On ‘Visual Pleasure’ and ‘Gainer Vids’: The Film Theorist’s Response

A guest blog, courtesy of Luvbeef87

I. What’s My Investment?

Gainers in higher education know that little to no scholarly research exists on our interests. I can say with certainty that, in the realm of film studies, nothing exists at all. In the last ten years, multiple film theorists have taken up the cause of “new media”: film, photography, television, and other existing media repurposed (or “remediated”) through computer and communications technology, especially the internet (Bolter and Grusin 15; 45). Nevertheless, in the current influx of research, the massive (pun intended) amounts of male “gainer vids” available on YouTube have gone completely unrecognized. To date, it seems that gainers only get passive mentions in sociological fat studies compilations that always shed our “kink” in an unseemly light and repudiate it outright. Who wants to be fat, especially for *shudder* sexual pleasure? As a gainer fully accepting of my “kink,” I obviously refuse to agree with such analyses that disavow us without objective critical inquiry into what we do. What we do truly warrants scholarly insight. For the first time, I propose to study the significance of “gainer vids” in the gaining community from the perspective of film studies. Assembling especially psychoanalytical and ideological works in film theory and criticism, I opine that “gainer vids” validate many of the theoretical frameworks on which popular film theory bases itself. At the same time, popular film theory sheds light on why we attain so much pleasure from documenting our bodies, from making “gainer vids.” Moreover, popular film theory tells us what properties of the film medium should be exploited in the production process, and so I contend that particular “gainer vids” provoke and heighten our visual pleasure through their cinematic abstraction from “real life.”

So far, I have been hesitant to offer an approach to “gainer vids” from the scholarly topos of film and media studies, even though I have been bursting at the seams to do so. I have always known such an approach was possible. After all, not only does our community greatly enjoy the production of “gainer vids,” but we have also appropriated various film and media texts into our cultural imaginary. For example, films such as Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory [Mel Stuart, 1971] and The Santa Clause [John Pasquin, 1994] and television shows such as Nickelodeon’s Doug [“Doug Tips the Scale,” 1994] populate our minds with images of unintentional, desirable weight gain, even if not necessarily “desired” by the protagonists of these media texts. Perhaps these texts suggest a viable topic for another blog posting. Regardless, media plays a significant role in our community, and I have feared to acknowledge it publicly at the risk of exposing myself as a gainer. As we know (especially after the uninvited presence of snooping journalists this past summer…), our community thrives and depends on anonymity. We require the capacity to blend in with the obese majority of our nation to obfuscate the sexual nature behind our extra flesh. At the same time, I see the injustice of silence (or criticism) perpetrated against us in academia, and I long to break this silence with real scholarly inquiry into what makes our community “tick.” Although I now come forth with such a study, I continue to hide behind the chimera of a screen-name I use across the internet and, with all due respect to Fatnesse, am not submitting my present work in a scholarly publication to be read by exclusively academics.

Yet I must acknowledge my long-time friend, Fatnesse, in coaxing me out of my silence. Although straightforward advice about how to make a good “gainer vid” for YouTube, “Fatties in Motion,” his most recent blog posting, draws attention to certain questions that, appropriately, evoke film scholarship and, hence, my area of expertise. Fatnesse hypothesizes that the visual pleasure of soft flesh amplifies when we extend the single photographic image into a series of single, juxtaposed photographic images unfolding in time, in motion (Fatnesse). He says the capacity to see the “private” in a public way titillates him. To watch someone take off their clothes and to see it through the ubiquity of the public video forum YouTube not only blurs the public/private boundary, but it also renders a great deal of voyeuristic pleasure. Fatnesse implies that this aspect of our community must be exploited.

Although Fatnesse often returns to the idea of “community,” we must realize that our ingestion of “gainer vids” happens on a personal level. When I watch “gainer vids” on YouTube, I often sit in the comfort of my apartment (the private sphere) with no one around. The gaze I have, in relation to my visual intake of the “gainer vid,” is specifically masculine: masculine in the patriarchal, phallocentric (i.e. ideological) sense that begets domination and authority. One could argue that my “male gaze” might be to surveil, to monitor images, qualities of television viewing articulated by Stanley Cavell in “The Fact of Television” (252). Indeed, “gainer vids” tend to have the quality of uninterrupted surveillance videos or contemporary “reality television.” However, television does not encourage the same degree of spectator concentration as in the cinema, necessitating only a look or a glance – not a gaze (Ellis 395-6). Therefore, it is not constructive to study the new media of “gainer vids” through the repurposing of televisual ideology. The gaze that begets visual pleasure is strictly cinematic.

Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) goes to the doctor with his unexpected results in The Santa Clause [John Pasquin, 1994]

II. Psychoanalysis

A discussion of the visual pleasure we achieve from “gainer vids” warrants a film studies approach with a specific emphasis in psychoanalysis. In the realm of film studies, Laura Mulvey is the author of the gaze sine qua non. Through her seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” we can acquire indispensible tools for theorizing visual pleasure in “gainer vids.” Mulvey, however, wrote of the dominant Classical Hollywood cinema apparatus, a matrix of cinematic codes and meanings self-imposed by the Hollywood institution to elicit unfettered attention in moviegoers across America (and, by extension, the globe). Cinematographic and editing techniques carry the narrative and are supposed to remain unobtrusive and non-distracting. As a result, viewers are “sucked in” to the narrative, leeching onto to a particular protagonist by way of identificatory processes. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey argues that this process is inherently gendered and that the presupposed audience member of these films (by sexism) is a male (841). In his masculine subject position, he identifies with the male onscreen and treats the female onscreen as an object of desire. In the absence of a male onscreen, “straight” fetishism transpires between the male in the audience who “looks” and the female onscreen who is “to-be-looked-at.” Extrapolating from Mulvey to the process of “gainer vids,” the male gainer/encourager spectator at the computer watches the image of the male gainer on the screen, who is “to-be-looked-at.” This dynamic complicates Mulvey’s heterosexist theory in multiple ways; for example, the male/female binary has been queered with the flow of male same-sex desire, the male in the “gainer vid” has accepted the feminine “to-be-looked-at” position, and the male both looks and is “to-be-looked-at.” This new paradigm both reaffirms and toys with the twofold psychoanalytic mechanisms on which Mulvey claims the cinema bases itself: scopophilia and ego libido (846). On one hand, “gainer vids” endorse scopophilia, the “pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object” (846). On the other hand, “gainer vids” complicate the ego libido about which Mulvey writes – the identificatory processes by which male spectators identify with “screen surrogate” males (842; 846). This is because the gainer/encourager watching the “gainer vid” also identifies with the erotic object. Not only does the gainer/encourager spectator enjoy gazing on the erotic object, but he also desires to become the erotic object. This connotes a sort of Freudian “narcissism,” “the collapse of same sex into sameness and sameness into self” (Straayer 117). A cycle of pleasure comes to life through the dialectical desires for fat and to become fat.

This cycle can also be interpreted through the “polymorphous perversity” of Freudian psychoanalysis. For the record, Freud’s concept does not engender “perversity” with moralistic implications (“Polymorphous Perversity”). Rather, he describes it as the sense of deriving pleasure from any part of the body. In Freud’s work, it is a capability found mostly in children, as they have not yet been socialized by conventions and still perceive the world in fluid ways. This ability to find ubiquitous pleasure in the whole body only becomes “perverse” by adult heteronormative standards that presume genital contact for pleasure and sex for reproduction’s sake. For the gainer, pleasure can indeed be found on any part of the body – rather, all over the body: in fat, in mounds upon mounds of soft, thick flesh. Freud writes about three stages of polymorphous perversity: the oral stage, the anal stage, and the phallic stage. More than any, I think the gainer’s visual pleasure ties itself to the first: the oral stage. How does the gainer get fat? By eating – through oral consumption, through the act of alimentation. This orality seamlessly transitions to the visuality of gazing on the “gainer vid.” The gainer/encourager viewer arouses a process not unlike “eating with the eyes.” The objective is to “stuff” the eyes with the rich, delicious image of the onscreen gainer in a practice not unlike the gainer’s relationship to his swollen, distended belly. They say that one’s eyes are often bigger than one’s stomach, but I beg to differ.

We cannot forget that the regimen of the gaze in cinema serves not only a voyeuristic function but also re-inscribes ideology (Mulvey 847). As the Cahiers du Cinéma critics Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni note, the cinema as a “reproduction” of reality has always been “nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology,” has been nothing but an “unconscious instrument of ideology” (815). In relation to Fatnesse’s demands for good “gainer vids,” Comolli and Narboni would remind us that “certainly there is such a thing as public demand, but ‘what the public wants’ means ‘what the dominant ideology wants’” (815). A productive way of getting at the ideology behind “gainer vids” takes into account SFBaydude02’s views on the discourse of “power” behind prevailing attitudes toward gaining (SFBaydude02). The gainer wants to feel more power, so his growing size compensates for a need to feel more empowered. Although I have not ever necessarily felt this to be the case when I think about why I desire to be fat, “power” nevertheless constitutes a fundamental way of approaching the prevailing ideology behind “gainer vids.” For Mulvey, the ideology behind Classical Hollywood cinema’s regime of the gaze is patriarchy, or male authority. The same is true for the production of “gainer vids,” yet capitalism, America’s dominant economic system of private ownership, also plays a significant role. In fetishizing the image of the male gainer, we seek to control him, to possess him. We want sole ownership of the image. We want that fat to be ours, literally and figuratively. However, at the same time we reaffirm traditional values of patriarchy and capitalism, we subvert them through the spectacle of the onscreen gainer who takes pride in his body. In culture, fat is stigmatized – undesired and undesirable. The regime of the “gainer vid” resists outright the social stigma of possessing mounds of extra flesh, putting them on display for visual pleasure. Patriarchy demands reproduction to perpetuate generations of “fathers,” which begets labor forces to maintain capitalism. Capitalism also values the lean body capable of labor. The fat, polymorphously perverse body undermines both of these institutions. This is a paradox of the ideology of the “gainer vid”: While somewhat complicit with dominant American ideologies, “gainer vids” inconspicuously subvert these ideologies in interesting ways.

The male gaze at work in Rear Window [Alfred Hitchcock, 1954]

III. Aesthetics

At this point, Fatnesse’s declaration about “fat in motion” necessitates conceptualizing the aesthetics of the “gainer vid.” What are the properties of the optimal “gainer vid”? Fatnesse says any “gainer vid” beats a photograph because it entails “fat … observed in motion” (emph. his). About twenty years after the 1895 “birth” of the modern cinema in France, theorists across the globe began the project of conceptualizing the unique properties of the film medium. To do so, they would compare and contrast it with the preexisting arts: theater, painting, and especially photography. Hence, the question of the supremacy of film over a photograph is not a new one, especially not in my field. Many theorists have opined on the dichotomy between film and photography. In theorizing the “basic concepts” of the film medium, Siegfried Kracauer concludes that the inherent photographic properties of the film medium supersede its technical properties (144-145). Nevertheless – and, here, he cites René Clair – “If there is an aesthetics of the cinema … it can be summarized in one word: ‘movement’” (qtd. in Kracauer 149). Conversely, avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren determines that the “creative use” of the filmmaking process lies in the exploitation of the medium’s inherently cinematic properties rather than making it serve the reproduction of preexisting arts (i.e. filmed plays, etc.) (188; 193). That is, the essentially filmic properties of “slow-motion,” “reverse motion,” and “the negative image” collaborate to compose the most cinematic quality of the film medium – the ability to alienate the space and time we know. While Fatnesse, Kracauer, and Deren would all agree that “movement” truly is the aesthetic basis of the cinema, they all also differ in their opinion on what is optimal. Because of the need to substantiate cinema on its own terms and to acknowledge how cinema can play with movement in ways not serving the forward, real-time motion of a series of images, I am inclined to agree with Deren. Perhaps the most “creative” use of the film medium in reproducing the spatiotemporal reality captured in a “gainer vid” would exploit properties of the medium itself: “slow-motion,” “reverse motion,” etc. The optimal “gainer vid,” by these standards, would be somewhat akin to one made by Flabbygainer [“Belly & Slow Motion,” 2009] and many by Fattybelly [“Ocean of Fat,” “Shaking All That Buttery Beef,” etc., 2010], among others. These “gainer vids,” all or in part, incorporate extended periods of “slow-motion” flab-shaking, which stretches the moment, inviting the spectator to revel in the pleasure of mounds of flab jiggling in a way that we cannot truly experience in real life. Was this quality not already important to Fatnesse? Fatnesse says one of the most exciting things about “gainer vids” is that the gainer/encourager spectator can experience an event that, due to societal constraint, is unlikely to happen in “real life”: seeing fat in real time and space (Fatnesse). Imagine taking it a step further by also incorporating a quality of the film medium unable to be replicated by other media: “slow-motion.” “Slow-motion” stretches the experience and pleasure of watching mounds of flesh bounce to and fro within the film frame. In addition, the fat body is supposed to be slow, heavy, and burdened in movement. What better way to portray enervated mobility than through “slow-motion” processes?

IV. The View from Here

The “gainer vid” is the pièce de résistance of our community. Tragically, no scholarly work has analyzed its functions. Nevertheless, media plays an indispensible role in the gainer community, and its meanings should be analyzed. As a piece of “new media,” I would argue that it repurposes the film medium and not television, specifically because the sexualized gaze constructed in the relationship between the gainer/encourager spectator and the onscreen gainer is cinematic. Through a psychoanalytical framework, the “gainer vid” can be said to reproduce the scopophilic pleasures of the cinema. Not only do gainer/encourager spectators fetishize and commodify the fat male body, but they also identify with it and desire to become it. At the same time, the process of the male gaze reproduces the ideologies of patriarchy and capitalism undergirding “gainer vids.” Hence, the regime of power imbues the relationship between spectator and onscreen gainer. Concomitantly, “gainer vids” resist the lean, reproductive bodies valued by patriarchy and capitalism, privileging instead the fat, polymorphously perverse bodies and, thereby, repudiating social stigma. The “gainer vid” also privileges the “movement” inherent to the aesthetics of the cinema. I have argued that “gainer vids” that integrate “slow-motion,” a unique property of the film medium, are perhaps the most cinematic. “Slow-motion” becomes an aesthetic event that we cannot truly experience in real life, even more so than simply seeing a human belly jiggled in “real time.” Also, “slow-motion” replicates and corresponds to the fat body and its heavy movements.

Obviously, much more work must be done to analyze gainer mass media (pun intended again). I hope that this is but the first in a series of writings about the relationship between the gainer community and media texts, especially those that we create to replicate the reality of our lives. Can we conceptualize of a different way of producing “gainer vids”? Is it possible that alternative aesthetics could eventually coalesce? Would it better to explore cinematic options instead of standard single shots? Is this even possible? I think the renaissance of the “gainer vid” lies in its potential to become filmic in a narrative way. With a real 16 mm. camera (or better), as opposed to a webcam or small photographic camera with video recording functions, the potential of shots from multifarious angles, narrative story arcs, and unique cinematographic and editing techniques would combine to produce real gainer films, as opposed to “vids.” Then, perhaps, a burgeoning gainer media would become traceable. ■

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Luvbeef87 is a graduate student in Film and Media Studies at a prestigious university in the Midwest. His research focuses on GLBTQ film and media studies, queer theory and its applications to film analysis, and images of non-normative sexual practices in the cinema (just like he wrote about here!). He would like to thank Fatnesse for generously allowing him to submit a blog posting for Fatnesse Follies. He would also like to thank his many great film professors, who shall remain anonymous, just like us.

Works Cited

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Print.

Cavell, Stanley. Themes out of School: Effects and Causes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print.

Comolli, Jean-Luc and Jean Narboni. “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6^th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 812-819. Print.

Deren, Maya. “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6^th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 187-198. Print.

Ellis, John. “Broadcast TV as Sound and Image.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6^th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 395-404. Print.

Fatnesse. “Fatties in Motion.” Fatnesse Follies. Fatnesse.blogspot.com, 26 Oct. 2010. Web. 28 Oct. 2010.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Basic Concepts.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6^th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 143-153. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6^th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 837-848. Print.

“Polymorphous Perversity.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Jul. 2010. Web. 30 Oct. 2010.

SFBaydude02. “The Power Dichotomy.”Gaining Perspective: On Life, Love, and the Battle for the Bulge. Sfbaydude02.blogspot.com, 5 Feb. 2010. Web. 28 Oct. 2010.

Straayer, Chris. “The Talented Poststructuralist: Heteromasculinity, Gay Artifice, and Class Passing.” Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. Ed. Peter Lehman. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. 115-132. Print.