Your Fat Friend: Review

13th June 2023

Your Fat Friend: Review. By Joe Muldoon.

Currently travelling its way across the festival circuit, Your Fat Friend is the highly anticipated documentary by filmmaker Jeanie Finlay. Subject of the picture is Aubrey Gordon, podcaster, author, and mind behind the immensely popular blog yourfatfriend.com. The result of 6 years of filming, Your Fat Friend is perhaps the most important documentary on the topic of fatness to date.

“Just say fat. Not curvy, or chubby, or chunky, or fluffy, or more to love, or big guy, or full-figured, or big-boned, or queen-size, or husky, or obese, or overweight. Just say fat.” Gordon’s opening words are as direct and unflinching as you could ever hope for. When much of the public discourse surrounding fatness has been informed by works such as the infamous 2004 documentary Super Size Me, Finlay’s latest film is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Finlay opts to take a more observational position in her role as documentarian, allowing for Gordon to tell her own story on her own terms. A call for kindness and for basic human decency, our subject begins by asking not for pity or empathy, but for solidarity and anger. The most seemingly mundane tasks such as eating, and sitting in an aeroplane seat, visiting a doctor, all become difficult situations for fat people; eating becomes a recurring guilt trip, air travel becomes something to dread, visiting healthcare professionals -the very people in whose hands we place our trust and lives- becomes a finger-wagging lecture.

We are shown the awful cruelty with which fat people are bombarded on a daily basis, both in person and online, from snide comments to doxxing, and even to death threats. Permeating the piece is Gordon’s fiercely funny sense of humour, providing at least some relief from the harsh reality of the adversity, and very quickly establishing itself as a highlight of the film.

A particularly chucklesome segment has Gordon introduce us to her growing collection of vintage fad diet books, ranging from the obnoxious to the outright bizarre. Attention is drawn to the absurdity of our longstanding obsession with fad diets, with her pointing out that “we’re repackaging the same four or five diets over and over and over again, and they didn’t work in 1943, so why would they start magically working?”

Delving further into Gordon’s personal life, we meet some of her friends and family members, including her father Rusty, a retired airline pilot. A rare instance of us hearing the documentarian’s input, Finlay asks Rusty what he thinks of his daughter’s popular pieces for her website, and he shows his support. We join Gordon for two of the most important moments of her life; first, the news that she will become an established author, and second, the wildly successful launch of her lauded writing debut, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.

Combining the dream-team of Finlay’s deeply compassionate storytelling and Gordon’s wicked wit, Your Fat Friend is a long-overdue work that refuses to tiptoe around a highly emotive issue, attacking it head-on and without reserve. Not only is it a documentary, but it is also a call to action, a call to change our behaviours and attitudes towards fatness: “My aim is to provoke people to question the things that they always thought were true… I want them to change the way that they treat the fat people in their lives”.

Many of us have had uncomfortable conversations surrounding weight and size with our loved ones; “have I put on weight?”, “do I look big in this?”, “do you think I should start a detox diet before my holiday?”. In most cases, these conversations operate with the unspoken implication that being fat or heavy is an objectively bad thing, any nuance or medical safety tossed by the wayside. Many of us have batted overused fat jokes around as if they were always innocent and innocuous.

Many of us have freaked out and reached for a salad after looking down to see that we have tummy rolls, as if they were unnatural or unhealthy. Your Fat Friend steps aside from these conversations and argues that the true problem is not fatness, but our relationship with it, and our treatment of anybody who fails to meet impossibly lofty (and largely dangerous) body standards.. Fat people do not need to accept themselves – they are in need for society to accept them.

By Joe Muldoon

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