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Abstract
This project explores the careers, screen roles, and cultural significance of fat actors who achieved stardom in the classical American film industry. It focuses on the period of the industry's development from the emergence of the star system circa 1910 through the organization and expansion of the classical Hollywood cinema, a mode of production that dominated American narrative cinema to approximately 1960. The Hollywood studio system was organized around shared assumptions regarding business operations, storytelling, and cinematic style. It also maintained assumptions about corporeal beauty, and the motion pictures it produced were arguably the world's most influential discourses of the body. While setting standards of corporeal perfection, classical Hollywood cinema also mobilized "embodied deviance"—the belief that nonnormative bodies signified social deviance, moral turpitude, and a failure to "measure up." The fat body's visible difference offered filmmakers an easy way to depict a character's deviation from a healthy, wholesome American ideal. Fat types—such as the fat comedian, the fat cat, the fat mammy, the fat palooka, and the fat heavy—emerged and developed into familiar cinematic figures.
This project seeks to explain why these particular figures of the fat body became so pervasive, how they developed, and why their popularity fluctuated over the course of the studio era. Recognizing cinematic figures as dynamic, historically contingent entities, it explores their development and popularity through the examination of four discourses: (1) film industry discourse concerning production trends, genre conventions, casting, and marketing; (2) critical and biographical discourse regarding fat actors' performances and careers; (3) public health discourse postulating the causes and treatment of obesity; and (4) cultural discourse concerning corporeal representations of class and material inequality, which underwent major transitions during the economic upheavals of the Depression and World War II.
This study offers a way to understand the social, class-based origins of America's obsessive regulation of fat in the twentieth century. By examining the norms and narratives that figured the fat body in American cinema, it aims to reveal fat characters as voices of social articulation—voices that have seldom been heard in historical accounts of American cinema and culture.
