Nobody Loves a Fat Man: Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and Conspicuous Consumption in the US of the 1920s

Abstract

In her 1993 study Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo draws on Delbert Schwarz’s poem ‘The Hungry Bear’ to characterise the body as ursine: ‘ruled by orality, by hunger, blindly mouthing experience’, its ‘infantile desires […] soothed by sweet things, falling exhausted into stupor’ (Bordo, 1993, p. 2). The power of Schwarz’s image, Bordo believes, derives from Western culture’s drive to separate body and spirit, the corporeal and the intellectual; clumsy, gross and disgusting, the body is not ‘us’ but a ‘clumsy fool’ we must drag around alongside us, a brute materiality appeased only by comfort or petting or food (Bordo, 1993, p. 3). Likewise, Alex Clayton’s study of silent comedy, The Body in Hollywood Slapstick, stresses the idea of the body as ‘a burden that holds us back’, linking this notion to Bergson’s stress on rigidity and clumsiness discussed in Chapter 3 (Clayton, 2007, p. 15). For Clayton, the focus on food and hunger in early comedy ‘relates to the comic idea that the body is a sort of machine […] chewing, slurping, spilling, digesting, a kind of guzzling thing’ (Clayton, 2007, p. 35) This view of our fleshy matter as ‘other’, this alienation from the body, occurs again and again in records of eating disorders, an idée fixe afflicting both men and women, though it is, of course, most striking in terms of negative views of female consumption.