Thoughts on "The Whale" Movie

People's Negative Reactions Like Disgust Come From Love

I’ve written about how I hate woke remakes of movies and the preachy films we’ve been getting in the past few years to a decade. It’s been exponentially worse than when I was born. So in the age of streaming, I mostly watch older movies and shows I’ve seen before.

But there is a desire to see something new that sometimes breaks me down and gets me to watch something I know nothing about. I recently watched The Whale (2022) with Brendan Fraser. I thought I might like to write about it, but in order to do that I will have to spoil it completely.

And if you click that link with the title, it goes to the Wikipedia article and that will spoil the whole plot. The movie is available for free if you’ve got Amazon Prime. So perhaps consider watching it before you read on. I thought Brendan did a great job acting in it.

SPOILER ALERT

If you read on past this spoiler alert section, you will be spoiled on The Whale movie.

Did you know that Brendan Fraser was emotionally disturbed by a sexual groping incident by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's President, Philip Berkback in 2003?
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association expelled Berk only after he sent an email to his fellow members calling the Black Lives Matter movement a "racist hate movement" and criticizing BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors for buying a home in Topanga Canyon, CA.

In other words, they ignored the actual awful sexual misconduct for years
and only expelled him after he spoke the truth about BLM’s racism.

It feels like Hollywood just doesn’t care about sexual misconduct at all.
I can see why Fraser would boycott the Golden Globes.

Giving Up

In the movie The Whale, Fraser plays Charlie who is morbidly obese. Charelie’s one friend, Liz, is a nurse and comes in and checks on him between shifts. She is getting more and more frightened that he is going to die and begs him to go to the hospital, even though he says he doesn’t have health insurance or the money to pay for a hospital visit. It turns out he was lying to her and did have the money to take care of himself. He just wouldn’t.

He has a daughter he abandoned 8 years ago so he could leave his marriage and get together with an adult male student, Alan. And, Alan died, which left Charlie heartbroken. In the movie, Charlie has been working as an English Writing teacher online and has $120,000 in the bank thanks to his job and not ever leaving the apartment. He asked his daughter to spend time with him in exchange for the money.

His ex-wife shows up when she finds out that their daughter has been visiting him. He and his ex-wife, Mary, have a heart-to-heart chat. At the end, he tells her that he’s dying, and she says, “Fuck you,” which is a pretty good response.

Mary: "Fuck you."

Charlie: "I'm sorry"

Mary: "Fuck you….. For sure?"

Charlie: "Yeah. For sure. Listen to me. I need to make certain that she's (Ellie) going to be ok. We can't give up on her."

Mary: "You already gave up on her! You gave up on her when she was eight years old!"

Charlie: "I wish I could have been a part of her life, Mary, a part of both of your lives."

Mary: "Go the hospital. You have money, just go to the hospital!"

Charlie: "We both know that that money is for Ellie. But beyond that, I need to know that she's gonna have a decent life, where she cares about people and other people care about her." ... "I need to know that I have done one thing right with my life!"

Mary then leaves and she is absolutely right. Charlie has the money and could go to the hospital. Charlie has decided instead to give up his life to help “save” his daughter. He thinks he’s made a good decision, and the movie ends in a way that seems to support that view. At the end of the movie, his daughter comes over furious with him. She had asked him to write her an essay and rather than write her an essay, he gave her an essay she had written years earlier.

He had become obsessed with this essay of hers about Moby Dick. He said it was the most honest writing in an essay he had ever seen. She didn’t even know he had it because her mother gave him the copy but he didn’t have contact with his daughter at that time. After her initial burst of anger, she saw that he wasn’t well physically and asked, “What’s wrong with him?” And the nurse says, “He’s dying.” So the daughter says, “Call someone.” Eventually, the nurse says she will call someone, which we all know Charlie doesn’t want.

Charlie asks his daughter to read the essay and once she starts reading it, he stands up and starts walking towards her without the walker. He’s basically stressing himself out, likely in an attempt at suicide (so he is not alive when the ambulance arrives). The movie has the daughter reading and smiling to see her father walking toward her and then his body starts rising off the ground as the screen goes white seemingly showing his death.

It could be that his daughter didn’t know he was committing suicide as he walked towards her and she possibly thought he was getting ready to get into an ambulance. That’s a possibility. And in that case, once he died, her smile would leave her face and she would be angry and sad. Perhaps I am projecting, but I think she really wanted him to get help, so he could live, so he could be a part of her life. I will get back to this point later in the article.

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Can We Save People?

There is a theme in the movie about “Saving” people. Throughout the movie, Thomas, a Christian Missionary, comes by and tries to save Charlie spiritually. Alan, the man Charlie fell in love with, was emotionally broken. Alan was in the same “church” (they call it New Life in the movie) as Thomas. Alan’s father wanted him to marry a woman. Alan came back and fell in love with Charlie, so his father disowned him and it ate Alan up inside. Liz was Alan’s sister, and so Liz and Charlie both tried whatever they could do to “Save” Alan. But that failed and he stopped eating and died. Liz eventually says at the end of the movie that she doesn’t think anyone can save anyone, which is pretty smart. It is everyone’s personal responsibility to ask for help and work to save themselves.

Thomas says that Charlie needs spiritual guidance because he’s dying and refusing to go to the hospital. Liz asked him if he was going to give it to Charlie, and Thomas said, “No. God will.” And, I think God does, through other people eventually give guidance to Charlie. Everyone tells him to go to the hospital. But Charlie won’t.

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Brutal Honesty Helps If People Let It

Let me get back to the daughter, Ellie, because this is the reason I decided to write this article. Ellie is seen as a troublemaker. She’s disillusioned with school. When she meets the missionary she knows he’s lying, she drugs her father and has a chat with Thomas after getting him to smoke weed (which he views as a sin he was once addicted to). Thomas then becomes more honest with her. (Honesty is another theme throughout the movie as Charlie is very concerned with writers not being honest in their essays). Thomas tells her that he was disillusioned with missionary work. He didn’t think he was really helping anyone being a street-corner missionary, passing out paper. (I agree those are pointless). So he stole money from them and ran away and started to go around to homes to talk with people.

Ellie records Thomas’ confession, finds his family, and “rats him out.” Towards the end of the movie, Thomas finds out his family doesn’t care about the money and welcomes him back home. He’s happy that she did this, although he’s not sure if it was done out of malice or love.

At the end of the movie, Charlie believes her actions were taken out of love. He thinks that she cared about Thomas and wanted to help him. I thought so too. She acted in harsh ways to help people. Now, Charlie thinks she was trying to “Save” Thomas. I thought at this point, that maybe it would click in his head that she was harsh with people (including him) to get them to help themselves.

Ellie was always taking pictures with her phone’s camera. That’s partly how she let Thomas’ family know where he was. But she also took a photo of Charlie, and wrote on a social media site, “There'll be a grease fire in hell when he starts to burn.”

Charlie’s ex, Mary, had just said, “She’s evil,” referring to Ellie. She whips out this page to prove her point. Charlie’s response is, “She’s a strong writer.” He sees the good in Ellie, while Mary sees evil.

You’d think that if he could see the good in her writing and see her as being loving towards Thomas when turning him in, he would also see this social media post as brutal honesty meant to “help” him.

Throughout the whole movie, Charlie is trying to get people to be honest with him. He’s sick of people pussy-footing around issues and being afraid of being honest. He gives positive reinforcement to those who will be honest with him.

Although Ellie has said she doesn’t care about him, her actions show differently. She says an ambulance should be called, knowing full well that it costs money. When he’s begging her to read the essay, she doesn’t have to but she does. She’s shown that she is willing to do things that seem harsh to help people. Pointing out how fat her father is on social media can be a trigger to get him to change (when he says he cares so much about her). He tells her he’s doing this all for her. But she’s really laying all of the groundwork for him to see that the best thing he can do for her is to get healthier and be there for her. She doesn’t need the money if she has him as a father, proving his love for her by taking care of himself.

The movie shows he cares more about himself rather than getting healthy for his daughter. Perhaps his love of honesty in others is a manifestation of his avoiding an honest look at himself. He cares more about his own comfort than he cares for his daughter. If he cared for his daughter the way he says he did, then he would go to the hospital for his heart and see a therapist for his grief and addiction to food.

An Era of Fat-Phobia Mania

Sara Stewart wrote an opinion article on CNN, “By many accounts, the film plays Charlie’s weight as an absolute tragedy and a visual horror show. ‘Aronofsky turns up the foley audio whenever Charlie is eating, to emphasize the wet sound of lips smacking together. He plays ominous music under these sequences, so we know Charlie’s doing something very bad indeed,’ wrote Katie Rife in Polygon. ‘In case viewers still don’t get that they’re supposed to find him disgusting, he recites an essay about “Moby-Dick” and how a whale is “a poor big animal” with no feelings.’”

Some suggest that this movie is all about making people feel that the obese have no feelings and are disgusting. But it clearly shows how much and how strong those feelings are that Charlie has and how they’re causing him to eat more than needed. His avoidance of dealing with his feelings is what is causing him to overeat.

I agree that it’s shown in a disgusting manner, but that’s what over-eating is. To someone who eats a reasonable amount, the idea of sticking more food than needed into the body causes us to almost feel as if we should vomit. The reason for that reaction makes biological sense. Our bodies are built to know that taking in too much food can kill us. And we have mirror neurons that cause us to see what others are doing and react in the same manner. When you see someone yawn, you may be more likely to yawn as well. Just writing that sentence suggested to my body that I should yawn; did reading it make you want to yawn as well?

Seeing someone being forced (even if personally) to have more food than needed ingested causes us to sympathize and makes us more likely to want to vomit (like they should be doing) to save their life. The disgust feeling is a sign of caring. People who don’t care won’t have any emotion at all.

But in today’s political climate, obese people can see that disgust as someone doing something morally wrong. I have to wonder if the reason the movie’s ending falls flat is because Charlie trying to get healthier would be seen as “fat-shaming.” Of course, they were always going to be those complaints, so they should have just gone for it anyway.

I would have liked Charlie to realize his daughter posted that picture in an honest cry for help, so he would make a change, and do right by her, being there physically for her. I’d have liked to see him make a change or be honest about the fact that he doesn’t love her enough to get healthy for her. Otherwise, this is a movie about a guy longing for honesty while being utterly dishonest from start to finish.

I wrote a post about coming from a place of love in September of 2022, oddly around when this movie actually came out. In it, I said that some people say they’re coming from a place of love when they want to force others to wear a mask. But I wrote that those who were against mask mandates were coming from a place of love. Both sides thought they were truly coming from a place of love.

Is Ellie Coming From Love or Hate?

In the movie, The Whale, Ellie is not seen to be coming from a place of love by her mother. She’s actually called “evil” by her. But I think that being honest about unhealthy behaviors is coming from a place of love. Sometimes you have to be seen as “Cruel” to be kind. That doesn’t mean you are “Cruel.” It just means people will view you as cruel. The actual cruel people of the world don’t care whether you live or die. People who care are the ones who mistakingly get seen as “cruel.”

I think the acting in the movie was great. I just wish someone would have called Charlie out for taking the easy path rather than taking the difficult one to get healthy and be there for his daughter. He laments not being there for her like some victim of the court order. However he was talking honestly with her mother at one point, he could have asked to spend time with Ellie. He could have said, “I’m going to go to the hospital, and work on getting healthier so that I can help you raise Ellie.” And his ex-wife would have probably been happy to hear that. Instead, he acts like a victim of his addiction with no hope of being saved from it. He gives up his responsibility to get healthy and help raise Ellie, thinking the money will do that for him.

But money cannot take the place of a father.

That’s a limiting belief he has that ultimately I would have liked to be squashed.

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