An intro to @fatinfilm, by Grace Barber-Plentie
Why I started an Instagram page dedicated to fat people in film and TV
As both a sporadic film programmer and a full-time loser, my eye is always on the look-out for the smaller details in films and TV. No, I don’t mean clocking the best mise-en-scene or looking for inconsistencies and fun bits of trivia - I’ll leave that one to the white folk of Film Twitter ™ to do - rather, I’m looking out for the people who, despite most often being relegated to background roles, stand out. I’m looking for people that look like me.
The idea to start an Instagram focused on these background players came to me a couple of years ago when I watched a 70s Michelangelo Antonioni film called The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson. There’s a scene in the film where Nicholson’s character, who’s just assumed another man’s identity, meets with a man in a church - I don’t remember the why, but I do remember that man just happened to be one of the coolest Black men I’d seen on-screen in a long time. Naturally, he had only mere minutes of screen time. The more old films I watched, the more non-white people who had interesting background parts in older films I would spot. For example, there’s a plethora of non-white people in small parts in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. There’s the military wives band that form Hedwig’s backing band in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The women in the club in Beau Travail It’s just about looking hard enough for these people.
At the same time as having this idea for an Instagram that was focusing on highlighting underrepresented people (at this time, specifically non-white people in ‘Old Hollywood’ and Arthouse films) I came into my fatness. It sounds like a ridiculous term but that’s how it felt - after years of either deferring from the term, denying it and most crucially hating myself and the way I looked, I finally realised that this is who I am, and the way I looked, and I’d wasted enough time denying that and self-hating. It was time to love my fat self. Of course, all of this has been helped by surrounding myself both IRL and URL by amazing fat babes who have supported and uplifted me just by being unapologetically themselves (including the two founders of The Fat Zine!). And now that I was lovely being a fat person, it felt only right that as a programmer, I had a duty both to myself and to audiences to show them positive depictions of fatness and highlight fat actors.
When researching a shorts film screening I have coming up at the Barbican Centre (I initially approached their Emerging Curators scheme knowing purely that I wanted to programme something around ‘fatness in film’ but with no clearer idea than that) I was dismayed that the same films about fat people were coming up again and again. It’s great that we have Divine in John Waters films - plus a MUSICAL remake of Hairspray - and Rebel Wilson and Melissa McCarthy but I felt sure that there was more out there, more diverse representations of fatness. My mind thought back to films I’d seen over the years, whether they were films I’d watched as a kid such as Real Women Have Curves, The Sapphires which I’d adored as a teenager, or films I’d seen at film festivals like Objects Attack!, Burning Cane and Rocks. Sometimes just because these films weren’t about fatness meant that they weren’t acknowledged. But they still showed fat people living their lives, and that felt important!
And so, the Instagram began. It’s still a very new thing for me, mind, but what I love about it is that I feel like I’m using the programming/curation part of my brain but to create something that is constantly evolving and will act as an informative tool for people - rather than a one-off screening, it’s a whole host of films that fat folk can look over to see ourselves, whether that’s as heroes, villains, love interests, preachers, dancers, half octopus-half woman sea witches, or….. thicc AF robots. (Getting to post a picture of Aunt Fanny from the critically underrated kids film Robots after a picture from a Hitchcock film remains a highlight for me so far).
And while it’s early days so far, I already feel a sense of community around the page. Submissions and suggestions regularly come in, offering insights to genres of film and actors I’ve never even heard of before. Tomorrow I’ll post my 100th post, halfway through a week of Halloween celebrations where I’ve been posting fat witches, monsters, ghosts and the like all week. And I’m proud to say… I’ve not resorted to posting anyone in a fat suit yet. Long may it last.
You can follow Grace’s film account, @fatinfilm, here. Grace has also joined our team as contributing editor, so look out for more content coming soon!! <3
