TOM STEWARD
In the last quarter-century of American cinema, there have been several notable instances of high-profile male film actors shedding significant weight and appearing onscreen with bodies unhealthily reduced in size, having taken on some degree of emaciation. Superficially, these actors have manipulated their bodies in preparation for shooting with diet, exercise and lifestyle changes to produce a viscerally authentic manifestation of the result (or by-product) of an illness that affects the body physically, such as insomnia, the HIV/AIDS virus, drug addiction and cancer. However, in all but the rarest cases, the underweight male body is identified with social and cultural transgression to the point of synonymy. This is in addition to any transgressive qualities associated with the specific affliction the characters possess and pertains to the audio-visual representation of the body and its configuration in the film’s social and cultural contexts. In particular, these bodies challenge and disrupt traditional notions of masculinity, such as physical dominance over women and preparedness for action. The underweight male body transgresses gender boundaries, by problematising both the masculinity of the character within the diegesis of the film and conventional depictions of the male body in film and popular culture more generally. The irony is that in creating bodies which enact and epitomise disregard for socio-cultural norms, these actors have achieved far greater standing and acceptance within cultural hierarchies, such as the film and acting establishment of Hollywood and celebrity and lifestyle elites.
This chapter examines qualities of socio-cultural transgression, unstable masculinity and extra-textual cultural legitimacy accompanying the underweight male body in three recent American movies featuring performances by Hollywood star actors who have undergone extreme weight loss in preparation for their roles. While a number of performances could potentially be discussed – Matt Damon in
Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996), 50 Cent in
All Things Fall Apart (Mario Van Peebles, 2011), Michael Fassbender in
Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008), Tom Hanks in both
Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993) and
Cast Away (Robert Zemeckis, 2000) – I have chosen Edward Norton and Brad Pitt’s performances as (dually) Tyler Durden in
Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Christian Bale’s portrayal of Trevor Reznik in
The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004) and Matthew McConaughey’s depiction of Ron Woodruff in
Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2013). While each of the comparative references above illustrate the relationship between underweight male bodies and transgression to some extent – Hanks is, after all, playing social outcasts (the latter quite literally) in both movies – my three case studies best exemplify the myriad of ways that the underweight male body resists and deviates from social and cultural conventions, laws and orthodoxies. As films which visually fetishise the body, male form and weight loss and make clear the connection between the body and society, they speak specifically to the key issues of this chapter’s investigation. Each film notably addresses transgressive bodies through the prism of gender and masculinity and demonstrates how cultivating an underweight body enhances male actors’ cultural status rather than marginalising them. These transgressive bodies are only attached to the stars temporarily as, once shooting is complete, they can return to their prior physiques, which are generally buff and masculine. Therefore, the actors can circumvent the social stigma of promoting unhealthy, emasculated bodies in the media and instead become icons of bodily transformation. Furthermore, the historical spread of these films suggests tropism rather than contemporaneity.
These arguments build upon, and are impossible without, an understanding based on the work of Mary Douglas that maps bodies on to society’s order and relations and considers bodily representations in a ‘social dimension’ (1970: 70). As these are Hollywood films with stars made in and/or about late twentieth-century culture, we can relate Douglas’s equivalence to specific historical and industrial contexts using Mike Featherstone, who argues that ‘inner and outer body’ are aligned within ‘consumer culture’, and sees Hollywood movies and stars promoting notions of the outer body as representation of self (1982: 118, 28). Andrew Tudor applies Douglas by attributing ‘unruly bodies’ in late twentieth-century horror film to ‘disorder and incoherence in social life’ of the time (1995: 40). In specific terms of the underweight male body (and the case studies), Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould have identified Christian Bale/Trevor Reznik’s body in The Machinist as symptomatic of ‘resistance to alienation’ under late capitalism (2009: 229). Similarly, the discussion of gender in this chapter must be contextualised within critical paradigms of representing male bodies in cinema and culture. It should be noted that the underweight male body departs from the ‘muscularity’ and ‘strength and vitality’ that Richard Dyer argues ‘legitimises male power and domination’ (1982: 67, 69). It also challenges Peter Lehman’s notion that traditionally ‘ugly or misshapen’ male bodies are compensated for by physical attributes of power and strength to re-instate male subjectivity and authority (2007: 12–13). Indeed, these bodies are more akin to the fragmentation and objectification that Lehman argues signifies a loss of power (2007: 19).
Scholarly precedent for parallels between ‘bodily disintegration and collapse’ and ‘transgress[ing] cultural categories’ derives from Tudor’s article, ‘Unruly Bodies, Unquiet Minds’ (1995: 29, 31). He identifies ‘bodily destruction and…decay’ in modern horror cinema as ‘signifiers of transgression’ and contends ‘taken-for-granted boundaries of gender are problematized’ (1995: 31). While the anxieties of late twentieth-century social experience are still relevant to my argument given the movies’ historical contexts, I apply Tudor’s observations to cinema beyond the genre of ‘modern body horror’ (1995: 39).
1 The duality of disintegrating bodies transgressing both gender and wider cultural conventions is also a useful paradigm. Vint and Bould’s ‘The Thin Men’ discusses ‘anorexic subjects’ in both
Fight Club and
The Machinist (2009: 222). Interestingly, anorexia is explored as a potential protest of late capitalist alienation and consumption, and though Trevor’s dissent against capitalist labour is linked to his ‘emaciation’ (2009: 229), neither his nor Tyler Durden’s bodies are described as anorexic, and their account of
Fight Club uses anorexia as a metaphor for a rejection of consumer culture, leaving aside the proximity of the underweight body to that of an anorexic altogether. I applaud the acute distinctions the authors make to prevent conflating underweight bodies with the disorder of anorexia and the notion of the body’s socio-cultural ‘resistance’ (ibid.) is clearly applicable to the idea of transgression. However, this chapter will address how
Fight Club maps social protest visually and viscerally on to the body as well as symbolically.
Fight Club
Edward Norton plays an unnamed protagonist, the Narrator, losing weight due to chronic insomnia.
2 A loss adjuster by day, at nights he does odd jobs as alter-ego Tyler Durden, a personality who starts to intrude on his regular life until his consciousness is split. Tyler is played by Brad Pitt and for the majority of the movie is assumed by Norton’s character and the viewer to be a separate entity. While Norton and Pitt have muscular definition on their torsos, both actors are noticeably underweight in the roles. For the Narrator, this body is a result of both his insomnia and the physical discipline and punishment he subjects himself to, first as president of an underground boxing club and then as the leader of an urban paramilitary unit. In interviews online, Norton acknowledged he lost weight to symbolise how the character was ‘falling apart’ and a metaphorical ‘junkie’. Though the viewer may attribute Pitt’s body to the gruelling activities he shares with Norton’s character, its diminished state is a clue to the eventual twist that they are one and the same person. Norton shed between around sixteen pounds for the role. Pitt embarked on a fat-burning diet and workout regime pre-production that reduced his body fat to five percent, rather than it being the product of digital manipulation, as Vint and Bould erroneously claim (2009: 232). While Pitt’s chest and abdomen are considerably more sculpted and toned than Norton’s, whose upper body reveals considerable emaciation, both actors appear to have abnormally reduced bodies.
It is not merely the appearances of the actors but visual contrasts within the
mise-en-scène of
Fight Club that highlight and exacerbate the underweight male body. Notable here is the juxtaposition of Norton’s character with the corpulent body of cancer survivor Bob (Meat Loaf), as the Narrator is slammed against his engorged stomach and oversized breasts both vertically and horizontally in tight close-ups during the group therapy and fight scenes, and Tyler’s beating of an obese club owner, which lacks narrative purpose except to exaggerate the disparity between the respective shapes of their bodies. Indeed, the frequency with which Norton and Pitt appear nude or semi-naked – legitimised by the proclivity for fight and sex scenes throughout the film – reinforces the difference of the actors’ bodies from more socially representative male physiques that appear. There is a tension here, however, as the film wishes to normalise the underweight male body as much as it wants to fetishise it. The muscular definition of Norton and Pitt’s upper bodies, complemented by warm lighting in the fight scenes which both shapes and textures the muscles, makes them look positively healthy against the other victims of bodily illness we encounter, such as the pale and gaunt terminal cancer patient Chloe (Rachel Singer). As Tyler’s two bodies routinely bear the damage of disfigurements, bruises and injuries from self-harm, their unhealthy weight becomes more difficult to elicit from other physical deformities. Therein lies
Fight Club’s ambivalence about the underweight male body as both socio-culturally conventional and yet transgressive.
The underweight male body is contradictorily positioned as simultaneously a product of late capitalist consumer society and a rejection of its excesses. As a symptom of insomnia contracted from long working hours and moonlighting, the Narrator and Tyler’s underweight bodies can be related to the loss of job security and de-unionising of labour in late twentieth-century American society. Its minimal weight can be seen as an outcome of the ‘single-serving’ culture of processed food and commodities that the Narrator encounters in his ‘tiny life’ while his and Tyler’s theft of body fat taken during liposuction reminds us that unnatural removal of body fat is a mainstream cultural norm. The irony of Tyler and the Narrator’s balking at the masculinity of an underwear model in a public ad for Calvin Klein is that their bodies are as excessively thin as his and that they display their bodies for other men as routinely and corporately as the model in their national boxing franchise. It is this ambiguous relationship between body and society that causes Vint and Bould to use the metaphor of ‘anorexia’ in relation to Fight Club since the disorder is associated with affluent Western societies yet a rejection of its conspicuous consumption (2009: 223). The authors also note that the film’s anorexic aspirations are undermined by its commodity fetishism, which accurately diagnoses its conflicting attitudes towards mainstream culture and society (2009: 227). Yet this social dialectic is not merely connected to the body by allegory but also by interactions of the underweight body with its socio-cultural contexts.
The underweight body also fights against the surplus consumption and melodramatic emotion of its society and culture. The Narrator is seen ordering a full set of Ikea furniture for his apartment from a catalogue while sitting on his bathroom toilet, the simultaneity of which sees his bingeing on commodities immediately repudiated into bodily waste and rejected by the reduced mass of his body. The Narrator and Tyler’s reconstitution of liposuction by-product as department store soap uses lost body fat to curb excessive consumption by making it part of one continuous cycle, and the process even ends up further taking from the body as the ‘chemical burn’ of the lye used to make the soap removes the Narrator’s flesh from his hand. The gross sentimentality of support group culture is represented through Bob’s obese body and excessively fatty ‘bitch tits’, seen in gargantuan close-up as he clutches the Narrator’s body to his breast(s), and which Norton with his small frame protests. Returning to Tudor, we can see this is an instance where disruption and decay of the male body creates a loss of cultural boundaries seen in terms of sex and gender (1995: 32). As the Narrator’s body disappears, it is met with Bob’s challenge to traditional male physicality and behaviour as an openly affectionate man with female breasts. Similarly, it is apparent that as Tyler is removed further and further from society with his guerrilla terrorist activities, his clothing becomes more androgynous and even feminine, as it begins to resemble Marla’s (Helena Bonham Carter) costuming.
Fig. 1: Tyler’s (Brad Pitt) feminised clothing in Fight Club (1999).
The underweight male body is presented as conducive to acts of cultural terrorism and vandalism. Tyler poisons the food in a high-end restaurant when working as a waiter by urinating and defecating in containers holding the various menu items. Both the bodily functions implicit in the act and those it will compel in the diners who consume the food may produce an underweight body. In fact, one of Tyler’s pranks on wealthy, conspicuous consumers is to make seagulls defecate on parked BMW cars, which consolidates the synonymy between bodily waste and cultural sabotage. The applicants for Tyler’s Project Mayhem who terrorise and destroy the property of the city’s financial elites are required to go without sleep or food for three days, deprivation that results in a significant loss of body weight. As all of Tyler and Project Mayhem’s attacks on dominant society are made under the cover of night, it is having a body that can function without sleep that permits subversion. The interconnectedness of the dieted, disciplined body with attacks on consumption and consumer goods demonstrates that Fight Club’s integration of the body and society disrupts cultural ideals observed by Featherstone which associate ‘body maintenance’ with the sale and fetishism of commodities (1982: 19), while preserving, through Pitt, the role of Hollywood cinema and stars to promote bodily discipline (1982: 23). Outside consumer culture, such a body is also resisting the social systems and services that provide a safety net for its citizens, as demonstrated when the Narrator refuses Marla’s (stolen) meals-on-wheels package.
Norton and Pitt’s bodies are clearly meant as parodies of contemporaneous male body images. The bodies themselves are impossibilities; sculpted muscular physiques cancelled out by anorexic levels of weight loss and emaciation, both of which are fetishised equally by lighting and close-up. Their grooming and washing in preparation for fights is undercut by the physical abnormality they receive as a result. It seems deliberate irony that the Calvin Klein model Tyler objects to has the same body that Pitt himself famously possessed, and still possesses here in miniature form. Though there was always a danger of Pitt’s stardom and pin-up status resulting in an objectification and eroticisation of Tyler’s underweight male body, the actor’s bodily preparations have permitted him to be a celebrity icon of male fitness and lifestyle in the media. Men’s blogs, books and magazines such as
Fitness B & W,
The Brad Pitt Diet and
Esquire identify Pitt’s
Fight Club body cultivation as an effective weight loss solution for men, the key to a coveted ‘metrosexual’ look and lifestyle (see Olesker 2015), and a sought-after celebrity physique (see Rawden 2014; Rhoades 2014). While the androgyny that the media associated with Pitt’s Tyler Durden image suggests that they recognise the loss of traditional masculinity implied by the underweight body, the focus in these articles on abnormally ‘low body fat percentage’ as the most desired quality of his look and shape indicates that its other transgressive qualities have not been acknowledged. The reaction to Pitt’s
Fight Club body exemplifies Featherstone’s argument that movie stars’ health regimes promote discourses of ‘body maintenance’ in consumer culture (1982: 24), even if the film may actually satirise it.
The Machinist
Trevor Reznik is a factory worker who claims to not have slept for over a year, resulting in a dramatic loss of weight. Insomnia is the primary cause of Trevor’s physical state, though the dénouement of the film reveals this in turn was the form his guilt and mental anguish took over killing a child in a hit-and-run accident. Trevor is played by Christian Bale, who dropped over sixty pounds in four months in preparation for the role using a combination of a strict, low-calorie diet and rigorous workouts. In the role, Bale appears with a completely gaunt face, upper body thoroughly emaciated – even ‘skeletal’ (Vint and Bould 2009: 222) – with visible ribs, severely contracted abdomen and an extremely narrow waist and hips. As Vint and Bould report, stories have mounted in the media about Bale’s excessive dieting, unhealthy consumption of drugs and alcohol, and weight loss surplus to the demands of the role (2009: 236). These anecdotes about Bale’s bodily suffering during production continue to circulate (mainly due to a recent interview with co-star Michael Iron-side), with testimony to his posterior muscles collapsing and losing more weight than necessary because of body mass index miscalculations. These are in keeping with the conflation of Bale’s star image with ‘will-to-body transformation’ (ibid.), evident in the recurrent loss and gain of weight and muscle for roles in movies such as Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005), The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010) and American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013). To wit, the majority of a 2008 BBC Wales Arts interview with Bale was spent discussing his weight and body transformations.
Though hardly necessary to do more than simply document Bale’s body for the audience to conceive how drastically underweight it is, the director chooses to magnify and accentuate the actor’s physique to the point of spectacle. Hence the body is shot predominantly in profile and often filmed without cut-aways, including a particularly gruesome long take in which Trevor stands at a right angle in an open kitchen doorway and Bale creates the illusion of his midriff disappearing for a second. Bale is frequently directed to reclining and bending poses, such as lying in bed (despite Trevor’s insomnia) and picking up clothes from the floor, allowing the audience to see bones and joints poke through the skin as they would the muscles of a circus strongman. The washed-out colour palette of the cinematography adds another element of gauntness to Bale’s skin while at points he is given ill-fitting shirts and trousers to hang off his body and reveal the stark contrast between his frame and an average body. The spectral colour and shadow of the film expressively aligns Trevor’s body with the supernatural, along with the association between Trevor and gothic monsters and underworlds as he descends into the sewers and compares himself to a werewolf. Some of the high-pitched radiophonic sounds on the incidental soundtrack reminiscent of classic B-movie science-fiction associate Trevor with audio filmic imagery of the extra-terrestrial. Curiosity value aside,
The Machinist carries through the notion that Trevor represents a transgression unknown to society.
Fig. 2: Trevor’s (Christian Bale) body in profile in The Machinist (2004).
Trevor’s body comes about as a result of contraventions of society’s laws, conventions and routines. By refusing to sleep and continuing to work, he defies organised patterns of labour, rest and time which produce a body dually worn down by manual toil and a lack of physical recovery. Vint and Bould correctly identify ‘the horror of a body reduced to mere labour power’ as a critique of ‘alienation’ in late capitalist labour (ibid.), which conforms to the authors’ impression of Trevor’s condition as, like anorexia, ‘a disease of affluent, industrialised societies’ (2009: 225). However, Trevor/Bale’s physical state more than ‘materially embodies’ labour orthodoxy; it is a consequence of him challenging it. Vint and Bould have it that Trevor’s ‘starvation’ is a bodily protest against his powerlessness and slavery in industry, revealing the truth of what capitalism does to workers’ bodies (2009: 231–2). These concepts are clearly present in the relationship of Trevor’s body to industrial labour, but are configured differently than the authors have suggested. Trevor’s co-worker Miller (Michael Ironside) is a better example of what capitalist industry does to workers’ bodies, having to suffer being maimed before his bosses will pay him a salary he can live on comfortably and relying on the safety net provided to him through workers’ insurance and union membership. Trevor’s ‘starvation’ (Vint and Bould 2009: 231), on the other hand, demonstrates the dangers of being an individual that dares to live outside the ordered system of mechanised labour.
As we learn that Trevor’s insomnia is a consequence of killing a young boy in a car accident and fleeing the scene, we encounter the possibility that his emaciated body is an effect of committing a violent crime against law and conventional morality that has gone unpunished. The final shot of Trevor falling asleep on the hard bed of a police cell once he has confessed confirms that this illegal, amoral act created his present body. We can add to this Trevor’s flouting of sexual criminal law and traditional morality by having sex with a prostitute during his sleepless nights, which perpetuates the insomnia that forges his body. In relation to gender, we can see that the lifestyle which maintains Trevor’s underweight body runs counter to his participation in heteronormative behaviour and accepted masculine practices. Trevor refuses to engage in homosocial rituals such as drinking in bars or going fishing with his male co-workers. We note from the co-workers’ conversations that he once did accept invitations and later see a photograph feature a slightly overweight Trevor from previous years with co-worker Reynolds on a fishing trip.
3 The disparate body size in the photograph suggests that Trevor’s skeletal physique negates his ability to partake in male culture. Trevor’s body has none of the ‘substitute phallic powers’ that Lehman argues can re-masculinise a flawed male body (2007: 13), underscored by the impossibility of becoming a patriarch in his current condition as he merely fantasises a domestic life with single mother Marie (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).
Vint and Bould make a compelling case that Trevor’s body manifests a ‘resistance to alienation’ of ‘labour conditions’ (2009: 229, 230) and the way the action plays out against a background of worker dissent, union unrest and industrial accidents gives their assumptions credence. However, the underweight male body is not just a site of industrial malaise but of wider cultural concerns and gender problems and tensions. Trevor’s emaciated body dispels late capitalist society’s myth of ‘body maintenance’ combatting ‘deterioration and decay’ as well as concomitant associations in consumer culture of ‘slimness’, ‘energy’ and ‘vitality’ (Featherstone 1982: 18, 25). Bale’s lack of muscle prevents the symbolic associations of men’s bodies with the phallus and, in turn, male power that Dyer has discussed in relation to the male pin-up (1982: 66) while his anorexic-like appearance displays the absence of a strong male body that is synonymous with a loss of patriarchal power and control. Furthermore, Trevor’s transgressive body challenges normalised paradigms of social protest. His socio-cultural transgressions are seen in contrast to conventional forms of deviancy, such as drinking, drugs and illicit sex, as well as means of defying social restrictions like suing employers or hedonism through bodily excess. He is dislocated from both his co-workers’ conversations about drinking and illicit sexual encounters, and his own encounters with public sex, drink and drugs at the Boiler Room bar. Trevor does not seek to profit from his employers for his damaged work body as Miller did and is antithetical to the gratuitous eating, intoxications and reckless driving of his imaginary alter-ego Ivan (John Sharian).
Bale’s diet and body would not, of course, become the cult object of lifestyle and fitness that Pitt’s similarly gruelling exercise regimes and underweight physical form in
Fight Club did but nor did it do what dangerous weight loss did for Matthew McConaughey in legitimating his worth as an actor. This is perhaps due to playing a character whose body suffers through vice rather than illness, or Bale’s masochistic approach to visceral authenticity in performance backfiring by alienating critics rather than impressing them. Online articles accuse Bale of trivialising eating disorders (see Gonzalo 2013) while critic Roger Ebert’s 2008 review of
The Machinist expresses confusion and worry about Bale’s condition rather than praise for his efforts. Nonetheless, the process of losing body mass in preparation for a role and appearing onscreen underweight in
The Machinist helped Bale to forge a celebrity image and brand in the media as an actor who endures physical punishment to undergo bodily transformations for roles, consolidated by his ‘bulking up’ for
Batman Begins and weight gain for
American Hustle. This in turn elevated Bale to the status of the American ‘Method’ elite within the acting and critical community, known and praised for changing themselves physically to inhabit their characters as fully as possible. When extreme weight loss was aligned to a character with a sickness beyond his control, as with his portrayal of drug-addicted ex-boxer Dickie Eklund in
The Fighter, Bale was endorsed by the Hollywood establishment with a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award.
4Dallas Buyers Club
Based on a historical person, Ron Woodruff is an electrician, small-time criminal and rodeo cowboy in Texas in the mid-1980s who contracts the HIV (and later the AIDS) virus as a result of sex with drug-using women. To portray Ron and his illness, Matthew McConaughey dropped around forty pounds using a controlled diet without exercise. McConaughey is transformed from previous appearances in film, even compared to movies made immediately prior to
Dallas Buyers Club in which he cosmetically contaminated his clean-cut image.
5 The transformation is particularly noticeable on parts of the body which made McConaughey an object of erotic desire. His handsome face has become gaunt around the neck and cheekbones now protrude. The actor’s idolised muscular torso becomes narrow and long. McConaughey looks even thinner towards the end of the movie, an effect achieved by adding minor make-up and prosthetics in earlier scenes to make the actor appear to lose weight as his condition worsens (see Miller 2014). As in
Fight Club and
The Machinist, the director uses compositional techniques to underline the loss of body beyond the physical change of a celebrity actor. McConaughey is costumed in oversized clothing throughout the film to emphasise the disparity between the sufferer body and both character and actor in a healthier state, particularly the large Stetson hat which hides his face and dwarfs his body. The director often poses McConaughey’s body against columnar lines in frame to demonstrate his stretched torso, such as ceiling beams and the bars of bullpens in the rodeo stadium.
Unlike the other underweight bodies in this chapter where they are the impact of psychological problems, the movie associates McConaughey virus-wasted physique with imagery of promiscuity and AIDS, locating it within the inter-social and medical causes of its condition. It is first seen writhing in intercourse with two anonymous women in the bleachers of a rodeo ring and again later prior to another
ménage à trois in Ron’s trailer. His gaunt face and droopy moustache makes his body a clone of the famous newspaper photograph of Rock Hudson dying from AIDS which Ron and his friends see following the actor’s death. Further connections can be made through Hudson’s portrayal of a macho Texan in
Giant (George Stevens, 1956) and parallels between Ron’s character arc and Hudson’s biographical journey from iconography of masculinity to that of suffering and homosexuality. As Ron comes to terms with his HIV, Kenny Rogers’ version of ‘Ruby Don’t Take your Love to Town’ plays on the soundtrack which aurally brings in popular culture signifiers of promiscuous behaviour and lifestyle. Such associations, however, are consonant with a loss of masculinity and even feminisation. We see that virility implies a loss of the strong male body that Lehman argues are compatible in normative representations of men’s bodies (2007: 11). The comparison to Hudson questions the veracity of Ron’s heterosexuality and alpha-male tendencies. If Rogers’ song is an allegory, Ron is Ruby, a character whose permissive sexual activity has led them astray, and thus re-positioned as a female object.
Ron’s underweight body signifies the undoing of archetypal modes of traditional masculine behaviour. It is telling that his bodily weakness makes him unable to fight, seen as he swings and collapses both at the hospital porter who refuses him drugs and then at his co-workers in a bar. The ‘potential for action’ Dyer sees as crucial in demonstrating gender power in representations of the male body is thus inhibited and further shows the underweight body at odds with masculine imagery (1982: 67). Ron’s semi-legal sale of contraband drugs to HIV and AIDS victims following self-treatment immerses him in homosexual male community and culture, whether in support groups or gay clubs and bars. This is yet another reason he keeps his Stetson hat on throughout the movie, since it relates to both heterosexual and gay iconography and naturalises his passage from ‘straight’ mainstream culture to homosexual subculture. Ron’s descent to a suffering body brings about a loss of the working-class, agrarian, South-western machismo that supports and stabilises an understanding of his own masculinity. He is ostracised by friends and colleagues who communalise that identity and instead surrounds himself with men who identify themselves as effeminate or transgender, such as mid-operative transsexual Rayon (Jared Leto). His business venture compels Ron to pose as social types outside of his status, regionalism and morality, such as jet-setting corporate executives and priests. As Tudor observed of horror cinema, Ron’s ‘bodily disintegration and collapse’ equates to a loss of the fixed boundaries between the body and the social world (1995: 29).
Fig. 3: Ron’s body and gay subculture, in Dallas Buyers Club (2013).
Once again, this body type is synonymous with socio-cultural transgression. The opening scenes contort Ron’s body in a litany of petty crime and illegality: gambling, con artistry, assaulting police officers, drug abuse. Given that Ron is identified with promiscuous sex from the outset, his physical suffering is seen in light of a breach of social contracts and moral standards around monogamy and abstinence. This is where Dallas Buyers Club differs from The Machinist and Fight Club. The (somewhat) subversive uses of underweight male bodies in The Machinist and Fight Club jar with the moral conservatism of Dallas Buyers Club’s representation of an unnatural physical state caused by a deviant and perverse lifestyle. Ironically, the former movies are far more sympathetic to the conditions of their protagonists even though they derive solely from their own proclivities rather than an unfortunate and unknowable disease. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Ron is seen to use his body to disturb the sanctity of another morally high social institution – the Church – as he repeatedly costumes as a priest to get banned drugs over the Mexican/American border. Ron’s transgressions are only forgiven when he uses his disregard for law and systems to protest federal strictures prohibiting drugs that could prolong the lives of HIV and AIDS patients. This, along with Ron’s rejection of Food and Drug Administration-approved food to fulfil the mainstream-culture endorsed ideal of ‘body maintenance’ to promote health and prevent decay (Featherstone 1982: 18), are the terms under which his meagre body is acceptable.
The maintenance of Ron’s body depends on abnegation of normative social behaviour. He refuses, unlike the majority of Americans then and now, to eat processed food, preventing his body from further health problems but maintaining his weight. His body defies casual faith citizens have in the American medical establishment, in its various corporate, federal and physician forms. Ron challenges the canon of FDA medicine approval, doctor prescription and private drug sale that conspires to give cell-killing AZT to HIV/AIDS patients. His depleted body speaks of a resistant survival over not just AIDS but also AZT. Ron’s body marks his induction into the world of AIDS survival, which comes with a rejection of the widely-held (even by Ron himself) homophobia and bigotry within the heterosexual majority. While it is ambiguous as to whether Ron repudiates his prejudice (at the level of screenplay he does not), acts of the body within the movie suggest this has happened on a symbolic level. Firstly, there is Ron’s physical restraint of estranged friend T.J. (Kevin Rankin) forcing the homophobe to shake Rayon’s hand, and then Rayon herself, whose gaunt body and pale skin (Leto also lost over forty pounds for the role) is strikingly similar to McConaughey’s as Ron.
6 In a less progressive vein, Ron’s contempt for heteronormative relationships (marriage, monogamy, intercourse with one partner) is deemed responsible for his continually declining body, with his decision to pursue a tawdry sex life against a relationship with Doctor Eve (Jennifer Garner) emphasised as his body wastes further. While Ron’s return to promiscuity can be seen as him attempting to regain his former masculinity, his failures to maintain physical strength and virility in his later encounters with prostitutes suggests no traditional masculine identities are available to him in his underweight body.
The image of McConaughey as a limited, bland actor cultivated by his appearances in a succession of critically panned movies in culturally derided genres such as romantic comedy was in remission before
Dallas Buyers Club after acclaimed performances as complex, challenging characters in sophisticated, innovative independent cinema such as
Killer Joe (2011) and
Mud (2012). It is clear, however, from media reports that McConaughey’s thinned-down performance as Ron Woodruff ‘capped’ his ‘critical resurgence’ (Brooks 2014). He received the Best Actor Academy Award as extreme weight loss to play an AIDS victim adhered to Academy conventions for prestigious screen performance based on a glamorous star transforming themselves to the detriment of their appearance to play a ‘worthy’ character with disability or illness.
7 As with Bale, weight transformation allowed McConaughey to be considered a legitimate ‘Method’ actor but unlike the former, who has been taken seriously from early (childhood) performances, critics were clear that the weight loss signalled a career shift to more thought-provoking acting material (see Riley 2014).
8 Consistent with the reaction to Bale’s weight loss, there were reservations, with some commentators calling it ‘dangerous’ (Lipton 2014), but McConaughey allayed these anxieties by suggesting in various interviews the worthiness of playing a character with a serious illness (see Percival 2012) and suggesting the process produced in him better citizenry and more engaged cultural membership, in finding sources of recreation and mental stimulation other than eating (see Gusmaroli 2014). McConaughey finds this to parallel Ron’s increased social responsibility through weight loss (see Masters 2014). This underlines the irony of McConaughey’s increased cultural status through a transgressive body in film.
Conclusion
Though each movie discussed above wields the transgressions of underweight male bodies differently, in all instances it is identified with liminal spaces outlying the mainstream of society. In
Fight Club, the Narrator and Tyler are found in abandoned, dilapidated houses on the edge of town and fighting in the basements of nightclubs.
The Machinist has Trevor spending his nights sitting in a diner caught in a limbo between reality and fantasy or a prostitute’s apartment, and heads into the city’s sewers. With
Dallas Buyers Club, it is Ron conducting his business and life in trailer parks and motel rooms, closed rodeo rings and gay subculture bars. All bodies are identified with planes and airports. In each case, the underweight body is embedded in transgression, especially in regards to masculinity, but there are varying degrees to which these are transgressive texts.
The Machinist uses Trevor’s body to warn against going outside social boundaries but nonetheless it exposes the conventionality of other forms of cultural rebellion.
Fight Club may be uncertain about whether underweight male bodies are products of or protests against millennial society, but that dialectic only enhances the movie’s subversion of contemporary culture.
Dallas Buyers Club is more conservative in its estimation of the possibilities for the underweight male body to transgress socio-cultural norms, only supporting the populist protests and condemning any cultural critiques outside of a Calvinistic moral code. However, it is the extra-textual responses to the actors’ bodies that really jeopardise their transgressive qualities.
The preparatory weight loss and screen exploitation of an underweight body has brought Brad Pitt, Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey to the fore of popular culture as idols of acting, art, fitness and lifestyle. This would seem to travesty the diegetic meanings of their bodies, which are to be or discuss transgressions of dominant society and culture. Through their uses of the body, culture has made them models of masculinity and professionalism when onscreen their bodies challenge gender certainty and offscreen actions irresponsibly promote health problems in the public eye. While we should not generalise about the significance of the underweight male body in recent American cinema – in All Things Fall Apart it really is the means to an end for playing a cancer sufferer and nothing more – we can say with some confidence that it is a commonly-used vehicle for exploring transgressive acts and ideologies. It breaks with established representations of the male body, typically transgressing gender boundaries and symbolic masculinity. What distinguishes the transgressive underweight male body from other cinematic exploitations of the body as a discourse of society is that we do not need frameworks like genre, gender stereotype, academic paradigms and allegorical reading in order to see it. The rejection of socio-cultural norms is inscribed onto the underweight male body, the way it moves and acts, and interacts with mise-en-scène and context, as if each instance was tattooed on.
Notes
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