In this scene from the movie “Get Smart“, Steve Carrel, playing Maxwell Smart, asks a fat woman to dance. The audience presumably expects a routine making fun of how clumsy a fat woman dancing is; the twist is that she dances wonderfully.
(In “Get Smart,” there are also a few brief fat suit gags — flashbacks to Steve Carrel’s character before he lost weight. Those uninspired gags, where were another instance of The Absent Fatso, aren’t the subject of this post.)
The fat woman is played by the wonderful Lindsay Hollister, an actress with a fat-positive attitude who I’m always glad to see in a role. Hollister enjoyed the part:
Especially being, obviously, a big girl and a character actress, these kinds of roles don’t come up often, especially in such a huge film.
To have it be fun and positive and not degrading was like a dream come true.
I was thrilled by the scene the first time I watched it. But, on rewatching, I began to wonder.
Much as I liked seeing Hollister, she’s not a dancer. (She moves through the choreography, but she doesn’t shine in it.) There are fat women dancers who have spent years working at dancing (I’ve seen fat dancing troupes a few times), who would have been physically much more impressive in the role.1 Combined with the reliance on special effects to provide the big lift at the end of the dance, the scene seems to me to be saying “look, fat people can dance,” but at the same time saying “only in a movie, which is why this is funny, this could never happen in real life.”
There are also a couple of fat gags in the scene — the big sight gag of Max lifting the fat woman over his head, and the two men rushing in from the side to push her up from the dip. I’m not sure what I think of this, either. The anti-fat humor that bothers me most, is anti-fat humor that says “fat people are disgusting” or “fat people are slobs” or “fat people are gluttons” — humor that seems to me to be based on unfair stereotypes.
I’m more comfortable with fat gags which say “fat people are heavy” or “fat people are physically wider,” because these premises are true. We should be able to laugh at genuine differences — if the gags aren’t meanspirited. But their gratuitous inclusion here does seem a bit meanspirited, maybe. seems meanspirited.
In the end, I’m starving for positive images of fat people — and even more, for positive images of fat people’s bodies. I enjoy this scene, despite its flaws, because it is so physical. I love that they put Hollister in a sleeveless dress. And I loved that, in a current, crass comedy, there was a fat character gag that wasn’t based on degrading the character or finding her gross. But in a saner, fat-positive culture, I wouldn’t be starved for good fat representation, and this scene would taste repulsive.
(Added in 2022:) I’ve come to think of this sort of it’s-bad-representation-but-not-100%-bad-so-I-love-seeing-it representation as “shit sandwich representation.”
- Of course, could those women have handled the acting parts as well as Hollister did? Almost certainly not. [↩]
I love how she flipped off the girls at the end, as she was walking off the floor. That was really the icing on the cake for me.
I have to admit that it was rather fun to watch. But there were definitely some irritating aspects of the scene.
It was disappointing to see that, at the beginning, 99 pretends that Maxwell’s Deaf and, at the same time, implies that he’s stupid, with the line about the “tragic story” with his being “quite Deaf” and “not bright” and her not knowing how much “gets through.” That kind of able-ism really undercuts my enthusiasm for the film quite apart from its treatment of fat people.
The fact that Maxwell’s being “light on his feet” because he lost weight was annoying, especially as that was the setup for a joke about how she had once been even fatter (and which therefore sets her up not as a happily fat person but as a dieter, which I would argue is a necessary precondition for the audience approving of her).
I was also less than impressed with the fact that, in the mirrored moves, Maxwell became “the woman” in being the one dragged across the floor. And though he does lift her, that’s again done for the visual affect, which was disappointing.
I guess I’m just not desperate enough to overlook the fat jokes, because if you want to see fat women who are “light on their feet” and capable of dancing in sexy ways, you need only go anywhere real people are dancing. The movie, in a sense, exoticizes and turns into a joke something quite ordinary and everyday that we see all the time.
I think you might be interested in the subculture of bellydancing; I took classes with a lady who is now merely plump but even when she was very fat she was an incredible dancer; look up Tamara Dewar and bellyfringe on Youtube. I do have issues with some of the cultural appropriation in bellydancing, but I’ve seen white women do amazing things with it (and a lot of the dancers are either light-skinned Arabs and Latinos, or Eastern European, or of mixed descent, which complicates matters).
Lindsay looks so cute!
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