tv and movie trope the same way that ugly nerdy girls are really gorgeous girls who need contacts, leads wear designer clothing that’s been tailored to them regardless of the character they’re playing and grandmas are 37 years old. It’s so engrained that if you defy these tropes it takes the viewer out of the show and movie.
Many men want a woman who is young, thin and who has never been fat. This is the woman who is most likely to be and stay thin and eat a lot without exercising a lot or purging. This convention is simply an exaggerated version of this ideal. Male stars play characters who are office workers and yet have the bodies of gym bunnies without exercise. It’s just part of the eu-reality.
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Men and women want people they find attractive. And that attraction is in no way linked to weight, history of weight or age. The belief that it is connected is based on the desire to quantify (and this explain) the unquantifiable. This stems from the fear of one’s sexuality and the desire to control it.
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Isn’t this the same as wanting to see superheroes perform impossible feats of strength on screen? People want to watch what cannot really be possible in real life.
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This is an interesting analysis. I like it. 🙂
So it’s a sort of an escapist fantasy. People can vicariously experience the ease of eating what they want and not paying the price for it. Yes, makes total sense.
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O RLY NEXT YOU’LL TELL US THAT WINNING AN EATING CONTEST IS A SUPER-HUMAN STRENGTH
[burrrrp] 🙂
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It crosses genres as well. Deanna Troi, the ship’s counsellor on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was a very slender woman, but was showcased as having an addiction to chocolate. If any scenes were involving the characters at the ship watering hole or where food was being consumed, she’d have something with chocolate in front of her. And on The Simpsons, there’s a one episode character, Mindy Simmons, who is the object of Homer’s desires; she gobbles down endless amounts of donuts and spends her time off work watching TV and drinking beer.
A good way to figure out why they’re like this is to look at the female characters who don’t have so much of their character centering around food. Homer’s wife on The Simpsons, Marge, is also slender, but she spends a lot of the show chiding Homer for his unhealthy eating habits. On Star Trek, Troi is treated as a weird cross between a sex symbol and a mother figure because the other female characters, Tasha Yar and Dr. Crusher, are a hardened military woman and a no-nonsense doctor. The characters indulge in fatty food because they’re associated with comfort, escapism, and fantasy, for the heterosexual male characters and audience.
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“The writers of the show seemed possessed by the need to prove that gorging on tons of junk food every day leads to remaining skinny and fresh-faced …”
No, the secret subtext is that all of these characters are hooked on heroin. 🙂
Otherwise, leahladygrey, didn’t Commander Data perform some “innovative interfacing experiments” with Tasha Yar? So perhaps she wasn’t as much of a hardened military woman as we were initially meant to believe … 🙂
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