In my mind there are two very fucked things about straight-size people using suits and cosmetics to portray fat people:

First, thin people design fat bodies the same way they design monsters

Second, the psychological effect of an actor being able to take their fat costume off

We're all victims of cultural fatphobia-- not just prejudice, but actual, literal fear of fat bodies-- and when a straight-size person goes to design a fat character without confronting their internalized fear, the fat body they create will always be a dysmorphic nightmare.

Artists who don't make a specific point of studying fat bodies produce these warped caricatures, with the things they fear most about fat bodies-- double chins, facial fat, chubby fingers, arm fat, folds-- all wildly exaggerated.

Part of the problem is that they have no frame of reference: fat people make up almost half of the population, but are totally absent from media portrayal. We're not usually studied and we're rarely allowed to be famous.

Fat people are everywhere, until you try to name ten.

Another part of the problem, though, is that the special effects professionals called upon to disguise thin actors as fat are using the same materials and skills they use to make puppets, fishmen, monsters and aliens. Is it any surprise that the end result is dehumanization?

The thing that ties my two observations here together is this:

Fatphobic culture, thincentric culture, sees fat as a foreign substance that encases what "should be" a thin person, instead of seeing fat people as holistic human beings.

Straight-size actors encased in latex underline this. When the audience sees brendan frasier in a fat suit, they'll know what he's is "supposed" to look like, and they'll know that at the end of the shoot he's going to take it off.

It's fetishized weight loss.

(I'm putting aside everything about how thin people don't know what it's like to be fat and can't realistically portray a fat person because, while true, if I have to reread the interviews of fat suit actors' tearful shock at people not making eye contact with them, I will yell.)

When I was a fat child, 13 and on atkins, and I watched Shallow Hal, I wondered if they had to put Gwynneth Paltrow in a fake-looking fat suit because real fat people refused to demean themselves for the jokes and plotlines that the writers, directors and producers wanted.

But Jack Black was right there, playing along. There's no shortage of fat actors willing to degrade themselves for fatphobic writing.

The truth is, they put thin actors in fat suits because *they don't want a real fat person on screen.*

They want the monster they designed.

Real fat bodies are holistic. Whether by genetic disposition or life circumstance, they grew into themselves over time, frame and muscle and posture and chemistry shaping each other symphonically. The living movements of fat bodies are inimitable by a thin body wrapped in foam.

That doesn't bother fatphobic filmmakers, though, because their goal isn't imitation or realism. It's abjection.