Western Society Is Built on Stigma

The backlash against The Whale seems to have taken Darren Aronofsky, its director, by surprise. The film concerns a gay online English instructor named Charlie who is dying from congestive heart failure, an ailment hardly unrelated to his weight of 600 pounds. Brendan Fraser’s remarkably convincing fat suit has aggrieved fat activists, presumably because all those 600-pound out-of-work actors should have been approached for the part first.