Issue #31: Paradise Hope and Thin

A body horror double feature.

CW: eating disorders, weight measurements, suicidal ideation (but in a fun way!)

Bonjour les filles,

Let’s talk about the body—specifically, body horror. It’s a genre that zeroes in on our anxiety about the fragility of our bodies and pushes it to the extreme. The body is mutated and mutilated until it is unrecognizable, until it becomes something evil. But what if body horror is your daily existence?

Listen, I may be an All-American, girl-next-door, Maxim Hometown Hottie-type, but even I have struggled to accept my body (pause for an uproarious 10-minute applause break).

For most of my life, I saw my body as an obstacle to my happiness. It was something I needed to destroy, hack-away at, beat into submission. I just knew if my collar bones and knee caps could poke out far enough, if my hip bones would emerge from their fleshy prison, and if my waist were the circumference of my Avril Lavigne “Let Go” CD, then I could be loved. I wouldn’t need to scrounge for the acceptance I so craved. If I could just be BEAUTIFUL…

In my preteen brain, I decided solution was to stop eating. And when people started to notice, I just moved on to purging—it’s much easier to hide. That turned into bingeing and purging. Then back to restriction veiled as a “healthy eating.” I’m 5’10”—at that height, doctors typically recommend women don’t drop below 135lbs. At the peak of my illness, I hovered around 115lbs. I fell below 110lbs on really good days. I vowed that if I ever hit 120lbs, I’d just mercy kill myself. At 120lbs, I’d be so far gone, what would be the point?

I am able to recall that mental state so well. For about 10 years of my life, my body consumed most of my thoughts. Now, I’m probably down to 20% of my thoughts being about my body. The thoughts are much less violent. I’d even say many of them are positive, gentle, encouraging thoughts. But I’m still queen of lifting my shirt 15 times a day to look at my stomach. This, for me, is progress.

I went to an all-girls school where eating disorders grew on trees. We celebrated our mutual self-destruction, shared tips on how to harm ourselves. Hating our bodies was as Common as Tiffany Haddish’s boyfriend. I know, bad right? But no, that’s not the thing. The thing that really pisses me off is how badly the adults in our life failed us. The rampant fatphobia we saw TERRIFIED us. Every piece of evidence I had collected by the age of 12 pointed to the conclusion that, the greater your weight, the worse your life. Fat is bad. Being fat is bad. Being fat makes you bad. You are fat because you are bad. Hear that enough times and it’s no wonder you end up 15 years old, 115 lbs, and convinced that every pound you carry is evidence of your badness.

That’s the torture of an eating disorder. It’s not the threat of your organs shutting down—I literally couldn’t have given two shits about that at the time. It’s living perpetually in this hell of acute self-hatred. You destroy yourself because you are convinced you are something that needs to be destroyed.

This is a very long way of saying “this week’s double feature is all about women being fucked up about their bodies.” But I think it’s important to note that this is the context in which I came to these films. These are not just films I like, they’re films that helped me find my personhood again. They helped me understand that, while I may be crazy, I might not be the crazy one. So let’s get into it. This week, we have (what I’m calling) a body horror double feature:

Paradise: Hope and Thin

HIGHBROW

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy is—and I can’t stress this enough—very BAE. And not just because you can reduce my entire love of film into this one tweet. Sure, the whole trilogy is about women Desperately Seeking Personhood. And sure, I’m partial to an independent European film about a troubled teen in deep pain. And yeah, I love it when a fictional teen’s sexual awakening is horror and fear disguised as desire. And when the love interest is an age-inappropriate predator cloaked in the gleaming infallibility of a teen girl’s infatuated gaze? J’adore.

Why? That’s for me to not bring up in therapy.

Paradise: Hope delivers on all of those fronts and more. The film follows the story of 13-year-old Melanie at a “diet camp” while her mom is on vacation in Kenya (refer to Paradise: Love for that adventure). And in between the exercise drills, the uninspiring meals, and the constant humiliation, Melanie lives her 13-year old life. So what if her 13-year-old life involves downing Jägermeister in the bathroom before a night out? My 13-year-old life was mostly me reading manga solely for the boobs. Turns out, being 13 is a universally psycho experience.

I know there’s kind of an assault on films that engage with the sexuality of young girls right now (google “Cuties discourse” if you want to ruin your day). And it may be uncomfortable to watch, but it’s real. Throughout the film, Melanie receives so many different messages about her body—it’s good, it’s bad, it’s sexy, it’s repulsive, it’s a reflection of her morality. Sexuality is her respite from that noise. Is it the healthiest coping mechanism? Likely not. Is it the easiest rung of validation to reach for? If you’re already being sexualized in the first place, sure!

No one’s arguing that these are safe impulses or situations. But to deny girls their sexuality—or to label it as the problem—is to burden them with shame and confusion. These are the seeds of victim-blaming. So let’s stop having “discourse” and let’s talk about how we can guide kids through their very normal feelings.

Anyways, forgot to mention that Paradise: Hope is bloody gooorjus too.

Rent that shit on Prime or YouTube.

LOWBROW

The problem with this HIGHBROW/LOWBROW schema is that sometimes you want to recommend two things that aren’t lowbrow but you’ve already boxed yourself into this dichotomy you don’t even believe in to begin with. So you have to call a masterful film documenting in-patient eating disorder recovery “lowbrow” with the only justification that people mistake disordered eating for “extreme dieting” and dieting is lowbrow because diet is girly and girly is stupid because… small brain? Have less bone density? I honestly can’t keep track anymore.

Thin is not for the faint of heart. It’s ruthless. It puts all the ugliness of disordered eating right in your face. The indifference to the self, the fear of rejection, and the degree to which you’ll mangle your body to avoid it. You’re watching people who deeply, deeply hate themselves (#relatable) in an environment that asks for their complete vulnerability. And somehow, filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield takes these horrors and makes them beautiful.

There’s no beauty in hunching over a toilet bowl, heaving until your stomach is past empty and your throat is raw. But Greenfield is able to document that, and the many other painful moments of recovery, with beauty because she is beautiful. Her gaze is compassionate, non-judgmental, understanding—basically everything I wish I were met with when I was hunched over my own toilet bowl. Ego so often encroaches on filmmakers’ work (don't get me wrong—I love and do that too), but feels so absent in this film. There’s no “take,” no declaration of how we are meant to live our lives. Greenfield just meets her subjects with an abundance of grace. And how beautiful that is to witness.

Obviously this movie comes with every possible trigger warning related to self-harm. If you’re not up for it, I get it. I just think we all deserve documentaries that aren’t just talking heads cut with stock footage telling us about how thoroughly effed we are.

You can watch Thin on HBO or YouTube. Or even here but shhh you didn’t hear that from me.

(btw, all the images above are from Greenfield’s incredible photo collection of the same name).

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Thank you for sitting through this. Regardless of my own stuff, these films are really quite stunning. If you take anything away from this, let it be that Ulrich Seidl and Lauren Greenfield are stupid talented.

And to all the grown adults that keep blaming kids for their illnesses, you can eat my full, entire ass (don’t worry, it is low-cal).

xoxo,

Simone

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P.S. If you’re an American of voting age, I highly suggest you request your absentee ballot and vote as early as possible. You can go here to check the early voting options in your state. I also donated to the Movement Voter Project’s Big 5 Battleground Fund, which funds organizations working to build voting infrastructure in battleground states—if that’s your vibe, vibe with me.