How do you make a movie about anorexia that feels modern? Hollywood has been trying for years. The latest offering, Marti Noxon’s To The Bone, which was released on Netflix on July 14, could have shifted the conversation around eating disorders and young women’s bodies.
Instead, the drama – which the streaming platform acquired for $8 million at Sundance – regurgitates the same tired stereotypes we’re used to seeing, framing anorexia solely around the experience of privileged white women.
The cliché has been around for decades. In the early 1980s, Jennifer Jason Leigh portrayed a good-girl ballerina with an eating disorder in The Best Little Girl In The World. Kate’s Secret told the story of a beautiful, successful woman hiding her bulimia from friends and family.
In 1997, Amy Jo Johnson – best known for playing the Pink Power Ranger – starred in Perfect Body, the story of a young gymnast who develops an eating disorder after being scrutinized by her coach. More recently, Natalie Portman played a ballerina with major food hang-ups in Black Swan.
The stereotype unfortunately has real-life consequences. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, women of colour are less likely to seek treatment compared to white counterparts, yet young African-American girls are just as vulnerable to developing eating disorders as white girls of the same age.
Doctors who treat eating disorders are similarly affected by misconceptions. A recent article in Slate reported that a 2006 study of clinicians in a fictional case study found they were less likely to diagnose a woman with an eating disorder if she was Black rather than white or Latina. Portrayals of anorexia in Hollywood, like the one we see in To The Bone, do nothing to dispel this myth.
Ellen (Lily Collins) is a 20-year-old woman with anorexia. She’s a talented artist, lives in Los Angeles and comes from a loving “modern” family (her birth mom, played by Lili Taylor, is a lesbian with new-age tendencies). She’s also a rebel, stomping around in black biker boots and smoking cigarettes, and gets kicked out of just about every rehabilitation facility in the state.
But then Ellen is admitted to Threshold, an in-patient program run by the unconventional Dr. William Beckham (Keanu Reeves), who helps Ellen see why life is worth living. His methods range from Scared Straight!-style tough love to art appreciation.
While To The Bone is loosely based on Noxon’s own recovery from anorexia, the writer/director never pushes the status quo. Instead, we see a string of recycled archetypes of female characters from mental health movies like Girl, Interrupted. At Threshold, there’s Pearl (Maya Eshet), a teen stuck in child-like fantasy Anna (Kathryn Prescott), a bulimia patient with no intention of recovering (and who hides her dirty secret in a bag under her bed) and Megan (Leslie Bibb), who is cool, popular and blonde. Noxon inserts one male patient, Luke (Alex Sharp), a former dancer whose career-ending injury sent him spiraling. He mainly functions as a love interest.
And while the movie is set in LA, racialized characters are scarce, playing housekeepers to the rich and servers at a Chinese restaurant. The two exceptions are Lobo (Parks & Rec’s Retta), the sassy program facilitator at Threshold, and Kendra (Lindsey McDowell), a patient – but not because she’s in danger of being too thin. All we get to know about Kendra is that she obsessively eats peanut butter from a jar at every meal. Otherwise, she’s rarely seen or heard.
So how does To The Bone fit in with current conversations around women’s bodies? It doesn’t, really. We’ve outgrown only idolizing “heroin chic” model-types like Kate Moss, and look to strong and fit role models like Serena Williams and dancer Misty Copeland. We’ve gotten better at celebrating all shapes, sizes and colours, and calling out body shamers. Progress is slow, but we’re starting to see more diverse representations of women in media. Young women are encouraged to speak up, be proud and take up space.
Courtesy of Netflix
Keanu Reeves and Lilly Collins in To The Bone
A month before To The Bone came out, Roxane Gay’s book Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body was released. The memoir deals with trauma, overeating and how the body is intertwined with identity. The author is outspoken about her weight issues – at her heaviest, she reportedly weighed 577 pounds – and discusses what it means to be a Black woman in America. While Gay may not have been classified with an “eating disorder,” her eating was certainly disordered.
As a teen, Gay began rapidly gaining weight after being raped by a classmate. She wanted to feel “like a fortress, impermeable,” she writes. Like many people suffering from eating disorders, Gay’s relationship to food was a way to control emotional pain without having to deal with underlying trauma. She writes truthfully about how it feels to live a life controlled by your body and defined by your size.
Earlier this year, body positivity and mental health blogger Lexie Manion introduced another way of thinking about eating disorder recovery through #BoycottTheBefore. The social media campaign urges against sharing “before” photos of eating disorders.
“One misconception around eating disorders stems from the thought, ‘You need to look underweight or look deathly ill to be struggling,’” she wrote for Proud2Bme. “And while specific eating disorders can drastically affect one’s weight, one can struggle at any weight – underweight, overweight, and any and every weight and size in between.”
The #BoycottTheBefore Instagram has nearly 3,700 followers and shares photos of people recovering from eating disorders with the tag line, “I am so much more than a ‘before’ photo.”
On the other hand, To The Bone is all about that “before” photo. Within the first 10 minutes of the movie, Ellen sheds her baggy clothes to stand on a scale. Her ribs protrude, her thighs don’t touch, and her bumpy spine barely looks strong enough to hold up her head. Although we’re accustomed to seeing photos of thin models, Ellen’s body is shocking.
“Do you see what you look like?” Ellen’s stepmother (Carrie Preston) asks after taking a photo on her phone and shoving the image in Ellen’s face. “Do you think that’s beautiful?”
Ellen shrugs and doesn’t answer. As the audience, it’s tough to know what the right answer is because for many of us, we’ve moved beyond the “thin” versus “fat” dichotomy. We’ve moved beyond most of the tropes doled out in the film and can’t help but eye-roll at all the stereotypes. We can view To The Bone as dated entertainment, but nothing more.
movies@nowtoronto.com | @michdas
