As an aesthetic failing that doubles as a moral one.įriends may have arrived onto the scene in the years before “body positivity” would pervade magazines and blogs and Instagram, before Dove would attempt to reclaim the pear shape by turning it into bottles of body wash, before empowerment would be reduced to a chipper marketing slogan. When Friends, looking for reliable LOLs, put the skinny-even-by-Hollywood-standards Courteney Cox into cheek-jowls and body-lumps-and then proceeded to suggest that the physical change would alter Monica’s very personality-the show neatly channeled the way American culture itself treats fatness, by default: as a flaw not just of appearance, but of character.
The Fat Monica thing is an easy joke-which is to say, it is a lazy joke-but it doubles, as so many lazy jokes do, as an insight. Watching the proceedings, you start to wonder whether Monica Geller, for the purposes of the flashback scenes, was given a fat suit or a lobotomy. Remember when, in those late-series episodes of Family Matters, Steve Urkel would go into that flashing box and emerge as the suave Stefan Urquelle? Fat Monica’s metamorphosis is a little like that, but in reverse: The transformation depletes her dignity rather than compounding it. Her movements become jerking and awkward.
Padded by her former girth, Monica Geller-the person who categorizes her hand towels and designates committees for the planning of birthday parties and is, in general, in thorough control of her life and her Type A-tastic self- undergoes a transformation: Her voice gets higher. American Housewife Has a Weight Problem Megan Garberįat Monica is technically just a younger-and slightly larger-version of Standard Issue Monica what becomes wincingly clear, though, as the Friends flashbacks play out, is that Fat Monica differs from the other Monica not just in scale, but in kind.
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