“Oh, I don’t mean *you*…”
I was catching up the other day on episodes of Pushing Daisies that I missed when I was away. And I got to season 2, episode 8, and a bit of my immense love for the show went away. (Warning: spoilers!)
The premise of this episode is that a thin man eats himself fat because he can’t control himself around delicious fried chicken. His actor puts on bigger and bigger fatsuits as he eats until he breaks his car and starts having to rely on a motorized wheelchair to get around. Eventually he kills the fried chicken maker (by pushing him into a vat of hot oil) for ruining his life by making him fat.
Let’s count the fatty stereotypes here, shall we? Haha, isn’t it hilarious that fatties can’t control themselves, and think it’s the fast food business’s fault? Haha, isn’t it hilarious that fat people pretend to be disabled when they’re just too fat to walk? And of course the whole fat suit business (although I’m somewhat okay with it in this particular instance–if a fat character is going to be mocked, I’d rather know that that mocking wasn’t tacitly approved by a fat actor playing him).
But the biggest thing for me is that Pushing Daisies has a fat main character–and a rather awesome one, at that. In a way, that makes the stereotyping more disappointing than it would be coming from a show that didn’t have fat characters. What you get when you have an awesome fat main character and then mock fat people is not “fat stereotypes are wrong”–it’s “fat stereotypes are right–oh, but I don’t mean you.”
Recognizing exceptional minorities is not the same as “getting it.”
I adore Pushing Daisies and also just watched that episode recently. Yeah… it made me so sad, because I adore the fat character and the show overall is (was?) so great, but that episode left me cold.
I took the premise of that character completely differently than you.
I think they were trying to show, in the heavily sarcastic nature of the series, that people can be addicted to food, emotional eating is real and to be taken seriously, fried food is in fact unhealthy, and his unfortunate circumstance living within a society that does not value these things caused him to self-destruct and snap to the point of murder.
I found it to be a very sad character story. But one people could relate to and not one normally seen. I didn’t think it was promoting fat-bashing… though yes as I was watching it I did feel uncomfortable for a moment, as someone who suffers from an eating disorder and is overweight… but I saw what they were trying to say with sarcasm.
I KNOW! I love that show. I. Love. It. And when I watched that episode, I was squirming with frustration and a little bit of anger as SOON as I saw the dude on the scooter. I knew what was coming and wanted to jump off the bed and get away from it.
Especially, right, because the detective guy, forget his name, is awesome and was recently depicted getting some hot action, and he certainly is a BHM.
two steps forward, one big fat step back.
Grggh.
That episode upset me, too. It’s the only episode I’ve ever flat-out been unhappy with…and one that had so much else to love, too!
I’ve said from day one that Pushing Daisies was clearly created just for me. That episode, though, wasn’t.
Also? Emerson Cod rocks my world!
I stopped watching that show in the first season after they had a really, I thought, grotesque cariacture of a woman with bulimia . . . not funny.
I agree with Sarah–my hopes for a reasonable portrayal of a fat or eating disordered person were dashed at that bulimia episode anyway, so I wasn’t expecting much out of the fried chicken episode and I didn’t get much. I mean, it was a good episode in other ways, but bleah on the fat stereotypes. Some people seem to just love to latch on to extremely rare events like the person who sued McDonald’s because of their weight (did that even actually happen? I can’t remember now) and view them as symbolic of everything that’s “wrong” with our society. They can be comfortable bringing that kind of stuff up and mocking it over and over, because hey, they’re not fat so they can blame society’s problems on fat people with a clear conscience.
What I mainly wanted to say was how brainwashed am I? I watched the show through its whole run and never thought of Emerson as fat. Of course he is, but I never thought of him that way. On the other hand, maybe that’s a good thing. He was just an awesome character, not a specifically fat or thin one, though as I think back they did emphasize him liking to eat to some extent. But it wasn’t anywhere near as obnoxious or over-the-top as portrayals of other fat characters.
Now if (and this will probably never happen) the same thing could happen with a character like Chuck, we’d be on the right track.