The last roll of fat had barely stopped jiggling on the corpse of ursine funnyman Chris Farley - widely described, in a rare burst of journalistic objectivity and accuracy, as "blubbery" and "sweaty" - when the media pounced on the death as a cautionary sequel: Wired 2 - Tommy Boy Clogs an Artery.
For the press, the two "tragedies" had more ominous parallels than any pair of deaths since the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations: "Farley died young, like his comic idol, John Belushi," ran the typical lead. Both were 33. Both came out of the "famed Second City comedy troupe" (a group whose reputation seems remarkably unconnected to the actual performances of its alumni) and Saturday Night Live (a show whose reputation seems remarkably unconnected to the box-office performances of its alumni). Both were crying-on-the-inside-kind of clowns. Both had film careers that, despite some success, were best described as degrading to actor and audience alike. The main point of comparison, of course, was that both were Weight Watchers washouts (as one paper euphemized, "both had a hearty appetite for food, drink and drugs....").
But such facile comparisons obscured a 42-ounce-sized steak difference between Belushi and Farley. A difference that forces us to face a disturbing, barely palatable truth about pre-apocalyptic American society. A truth as dark, rich, and artery-clogging as a Godiva soccer ball. The simple fact is that compared to Farley (who shuffled off his chafing, cellulite-ridden mortal coil at over 300 pounds), Belushi (the undisputed fat-slob comic of his day) practically looked like a supermodel. Sure, Belushi lacked washboard abs, but Farley needed his own ZIP code.
This is all about rising standards of corpulence, of defining fatness upwards. While our society seems content to lower expectations with regard to general civility, the SAT, and the behavior of the Kennedy clan, it has continued to raise the bar, to push the envelope, to bust the britches of what we consider fat. Indeed, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which publishes standard weight-and-height charts, has over the years simply upped the allowable poundage to accommodate a fatter America.
As Farley's bury-him-in-two-piano-cases example suggests, this trend is particularly apparent in the entertainment world: Who would you bet on in a game of Red Rover between celebrated suets of the past and their contemporary counterparts? Team up any three indisputably fat-in- their-day characters - say, the beloved, barrel-shaped skipper of the S. S. Minnow; gruff, husky newsman Lou Grant; and beer-bellied gumshoe Frank Cannon. Could all three combined withstand an attack from any one of a latter-day trilogy of tallow consisting of, say, Roseanne, John Candy, or John Goodman (who, in playing Babe Ruth a few years back, bore an obovoid resemblance to McDonaldland's Grimace whenever he ran the bases)? And chew on this: Only 20 years ago, the Mary Tyler Moore Show could believably pass off Mary's anorexic attic pal Rhoda Morgenstern as the fat one.
Of course, none of this is to deny that there were true, elephantine lard-asses in the past: Who could forget gargantuan songstress Mama Cass Elliott, whose plurality of chins belied a tragically petite throat - one simply unable to accommodate the architecture of an unchewed ham sandwich? Or the underwater shot of Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure, where she thrashes in the water like a rare West Indian manatee? It's a fair bet that Canned Heat's Al Wilson could have held down his end on a see-saw with Blues Traveler's John Popper. But the trend is indisputably onwards and upwards: Whatever you could say about, for example, Orson Welles or Marlon Brando at any given moment, this much is true: They were even fatter the next year.
The mainstreaming of fatness - according to 1996 data, about 75 percent of Americans exceed their maximum recommended weight - is due to an increase in eating. As journalist Michael Fumento, a self-admitted former tub of goo, points out in Fat of the Land: The Obesity Epidemic and How Overweight Americans Can Help Themselves, we are besieged by an "attack of the giant killer food." Portion sizes have vastly increased over the past decades. An original McDonald's hamburger, writes Fumento, weighed in at 3.7 ounces (bun included); the Arch Deluxe tips the scales at 9 ounces. Fumento, like other scolds, is quick to shift the debate to moral grounds: "Gluttony and sloth need to be demonized to the extent that cigarettes have been."
Such critiques - and such solutions as "sin taxes" on Twinkies, pork rinds, and other fatty foods (proposed by Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Center for Eating and Weight Disorders) - exemplify what (admittedly chubby) Cornell University professor Richard Klein calls the "shrill voice of skinny." Indeed, despite Fumento's suggestion that fat is where it's at these days - that we've accepted plumpness as an ideal as easily as we slip on relaxed-fit jeans, our ideals of beauty still revolve around virtually impossible thinness achieved only by bulimic supermodels and junkie rock stars.
Hence, "thin dream" flicks like The Nutty Professor and Thinner. Or the fact that the video for Sir Mix-A-Lot's paean to ample-assed sweethearts was populated exclusively by models with buns of steel shaking their shapely booties for the camera. When a Latin-American drug kingpin died last year after attempting to change his appearance via massive plastic surgery and liposuction, it was hard to shake the feeling that the fat reduction measures were done less out of necessity and more out of vanity (even all-powerful coke lords want to look good in a tight pair of pants). After 50 years, it's still preferable to be the 98-pound weakling in Charles Atlas's gamble-a-stamp comic book ad than to be a flop-breasted man on the beach desperately hoping for old-fashioned, full-body swimsuits to make a comeback.
But critiques like Fumento's also miss another, more crucial point: Overconsumption doesn't happen by accident; obesity is not foisted on starving people. As Klein writes in Eat Fat, "We ought to consider that what is actually happening might just have some good reason to happen." Indeed, quite possibly, overconsumption is the American dream - quite possibly, we have always been a nation of fat slobs trapped in skinny bodies. The difference is that, now, we can afford to pig out like there's no tomorrow; the whole world is an all-you-can-eat buffet. The line between Manifest Destiny and Wendy's "Biggie" menu (cheerily pitched by multiple-heart-attack survivor Dave Thomas) is perhaps shorter than we think. Like the dog that licks its own balls, we now chow down to excess not necessarily for the flavor, but simply because we can.
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This article appeared originally in Suck.
