Anyone who listens in on Podcast #3 over at MovieSucktastic.com will hear me rant about Sam Raimi's recent return to the Horror genre, Drag Me to Hell.
For the most part, I enjoyed the film. It was fun, creepy, entertaining, and even the third act was little more than a rip-off of Night of the Demon, it felt refreshingly original in a market saturated with Franchise do-overs and Japanese Horror Cinema rehashes.
What I didn't care for, however, was the films almost subliminal (and completely unnecessary) and negative portrayal of fat people, or rather, Fat Kids.
In the film Alison Lohman plays Christine, an almost frail-looking bank clerk from a humble background with dreams of a bank job promotion and marrying into a wealthy, sophisticated family. When she decides to deny a mortgage extension to an elderly woman from the old country, she finds herself on the receiving end of a rather ugly gypsy curse. Hilarity ensues.
Characterization is an important part of any screenplay, and most dialogue and action is designed to impart some sort of knowledge about the character. However, these characteristics are also meant to be important to the plot, or the way in which the audience relates to the character.
So, as the film progresses, there are four scene that are 'subtly' inserted to imply that the beautiful, delicate, wafer-thin Christine once suffered from a childhood eating disorder:
1) In the opening of the film, Christine is shown pausing at a bakery window briefly to gaze longingly at the frosting-coated delicacies within. I love scenes like this that imply all people with weight issues have a tendency to congregate around pastry displays like recovered heroin addicts.
2) While cooking for her prospective in-laws, Christine comes across a poorly photo-shopped childhood picture of her as a young tubby girl in overalls, which she promptly crumbles up and throws away. First, you have to love the logic that the picture would be in an old cookbook, since she was a fat kid. Makes sense, right? Then there is the reasoning that formerly fat skinny people are enraged and disgusted by their childhood memories. Why wouldn't they be, they were fat, weren't they?
3) When greeted by the gypsy woman's granddaughter, she says to Christine "You were a fat little girl, weren't you? I can tell." In case you didn't get the hint from the cannoli coveting and cookbook photo album, the mean gypsy lady taunts her out loud so you get the idea that at one point in her life, this skinny little wall flower was a chunky monkey.
4) In two separate scenes in which Christine is facing certain death and possible homicide, she indulges in eating vast amounts of ice cream. Of course, both scenes are played for humorous effect. Because fat people eat in stressful situations, right? And that's funny!
This minor background character trait resurfaces repeatedly throughout the film in these few instances, but has no real baring on the plot or character development as a whole. Is Raimi just inserting little fat jokes throughout the film to lighten the mood or express some personal deep-seated hatred?
You see where Raimi is going with this, don't you? In order to enhance the character's inherent greed and selfishness, he's added a fat past and overeating into her personality and history. The tiny, practically anorexic character is given a past in which she was fat in order to make her less appealing, less likable, less sympathetic character.
Like I said, I liked the film. But I can't stomach this kind of stuff being passed of as character development in a film like Drag Me to Hell.
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