Hairspray and Fat Pig

On Wednesday, I went on a pirate ship to cruise the Halifax harbour in Nova Scotia. But that’s not what this entry’s about.

So my family and I went to see the “Hairspray” movie a couple weeks ago. And then I convinced a friend to come see Breathing Time Theatre’s production of Neil LaBute’s play “Fat Pig”. The stories share one major plot point: a thin, supposedly (according to all the other characters) handsome guy falls in love with a fat woman. And they share one major theme: our culture judges fat people harshly, and that’s wrong.

In “Hairspray”, this unfairness is happily remedied by the fact that, secretly, everyone but the prissy high-society snob is completely OK with people of different sizes and shapes and colours. Which, you know, is nice, but not exactly… uh… helpful or true or thought-provoking. On the other hand, “Fat Pig” tries almost too hard to be in-your-face and hard-hitting. In case you couldn’t tell by the title. Every character is an asshole except the fat woman, Helen, who is Practically Perfect except (as the other characters tell the audience at every opportunity) for the fact that she’s, you know, fat.

Tracy, the main character in “Hairspray”, really, really wants to be just like everyone else. She spends forever primping her hair into a Jackie Kennedy-esque flip. She dresses like the popular “nicest kids in town”. This girl’s biggest goal in life is to be accepted into the select clique of cool kids who get to dance on TV every afternoon. And, when she finds out the black kids at her school don’t have the opportunity to do that, she fights for them to have that chance. Because they’re great dancers, too! They’re cool in the conventional, accepted way, but people won’t acknowledge it! It’s not fair! No one can help being different! Why can’t everyone join the mainstream?

Helen, in contrast, would rather die than join the mainstream. She’s a punkish librarian with streaked hair. She’s forward and brash and takes the upper hand in social situations. She’s happy to try strange foods; she likes obscure war movies. A great deal of time is spent establishing that she’s different in every way from every single person her love interest, Tom, has ever known. In his life. Or even outside his life, in pre-living-soul-land before he was born or whatever, because she’s THAT special.

The actress playing Helen has to share some of her confidence, too. Whereas “Hairspray” reserves its most potentially embarrassing scenes for a performer who isn’t putting his self-image on the line (remember the whole John Travolta thing? So what if he doesn’t make an attractive woman? He’s a man – he’s not supposed to), “Fat Pig” purposely – and provocatively – calls for Helen to be hugely obese and still appear onstage in a negligee and a bathing suit. Why not just stick a sign on her back that says “JUDGE ME”? It’s like the playwright and director are using the actress as well as the character to drive home their point: it’s easy to dismiss nasty thoughts you have about a fictional character, but that body onstage is real. It’s not a fat suit; it belongs to someone. When you laugh at the jokes the other characters make, you’re laughing at a real person. How do you like them apples, plebs? Do you understand the artistic merit? DO YOU?

I kid, because, overall, I did like “Fat Pig” better. It raises some interesting questions by focussing not on Helen herself, but on Tom and the way he experiences society’s prejudices against her. It also does not gloss over the ugliness: LaBute tries at every turn to catch you off-guard with shiny, witty characters who are fun and funny but say and do the awfullest things. He paints a picture of people as basically nasty with a veneer of nice to keep society going – even if he does push his portrayal a bit overboard, it’s still something to think about. And, above all, he doesn’t make it easy for the audience by making Helen an innocent victim.

Through its parallel plotlines, “Hairspray” suggests being fat is just like being black: something a person is born with, something that isn’t intrinsically bad or good, something that is unfairly and irrationally looked down upon by biased, flawed bigots. You wouldn’t wonder why someone of a different race doesn’t knuckle down and change her skin colour; why would you expect someone of a different size to change his weight?

And, hey, according to certain studies, there may be truth in that. But the fact of the matter is, people don’t discriminate against overweight people the same way they discriminate against African-Canadians. People don’t blame a person for being black; they blame a person for being fat. As “Fat Pig” opens, Helen is sitting on a cafeteria stool, stuffing her face with pizza. As she tells Tom, she doesn’t care what people think she should eat or how much they want her to exercise. It is her body, the play seems to be arguing, and the point is not that she could be thin but that, whether by choice or by fate, she is the way she is, and she’s happy with it.

Tolerance means more than accepting that some people are different through qualities they cannot change, like skin colour or age. Tolerance means that, even if I decide to be Jewish and you decide to be Muslim; even if a homosexual man really does “choose” to be gay or an overweight person to be fat; even if everyone in the world suddenly becomes shape-shifting, history-less creatures who can alter their personalities, bodies, and beliefs at will, we can still treat each other with the respect and dignity due to every human being.

PS. It’s true that there are some choices that can’t be accepted: in “Hairspray”, Michelle Pfeiffer’s character chooses to be a conniving bigot who seduces other women’s husbands. In “Fat Pig”, Tom’s friend Carter chooses to be a winning but shallow cad. How can anyone suggest accepting a serial killer or pedophile as “who they are” when their actions, chosen or not, hurt others? Well, I don’t know. But I think any sort of tolerance worth having is one that is thoughtful and complex enough that there’s no easy answer to problems like these.

Or, in other words:

Yourrrrrrr mom!

I swear I’m not normally this repetitively piratical…