Obesity

Over at The Colonic there was an excellent entry about the upcoming movie “Norbit” starring Eddie Murphy. The entry lambasted the movie for its negative portrayal of an obese woman and her sexuality. While the focus of that entry was more on sexuality, I was much more concerned about the choice of an obese person as the “annoying” and “unattractive” woman. This is not the first movie Eddie Murphy has made where the one of the characters was an obese person… “The Nutty Professor” anyone? After watching him speak about his movies on “Inside the Actors’ Studio” and the fact that he is obsessed with makeup transformations, I can understand why Eddie Murphy feels the need to make the movies but I cannot understand why anyone in the movie industry thinks that “Norbit” will make any money. From what I have seen of the movie trailers, the movie is littered with extremely absurd scenes with people flying off of water slides and other rote “funny” jokes.

Not only is the movie subject not funny, its portrayal of obese people as the butt of jokes and the way in which the woman is spoken about in the movie is not funny either. Obesity is such a serious health problem that it has been classified as a disease. Currently 30.5% of American adults are classified as obese. These people are at risk for major health problems such as heart attacks, strokes, and early death. Obesity has become a major health crisis that affects all regions of the world and all ethnicities. A thin man dressing up as an obese woman seems to be making light of this problem. Also mentioned over at The Colonic are the billboards with the slogan “Have you ever made a really big mistake?” This is incredibly insulting to any obese person because this slogan seems to infer that dating an obese woman is a big mistake.

Since some members of my family and some of my friends have struggled with obesity, this movie and its flippant dismissal of obese people as desirable makes me very angry. I was always taught to judge a person for what they had to offer on the inside (i.e. their personality) rather than their physical appearance. Unfortunately, the media through movies such as “Norbit” want to counter this teaching for some perverse reason unknown to any decent human being. I feel that the discrimination and abuse many obese people face is hindering American society as a whole and is another instance of civil rights abuse in the U.S. Thanks to the work of dedicated doctors, scientists, and activists, there have been major gains in the ways in which obese people are represented in the media but there is still a long way to go.