The Eating Disorder Melodrama--or Why I Will Always Watch a Lifetime Movie with Hunger in the Title

After a week of moving hell, Cat and I finally got settled in Chicago and got our internet installed just in time for her to spend the next day at a Grad School orientation. Which meant: I am alone in an apartment with the World Wide Web. Given that I was in a new city with plenty more neighborhoods to explore, I might have found myself cafe and museum hopping. But nope. It was kind of grey outside. I was a little achey. And I had the internet for the first time in over a week. I could have caught up on my news sources--Huffington Posting myself out and actually figuring out what is happening on the Syrian Lebanese border. But nope.

I went to hulu. And what did I find on the front page of their "movies" section? A list of lifetime movies. Usually, lifetime movies I could take or leave but what I really truly love is a good eating disorder melodrama. It's probably some really fucked up subconscious identity relation thing that pulls me to click on the link "Hunger Point". But here's my rule of thumb about these things: if it is a two word title and one of the words is "hunger", I am basically going to give up everything for the following two hours.

I was in luck this time. The cast involved Christina Hendricks (of Madmen fame) in 2003, playing the older sister (and main character) of a woman who eventually dies from her anorexia. And of course, Hendricks is the "fat and sensible" character, the foil, who, in her grief, dabbles with bulimia before their father catches her over the toilet and says "I can't lose you, too". And just like that, her eating disorder is gone. And she gets a middle-class job after losing waitressing jobs for the past few years (this film is obviously made in the doe-eyed years before the recession) and, lucky her, finds a man who loves her. It's all heterosexual utopia. It's all predictable. And yet the hospital scenes with her sister on the eating disorder ward are strikingly realistic--the fidgeting of the patients creating a mis-en-scene reminiscent of my treatment days.

Here's the thing. I know these movies are TERRIBLE. They play on cultural fears of mental illness. They still promote images of true health as a heterosexual, reproducing female body whose adolescence is stolen from her in her pursuit of thinness. And I don't believe eating disorders have much to do with body image. I don't believe that surveillance technologies of mainstream e.d. clinics are effective. And I actually don't believe that there is "recovery" in a utopian "I've found my authentic self and now I don't have a problem" way.

But just like I watch the L Word for queer representation even though there are a myriad of problems with representation on the show (perhaps another entry) as a way to escape the heterosexual-everywhere of the world we live in, I watch these Lifetime dramas as way to escape the ableist-everywhere. I believe mental illness is illness and is best understood as a kind of disability. I believe that we need to accommodate and not expect utopic transformations (does everyone in a wheelchair eventually get up to walk? maybe in lifetime movies...) of people with all sorts of mental illness. We need to think about diversity as accommodation and inclusion, not assimilation. And while lifetime gets representation of mental illness, eating disorders included, wrong so much of the time, there's also something to be said for the moments they get right--the defeated-looking therapist when approached with pro-ana website material; the older sister who, despite her best efforts to understand her sister's world, still fails in her offer of half a sandwich to her sister; the minute movements of patients in the clinic who attempt to subvert surveillance at any cost. Perhaps lifetime melodrama isn't always the most effective way to approach mental health representation but it begs the question: effective for what? And how do we read it? And what do we get out of it?

When Cat got home from orientation, I told her what I watched. She rolled her eyes. We made dinner. I felt relaxed for the first time in a week as we fell into bed.