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As a fat activist Aubrey Gordon While giving a talk at her first book signing, her doting father Rusty turned and whispered to the person sitting next to him, “That’s my daughter.”
This tender, seemingly harmless moment that comes towards the end of the documentary”your fat friend”, might have gone unnoticed without the gaze of a camera, but it is loaded with meaning. Rusty could barely bring himself to say the word “fat” when he began filming the documentary six years earlier.
“My parents are the heroes of this movie, without a doubt,” Gordon told CNN of the film, which is now opening in Europe before beginning a tour of the United States and Canada. “I’m pretty much in the same place and everyone is going on a trip.”
This space between Gordon’s activism, his willingness to satirize the world’s reflexive anti-fatness, and that “big difference between where his family was,” was what immediately drew director Jeanie Finlay to Gordon’s story, she told CNN.
It is this gap, which exists within a loving family, That allows Finlay’s film to challenge the audience’s own perceptions of fatness, as it documents both Gordon’s work for fat justice and her sometimes painful everyday interactions with your friends and family.
Jeannie Finlay
The documentary followed Gordon during a six-year period of major changes in his life.
“It’s not a clear story that there’s a good guy and a bad guy,” Gordon said. “It’s like we’ve all been trained to think we’re the good guys, when in reality we could be making life considerably harder for fat people.”
The couple first met in 2017, shortly after Gordon’s life changed irrevocably. The Oregon community organizer had written a letter to a thin friend after an argument about body image, and another friend whom Gordon had asked to review it suggested posting it online. Gordon agreed on the condition that it be published anonymously, and the letter went viral, racking up tens of thousands of views.
Under the pseudonym “Your fat friend”, he began blog anonymously, highlighting these ways the world makes life harder for fat people.
Gordon wrote of the “heightened” panic that accompanies boarding a plane; about receiving “qualified” praise that is “congratulations for hiding unattractive parts of my body”; about “what it’s like when no one believes your body can be healthy”; about being “greeted with sideways glances and gawks” at the gym.
Filmed over six years, “Your Fat Friend” charts this period in Gordon’s life as he drives through Oregon, stopping to write one of his essays when inspiration strikes: “a fat lady in a small car,” he jokes. . in the film with characteristic wit.
Phil Sharp
Director Jeanie Finlay, who made the film over six years.
But the film also details the online reaction to Gordon’s writing – the abuse, death threats and doxing she endured, along with messages of solidarity – before she reveals her identity after writing a best-selling book.
“For me, the film is an act of visibility,” Finlay said in a recent Q&A following the film’s screening in London. “It’s about Aubrey being anonymous on the Internet as a name. She then she’s a face on the dust jacket of a book with a different name, then she’s a clipped voice on the internet as a podcast host. And then she walks into a room as a whole person and her family sees her.”
Finlay’s visual storytelling also highlights this. The opening shots of the documentary show Gordon swimming in outdoor pools, his body reflecting and refracting in the water as the camera lens pans over the stretch marks. It’s not voyeuristic or glamorous, it simply presents Gordon in a matter-of-fact way.
“Just say fat,” Gordon says in an accompanying voiceover, reading aloud from one of his essays. “Not curvy, not chubby, not stocky, not fluffy, not more to love, not a big guy, not full figured, not big boned, not queen size, not stocky, not obese, not overweight. “Just say fat.”
But while Gordon becomes increasingly publicly visible throughout the film, spreading his anti-fat message, his parents, Pam and Rusty, are in a different place.
During an awkward exchange in a hangar next to a runway, Rusty can’t say the word “fat,” and his attempts to dodge it echo through the space. Throughout the film, Pam deals with the unintended consequences of sending Gordon to Weightwatchers camps when she was a teenager and finally, in a delicate moment, she admits that she didn’t think it would have any effect on her daughter’s weight.
Your own struggles Weight and body image are also explored, gently exploring how the way we view our bodies is passed down from generation to generation.
Jeannie Finlay
“Just say fat,” Gordon says in voiceover in the film. “Not curvy, not chubby, not stocky, not fluffy, not more to love, not a big guy, not full figured, not big boned, not queen size, not stocky, not obese, not overweight. “Just say fat.”
“What I really appreciate about the movie is that it looks at the things that make life harder for fat people as tenderly as it looks at fat people. “There’s room for my parents to grow and change, there’s room for the audience to grow and change,” Gordon says.
At a Thanksgiving dinner, a family friend jokes about readjusting the scale to shave 25 pounds off his measurement. When Gordon’s father gives him a birthday cake, with a picture of his dog in the frosting, he assures him that it is sugar-free, and the celebratory mood deflates. They are seemingly small exchanges, but they accumulate into something larger under the unwavering gaze of the camera that acts as an “amplification,” Finlay said.
“I’ve always had the mindset that microcosmic cinema is a way to tell really important stories,” he says. “So microaggressions or small moments become much bigger. And those are the things we do our daily lives with, not grand gestures.”
There are moments when the film goes beyond Gordon’s personal experiences, such as when he shows off his collection of old diet books or records his popular podcast “Maintenance Phase,” which criticizes the most ridiculous aspects of the wellness industry.
But this is Gordon’s story for the most part, focused less on the causes or social consequences of being fat and more on the idea of the present moment, of unraveling the prejudices that fat people face in their daily lives and of living in a body without seeking to change it at every possible moment.
“We have endless places to talk about how much you want to change your body and almost nowhere to talk about what it’s like to live in your body without leaning toward change,” Gordon says.
brilliant movies
The film aims to challenge common perceptions about fatness.
And by focusing on Gordon, the film blurs those lines between the personal and the political.
“I know the power of telling one person’s story that can stretch to align with the experiences of thousands of other people,” Finlay said.
Stories about fat people are still rare in pop culture, and when they are told (like Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale” or the 2001 film “Shallow Hal”), they are often “filtered through the lens of stories that They make thin people feel better about themselves.” themselves…usually at the expense of fat people,” Gordon said.
“It’s very easy to burn out because of anger, frustration and isolation,” she added, “because as much as I would love for thin people to listen to me the same way fat people listen to me, I just don’t… People He says, ‘Of course you say you’re just justifying your looks or whatever.’ It feels really important to be able to figure out where all that is coming from and give people space to make a different decision.”
“Your fat friend” screens in theaters starting in February. See website for more details.
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