Shallow Hal
Shallow Hal
I have memories of watching Shallow Hal on cable as a kid, when it enjoyed a heavy rotation on television. Back then I was too young to fully understand the cultural context and therefore the meaning of the jokes and the set-up, much like everything I watched around that age. However, it came on television about two years ago and I rewatched it. This time, as a plus-size woman who had experienced the U.S. dating scene, I understood the underlying messages. My gut instinct two years ago was to be offended by the movie and its premise. However, after rewatching it today, two years later, I found a new appreciation for the film.
The basic premise of Shallow Hal is that Hal (played by a young Jack Black) is a slightly overweight, short, average-looking white male striking out with white women. His problem? Hal (and his short, chubby, balding older friend) only pursue women that look like American supermodels: read young, tall, white and thin. The women they pursue are often much taller than Hal and his friend. Because of this dating preference, Hal doesn't have too much luck with women. On the other hand, his friend Mauricio is dating a woman that fits the description but he has to break up with her - because he noticed that "her second toe is like half an inch longer than her big toe." Cue the laughs - here the audience knows that the butt of the joke is the insidious shallowness, judgmental and sexist attitudes cisgender, heterosexual men harbor towards women.
Then comes the plot twist: Hal gets stuck in an elevator with a self-help guru and dishes his problems after yet another unsuccessful courtship of a woman. The self-help guru understands the situation and hypnotizes Hal into seeing women's inner beauty instead of their outer beauty. In other words, Hal sees women with good hearts as very physically attractive and women with hearts of ice as physically unappealing. Hilarious hijinx ensue in which Hal pursues societally undesirable/unattractive women because he sees them as supermodels, while his good pal Mauricio becomes increasingly perplexed. "You didn't become irresistible to women! You started desiring the undesirable!" - Mauricio to Hal after the jig is revealed. Significantly, ugly women are portrayed here as obese/plus-size women and thin women with bushy eyebrows and big noses (read: non-Western European facial features). Even after this more sympathetic re-viewing, my heart hurts for the actresses who had to embody ugliness and undesirable women in this film.
The film culminates in Hal falling in love with Rosemary, who is played by actress Gwyneth Paltrow. This is what offended me about the film when I watched it two years ago. Paltrow, a tall, thin, blonde, very-white woman (replete with Western European facial features and described by the movie's producers as "a classic American beauty"), is the physical manifestation of character Rosemary's heart of gold. After a slew of surreptitious clues about Rosemary's true appearance, she is revealed to be Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit. This is highly insulting and unfair to obese/plus-size women: in a movie/film industry that does not hire overweight/plus-size/obese women or people generally, a conventionally attractive woman dons a fat suit to play one. To me, this is vaguely reminiscent of when white actors would wear blackface to play people of color in old Hollywood movies. A thin woman playing a fat character by wearing a fat suit in a film industry that otherwise refuses to hire people of size is the very embodiment of sizeism.
That being said, I admit I enjoyed Paltrow's performance because she played the role of an undesirable woman quite well - she makes it believable that she is Rosemary and not just Gwyneth in a fat suit. However, her presence and the representation of women in the movie overall tends to uphold beauty standards instead of deconstructing them - but then what else could I expect from a Hollywood film engineered by white, cisgender, heterosexual men? Given these circumstances and in comparison to its peers, Shallow Hal did quite well. As in, this social critique from 2001 still applies to American society and film today. Shallow Hal not only included people of size (albeit in miniscule roles, negatively represented and with Paltrow in a fat suit) but also had positive representation of people with disabilities: an actor with spina bifida had a prominent role. The film also showed children in a hospital's Burn Victims Unit (although like the Paltrow situation, the girl with burn scarred-skin had just gone through special effects makeup). The idea is to make the audience question their attitudes towards and treatment of people considered undesirable in our society, not limited to people of size, disabled people and people with other physical imperfections. A vast majority of the films Hollywood released after Shallow Hal continue to star conventionally attractive people (read: white, thin, cisgender, heterosexual, abled, young people) while normalizing this decision.
My re-viewing of Shallow Hal also made me reevaluate how we as a society can be shallow in our view of attractiveness and desirability in men. In terms of attractive men, the first thing that comes to my mind and what I usually see women crushing on/dating are tall, fit men with chiseled jaw lines and visually aesthetic faces. Have I ever had a crush on someone who looks like Hal? (No. But I have crushed on/dated overweight men and/or short men of color). Would I ever consider dating someone in their 40s who looks like Mauricio? It makes me realize that shallow physical attraction is a two-way street - although men have the upper hand because the emphasis on their looks is not at the magnitude it is for women. Men can more easily get away with not being beautiful while a lot of women's gender role is being socialized to be pretty and physically appealing to men. The beauty standards and judgment meteorically rise for gender non-conforming people who are constantly scrutinized and whose bodies and appearances are questioned because they do not have archetypal, recognized roles in American or other societies, like men and women do.
Being a plus-size woman of color, I enjoy a fair share of fat jokes - as long as they are done right and are subversive deconstructions of systems of power instead of upholding them a la The Mindy Project. The Mindy Project was a coup-d'état because it was the first primetime television show to star a South-Asian person and it starred a dark-skinned Indian-American woman of size. Kaling mastered the fat joke in that show and demonstrated how it could be done without being inherently offensive. She also had to jump through a staggering number of obstacles to even get the show created, and it went on to be canceled after 3 seasons on Fox before getting picked up by Hulu. What does it say about American society, film and television that 17 years after Shallow Hal was created, there is still a dearth of people of color, people of size, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA people acting in TV shows and movies?
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