..is
the issue. For example, I’m certain the food ‘experts’ would
decry the quality of food we ate back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. (If
we’d seen a sign saying ‘fat free’ back then, we would have
assumed it was free fat being advertised). It’s simply that in those days
we didn’t eat nearly the quantity of food we do these days, and what’s
more, the food we did eat then was home-cooked. It would stagger the present-day
kid to learn that, apart from the odd encounter with a pub meal and a special
treat from the fish & chip shop, I can’t actually remember being taken
out anywhere for a meal by our parents. Ever. And I’m pretty sure ours
wasn’t such an uncommon experience.
I’m starting to wonder now if the current veneration of the svelte bod
isn’t so at variance to the prevailing average as to be unfathomably dumb,
not to mention hypocritical in the extreme. We’ve come to accept that
we’re ‘consumers’ for goodness sake, so let’s restore
the Rubenesque model.as our aesthetic ideal and see if our bums look good in
that.
A couple of movies I’ve seen over the past year have added fuel to the
internal debate about fatness and where it’s all heading – WALL-E
and the lesser known Idiocracy. (I saw the latter for the second time
recently on Foxtel and was inspired to buy the DVD for Bill’s Chrissie
present). I can highly recommend WALL-E as a superior piece of animated entertainment,
perhaps even my movie of last year, (which is a bit sad really), and while it’s
probably a bit beyond most of its assumed demographic, especially as far as
pace is concerned, to an old Eagle comic fan it’s an utterly
beguiling hyper-realistic rendering of a post-apocalyptic Earth and its lone
mechanoid inhabitant.
That is until we meet the humans, (whom you might have assumed to have been
wiped out entirely, but are in fact exiles in deep space awaiting more favourable
conditions on Earth before they return). In contrast to the forensically detailed
observation of the robots and other hardware, the human characters are disappointingly
rendered in a broad, Hanna-Barbera style, not dissimilar to the Flintstones.
Because I enjoyed the movie so much, I felt obliged to defend this stylistic
change in subsequent discussion with bro’ Dick, but on reflection, I now
suspect that the Pixar creative team must have decided that the hyper-realistic
rendering of endless phalanxes of fatties was going to be so visually offensive
as to be off-putting. Maybe they even experimented with some detailed fatties
before coming to that conclusion – if so, I’d love to see the out-takes.
When I tried to find an appropriate image on Google (which tellingly
proved to be quite difficult), I came across references to a number of blogs
and discussions on the OB subject obviously engendered by the movie, which all
goes to prove, emasculated images or not, there’s a lot of sensitivity
out there on the issue.
Looking for silver linings, the present global economic downturn could prove
to be an ideal opportunity for the world’s prosperous to reassess their
lives and make a few changes. Wasn’t it Dr David Suzuki who said years
ago that we’re eventually going to have to discard the notion of economies
predicated on growth? Have I mentioned that before? Anyway, the writing’s
on the wall – writ LARGE.- and I don’t think it’s beyond the
realms of possibility that the current bout of global unease could be due to
our collectively catching an unflattering glimpse of ourselves in the Big Mirror.
