My Mirror column:
Women struggle to feel beautiful in an intriguing television series called Dietland , and a new comedy called I Feel Pretty .
“Apart from Steven and a few other people, I’d learnt to live deep inside myself... My body was just a thing I used to move my head around,” says Alicia ‘Plum’ Kettle early in the first season of Dietland, the ongoing television series of which she is the heroine and sometimes narrator. The thought isn’t a complicated one. But Plum’s description of her inner life as a fat person also encapsulates what seems to me to be a most universally resonant thought: a split between the body and the mind, the feeling that one’s visible outer self does not really represent one’s inner being. Based on Sarai Walker’s novel of the same name, Dietland’s aim is simple: it places a woman’s struggles with obesity at the centre of our consciousness, forcing us to engage with our prejudices and pity-parties, even — perhaps, especially — when they come couched as concerns about the fat person’s health and happiness.
As she moves hopelessly between her friend Steven’s cafe and her lonely Brooklyn apartment, her thankless weightwatchers meetings (where she is lectured by annoying thin women) and her freelance gig as ghostwriter for teen zine editorKitty Montgomery (where, too, she is lectured by annoying thin women), Plum gets sadder and angrier. Still, she continues to suspend all her present-day desires in aid of a future Day of Fulfilment, pegging her meagre savings and oversized hopes to a gastric band surgery that promises to unveil her “thin person within”.
So in Plum’s case, the split sense of identity is based on being fat. But Dietland makes it clear that what it’s really targeting is much larger: a world of impossibly precarious standards for what counts as female beauty, held in place by what it refers to as the “dissatisfaction industrial complex”. “They get us to tell them how broken we are and then get us to buy things to fix it,” says the wonderfully savvy Julia, manager of the so-called ‘Beauty Closet’ that’s part of Kitty Montgomery’s media empire — who also enrols Plum into a secret project to subvert it. Meanwhile, an anonymous female vigilante group by the fantastically normal name of Jennifer starts to claim responsibility for the grisly murders of rapists who have escaped the law. Their violence is effective and media-grabbing — it shuts downFashion Week and kills off a female porn star associated with rape porn — and even as Plum is adopted by a peaceful ‘anti-diet’ philanthropist, the connections she’s making seem to lead her closer and closer to Jennifer.
A few weeks after I watched Dietland, I came upon a 2018 film that seems to engage with very similar concerns. Called I Feel Pretty, it stars the influential stand-up comicAmy Schumer . Schumer’s Renee Bennett is by no means obese, but like Plum Kettle, she struggles with insecurities about her looks.
If Plum slaves away secretly over her laptop in her apartment, Renee leads her work life in a dank Chinatown basement. Both are wage slaves employed by insanely posh women in the youth and beauty business, who gradually start to see the value of our anonymous, non-posh heroines. Where Plum had Kitty, Renee has Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams in a memorably excessive performance), heir and CEO of a cosmetics corporation called Lily LeClaire that’s looking to branch out from high-end to mass products. Most strikingly, Renee yearns to know what it’s like to be “undeniably pretty” — which, in both Plum’s and her minds, is what will make them worthy of being desired, and thus — at least potentially — loved.
I began by being struck by how similarly Dietland and I Feel Pretty set up their scenarios. But I ended up amazed by the different routes they take to resolve them. I Feel Pretty uses the old knock-on-the-head device to create a version of amnesia: Renee wakes up from a gym accident convinced that she has been transformed into a woman of stunning attractiveness; a babe by mainstream standards. That illusion kickstarts her lifeless dating life and career, as romantic partners and snobbish bosses alike are first bemused and then charmed by her self-confidence. As feel-good comedy, this premise walks a bit of a political tightrope — because, of course, the reason everyone (including us, the audience) is so amused is because Renee’s new confidence is misplaced, incongruous, delusional. And there are moments of annoying obviousness when Renee befriends the beautiful people — her gym friend or her boss — only so that we can be told that hot people have problems, too.
What I Feel Pretty’s makers want us to concentrate on, however, is that feeling “undeniably pretty” is enough to make the life we want. If we feel it on the inside, it’ll start to show up on the outside.
Meanwhile, in Dietland, we watch Plum being treated badly, by strangers and by potential dates, because fatness has been declared not just unattractive but inferior, worthy of fetishising but not respect and love. But then we also see women with the most flawless of bodies being objectified. “They’re perfect,” says an acid attack victim with a disfigured face. “How’s that working out for them?” In fact, Dietland wants us to arrive at the same place as I Feel Pretty —just via a darker route. The most beautiful body is no guarantee of anything, if we aren’t feeling pretty on the inside.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Aug 2018.
Women struggle to feel beautiful in an intriguing television
“Apart from Steven and a few other people, I’d learnt to live deep inside myself... My body was just a thing I used to move my head around,” says Alicia ‘Plum’ Kettle early in the first season of Dietland, the ongoing television series of which she is the heroine and sometimes narrator. The thought isn’t a complicated one. But Plum’s description of her inner life as a fat person also encapsulates what seems to me to be a most universally resonant thought: a split between the body and the mind, the feeling that one’s visible outer self does not really represent one’s inner being. Based on Sarai Walker’s novel of the same name, Dietland’s aim is simple: it places a woman’s struggles with obesity at the centre of our consciousness, forcing us to engage with our prejudices and pity-parties, even — perhaps, especially — when they come couched as concerns about the fat person’s health and happiness.
As she moves hopelessly between her friend Steven’s cafe and her lonely Brooklyn apartment, her thankless weightwatchers meetings (where she is lectured by annoying thin women) and her freelance gig as ghostwriter for teen zine editor
So in Plum’s case, the split sense of identity is based on being fat. But Dietland makes it clear that what it’s really targeting is much larger: a world of impossibly precarious standards for what counts as female beauty, held in place by what it refers to as the “dissatisfaction industrial complex”. “They get us to tell them how broken we are and then get us to buy things to fix it,” says the wonderfully savvy Julia, manager of the so-called ‘Beauty Closet’ that’s part of Kitty Montgomery’s media empire — who also enrols Plum into a secret project to subvert it. Meanwhile, an anonymous female vigilante group by the fantastically normal name of Jennifer starts to claim responsibility for the grisly murders of rapists who have escaped the law. Their violence is effective and media-grabbing — it shuts down
A few weeks after I watched Dietland, I came upon a 2018 film that seems to engage with very similar concerns. Called I Feel Pretty, it stars the influential stand-up comic
If Plum slaves away secretly over her laptop in her apartment, Renee leads her work life in a dank Chinatown basement. Both are wage slaves employed by insanely posh women in the youth and beauty business, who gradually start to see the value of our anonymous, non-posh heroines. Where Plum had Kitty, Renee has Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams in a memorably excessive performance), heir and CEO of a cosmetics corporation called Lily LeClaire that’s looking to branch out from high-end to mass products. Most strikingly, Renee yearns to know what it’s like to be “undeniably pretty” — which, in both Plum’s and her minds, is what will make them worthy of being desired, and thus — at least potentially — loved.
I began by being struck by how similarly Dietland and I Feel Pretty set up their scenarios. But I ended up amazed by the different routes they take to resolve them. I Feel Pretty uses the old knock-on-the-head device to create a version of amnesia: Renee wakes up from a gym accident convinced that she has been transformed into a woman of stunning attractiveness; a babe by mainstream standards. That illusion kickstarts her lifeless dating life and career, as romantic partners and snobbish bosses alike are first bemused and then charmed by her self-confidence. As feel-good comedy, this premise walks a bit of a political tightrope — because, of course, the reason everyone (including us, the audience) is so amused is because Renee’s new confidence is misplaced, incongruous, delusional. And there are moments of annoying obviousness when Renee befriends the beautiful people — her gym friend or her boss — only so that we can be told that hot people have problems, too.
What I Feel Pretty’s makers want us to concentrate on, however, is that feeling “undeniably pretty” is enough to make the life we want. If we feel it on the inside, it’ll start to show up on the outside.
Meanwhile, in Dietland, we watch Plum being treated badly, by strangers and by potential dates, because fatness has been declared not just unattractive but inferior, worthy of fetishising but not respect and love. But then we also see women with the most flawless of bodies being objectified. “They’re perfect,” says an acid attack victim with a disfigured face. “How’s that working out for them?” In fact, Dietland wants us to arrive at the same place as I Feel Pretty —just via a darker route. The most beautiful body is no guarantee of anything, if we aren’t feeling pretty on the inside.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Aug 2018.