Representation of Eating Disorders on Media

 In an initial brainstorming session, i came up with the idea of portraying a young woman suffering from ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder), coping from her day to day life without much support and accepting how she needs help. It seem to me interesting to portray this type of eating disorder, since "extreme picking eating" is usually related to toddlers or young children and treated as an annoyance. I feel it is important to know a history of how the media, specially in films, has portrayed eating disorders in general, to not commit the same mistakes of misrepresentation or ignorance of how these type of mental illness work. I hope also to bring awareness and more compassion to these topics. 

The first ever movie to claim to portray these heavy topics is "The Best Little Girl in the World" (1981), being shown in cable television and sold in VHS. It is about a teenager suffering from bulimia and anorexia. The main portrayal is, a s it has been the stable of many to come, a

upper-class white female teenager wanting to look like the people she sees in magazines. The movie as well brings much deep attention to her emancipated body, focusing the camera in in the balance with a zoom and her weight in the promotions, and does not examined the deeper psychological battle going on and instead feels more like a melodrama. It is not to say to not show the difficult side, hospitalizations and family suffering, but it has been the only way media has been portraying these issues since then.

A more recent example is the the Netflix movie "To The Bone", starring Lilly Collins. Following the same stereotypical portrayal of sufferers, the protagonist being a white privileged teen. It has received many criticism for the same issue, focusing too much on how her body looks for shock value. It does give more "reasons" to the eating disorder, breaking the idea that they are only done to be "pretty". However, as seen in the scene, the group who accompanies the protagonist, are also people with eating disorders, with people of color and male patients, and not all with the archetype of what the body of a person with an eating disorder should " look like".

In this scene, putting Collins character in the seat by herself, shows how much isolated she feels, important to bring compassion to the character. Though with some improvement compared to the representation 36 years ago, it still can do better to show how these diseases are multifaceted and is not as easy as just "eating" and having some type of support.

For the eating disorder i would want to portray, ARFID, it has not been characterized in a fictional setting yet, as far as i had search for. This would bring both a challenge and an opportunity for me, since i don't have any type of parameters to be based on, but that also means i can start form scratch and offer my artistic vision based on my research, trying to be as compassionate and not stereotypical of the sufferers, since i would want the same if someone is trying to portraying a condition i may have. I did found a vlog of a person detailing the disorder itself, their personal experiences and thoughts on their own disorder.

I founded very interesting, seeing someone talk openly helps those who don't know about the disorder and find themselves learning something new. She also talks about the difference to how it is connected to sensitivity than to body image, interesting to note and find ways to show that visually. 

With all of this information, i hope to be able to portray it very respectfully and bring the information without concentrating in things for "shock" value. A way to show this sensitivity issue, could be making the food look unappetizing from the point of view of the character, and then cutting to how others see it, changing the background noise from higher to lower.

Citations:

Gale, Morgan,  I Have Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder | ARFID. Youtube, 9 May 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mw_ErZZMew&t=343s.

Noxon, Marti, director. Ellen's New Home - To the Bone Clip. Youtube, Netflix, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjnEhTuQxTc.

O'Steen, Sam, director. ABC 1981 Monday Night Movie Open Best Little Girl in the World. Youtube, ABC, 1981, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew3D7iQS4B8.