It was two days before Halloween. The perfect time to start Resident Evil Village. I had, for the first time in two years, a weekend largely to myself, and goddammit, I was going to play some spooky games. The opening scenes are tense and unexpected. The introduction to the Lords, including the much-memed Lady Dimetrescu, was delightfully campy. And then I met the Duke, a merchant whose immense fatness forms the bulk, pardon the pun, of his character. And I felt a sour taste rise up.
The Duke exists for a variety of reasons. He provides wry exposition to Ethan Winters, otherwise an outsider. As a merchant, he sells you valuable items. And he gives you direction in the sprawling village environment, marking your map with future quests.
He is also cartoonishly obese.
The Duke cannot move, you see. In Lady Dimetrescu’s castle, he lurks in the background of a room that can’t contain him. Otherwise, he rides in the back of a wagon, immobile. You even earn the game’s only permanent power-ups by feeding him.
Three days after Halloween, I saw Dune: Part One in theaters. I loved it. I loved the way director Denis Villeneuve used scale to give a sense of majesty to the intergalactic empire’s power. The decision to make so much of the designs originate in brutalist architecture gave the world an old, lived-in feeling that most cinematic science fiction lacks.
But there is a spectre haunting Dune for me, the spectre of Baron Harkonnen. I couldn’t not be aware of him, wondering what a modern incarnation might look like.
“You never met Harkonnens before.”
Baron Harkonnen is fat, you see. His fatness is his character, in some ways. In the book Dune, Herbert describes him as “Grossly and immensely fat.” His prediliction towards floating, one of the creepiest images Dune: Part One uses, is here a joke about his weight, as his legs are so weak they literally cannot hold up his staggering bulk.
In Harkonnen, his fatness means something. It is representative. Duke Leto dresses properly, acts properly. He is a proper man. The Bene Geseritt are secretive; their external appearance, faces enshrouded, matches this. Baron Harkonnen, on the other hand, is decadent. His fatness represents his inability to control his impulses. It is from here that his brutality comes in; he craves quantity, not quality. He ate until he could not walk. Just as the speed and brutality with which he harvested on Arrakis has brought the planet to a breaking point, so too has his appetite shattered his body.
Villeneuve’s film is more thoughtful about this, at least. His hovering here does not read to me as a man who cannot walk. Instead, Stellan Skarsgard’s Baron is a man who chooses to hover over all around him, an inhuman wraith. The film shrouds his bulk for the most part. But it also seeks to make his fatness almost inhuman. In discussing the reasoning behind the design of the fat suit they used for Skarsgard, Villeneuve said, “I wanted to feel the menace of that massive human being, and that weight.”
Dune: Part One has easily the most terrifying iteration of Baron Harkonnen I’ve seen. But even Villeneuve could not escape the immense gravity of the Baron’s body.
“They’re not human.”
It comes as little surprise that both Dune‘s Baron Harkonnen and Resident Evil Village‘s Duke are figures reminiscent of Old World nobility. Most of you have probably seen political cartoons about ‘fat cats’, obese wealthy political fixers and bankers. The kind of men who run the world. Many of these are references to specific historical figures.
See, once upon a time, it was hard to get fat. There simply… weren’t enough calories available. These representations of obese aristocrats stem from the fact that, to become obese, one often had to have incredible wealth. These cartoonists literalized the wealth they sucked up from working people in their physical forms. Obesity was a manifestation of existential greed. It still is, to many. This may be why so many liberals mocked Trump for his weight when he did so many other awful things, while conservative cartoonists erased his weight, replacing it with a more muscular physique in line with the way a ‘good’ person looks, to them.
But in the last century, things changed rapidly. Calories are comparatively easy to come by; time is not. Time is something you need in order to be in good shape: Time to exercise, time to cook, etc…. Now, when you look at many of the world’s wealthiest people, it’s rare to see someone who is obese, because men like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates — the kind of modern aristocrats who are sucking the world dry — they can buy time.
Many of us cannot. This leads to conflicting messages. Fatness (and poverty), it is believed by some, is a moral failing. We choose fatness, just as we choose to be poor. In this mindset, we choose depression and anxiety and not having the time to cook an elaborate meal or the energy to clean up after them. We are decadent.
And we must be controlled. Our hunger is rapacious. This is why WIC (food stamps) comes with bizarre and strict restrictions. Because you don’t deserve flavorful cheeses. We know you can’t control yourself around those nice cheeses. And yet, sit with that a moment, and the contradictions become clear. The wealthiest among us can have professional chefs craft nutritious meals without a thought — but it is the obese who are decadent? It is the poor who need to be controlled?
“They’re brutal.”
When I think about obesity in pop culture today, I often think back to Hades, which could imagine beauty in every color but only a single shape. I think back to Avengers: Endgame, which made Fat Thor a punchline without a joke. I think of the criticism of God of War: Ragnarok‘s portrayal of a chubbier Thor. Recently, I watched the excellent Paper Tigers on Netflix, which features numerous fat jokes at the expense of a guy who looks… perfectly average, honestly. Over the pandemic, I read a fantastic book, The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which featured Lord Ravencourt, a banker so obese he could barely move.
In the end, though, I always come back to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I think of Mac. Rob McElhenney gained a considerable amount of weight for season 7 of his sitcom; only to later lose it for another joke in which he would get absolutely shredded. On Instagram, McElhenney wrote the following:
Look, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from Magic Mike, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span. I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to.
– Rob McElhenney, on Instagram
McElhenney is, unexpectedly, the only person on the list who seems to understand how fatness interacts with society in any way. Mac gained weight as a commentary on how, the longer TV shows run, the better looking the stars get as salaries balloon and stylists come on board. He commented on that even more explicitly when he lost weight.
And yet, despite having the time and resources to live that lifestyle being incredibly, well, decadent, that form is seen as the platonic male ideal — as peak performance — while the Baron’s is seen as something monstrous, perhaps even inhuman.
This doesn’t make Dune: Part One a bad film. As I said, I was a big fan of the film. But it has been intriguing to watch the aftermath of the superhero body image shattering the self-image of men the world over. I don’t think it’s a mistake that there’s been a resurgence these last few years of fatness as a sign of weakness, of immorality, of avariciousness.
There’s hasn’t been a single time in my life when I’ve tried to take up jogging when I haven’t been openly mocked by someone on the street. I learned to cower inside myself a long time ago, to avoid being noticed, to avoid taking up space. It was as if by taking up less emotional space in a room, less social space, my body might somehow be rendered invisible. I did not want to be seen as Baron Harkonnen. I did not want my decadence, my appetite, acknowledged.
Even today, I crave an escape from the judgment. Boy, pop culture makes that hard sometimes, though.