I felt the entire premise of the story was very inappropriate. The moral of the story is basically "don't marry a fat lady or you'll become just as miserable as she is". Was anyone else offended at this part of the story?
shareNevermind the fact that he fell in love with her in spite of her weight, and he loved her so much he completely dedicated his entire life to her in an attempt to keep her happy, even after her death.
It was a story about not judging people based on their appearance, both in the case of Nebbercracker's affection for his wife, and the kid's initial opinions of Nebbercracker. If anything its about acceptance - both of people and mortality.
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"unhealthy and dishonorable condition"... While unhealthy is true, I don't see the dishonorable part.
A myriad of glandular problems, intestinal problems, and uncontrollable neurosis can cause obesity. While there are some people who just plain over-eat, extreme cases such as depicted here are generally quite involuntary.
Hard to say there's any dishonor in being the victim of something you cannot control.
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obesity is an "epidemic," glandular problems aren't an epidemic. too many people do not exercise/watch their food intake, and that is who people are talking about. if a lot of the fatties that are there by choice would work at good/average health, obesity wouldn't seem such an "epidemic." this way, people would actually understand about true obesity, and the people who can't counteract their "glandular problems" you re talking about.
share"Ignorant bigots are handicapped by their ignorance and bigotry and it is an unhealthy and dishonorable condition. The last thing we should teach children is that ignorant bigotry is normal or acceptable."
There, fixed it for ya
"We have no past | We won't reach back | Keep with me forward all through the night"
Talk about an idiot who completely missed the point of the movie.
shareSo-called 'obesity' (itself a recent construct of manipulation of the thresholds of the 200 year-old BMI scale) has little if anything to do with lack of self-control or personal morality. The most recent scientific studies are pointing to it resulting from a complex interaction of genetics and environment; recent studies suggest that body size may be as much as 77% genetic (see links below) which puts it almost on a par with height in terms of characteristics over which we have little beyond a short-term illusion of control.
It's well-known that 95% of diets fail; this is not because 'fat people have no willpower' but most likely a result of the body becoming accustomed to the lower calorific intake, the diet itself being unsustainable long-term, or a combination. Exercise often results in building muscle which weighs more than fat; someone may become healthier as a result of being more active without changing BMI category, and weight-loss surgery is a drastic and dangerous procedure which carries not only the potential of death on the table but for most patients long-terms side-effects which actually render them less 'healthy' than if they'd remained fat.
Moreover, even if we 'could' control our weight to any meaningful degree doesn't mean we should be socially obliged to in return for acceptance. People make all manner of non-mainstream choices in terms of dress, political affiliation, body art / ornamentation, religious belief, drug, alcohol and nicotine use, and by and large in liberal societies these are accepted as matters of personal conscience. Gay people, whilst not universally accepted, are at least a protected class even as the 'nature versus nurture' debate rumbles on.
Therefore I refute your assertion that 'obesity... is an unhealthy and dishonorable condition'. Indeed, the health implications, like the causes, are the source of fierce scientific debate (unfortunately rarely presented by the media, who have a vested interest in maintaining public outrage by continuing to present the dual fallacies of obesity as a personal choice and as something which through the strain placed on healthcare services is of wider social and political concern).
In fact, more recent studies have found that 'overweight' and 'moderately obese' people have better survival rates from a range of diseases and conditions, and that older people in these categories do better and even live longer (as would be expected, since the ability to store excess engergy as fat reserves developed as an evolutionary advantage). As such fat is a NATURAL and NORMAL part of human physical diversity and variation; it should certainly not be demonised or denormalised by counterproductive and shortsighted media and government 'anti-obesity' campaigns or form the basis of discrimination and hate, but tolerated and even celebrated as one more thing that makes us unique and on which has helped us become (for better or worse!) the dominant species on this planet.
Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7230065.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8394991.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4468001.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8483456.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2725943.stm
"We have no past | We won't reach back | Keep with me forward all through the night"
Everything you said is FALSE FALSE FALSE
Humans have 100% control over our body weight. Basic physics ( conservation of energy) means that if we take in less energy from food then we use to stay alive, the body will use fat to make up the difference. Conversely, the body stores any excess food energy as fat. This is basic human physiology and physics. 1 pound of fat stores 3500 calories, so in order to be 300 pounds overweight, a person HAS to eat 1,050,000 calories more then they use. I've have friends and acquaintances who are quite overweight, and the thing they all have in common is EATING A LOT!
In the past people tended not to get overweight because food was expensive and people were very physically active, making it difficult to sustain a calorie surplus long enough to get significantly overweight. Today its the opposite, food is very cheap and people can get by being very inactive. Obesity can become a feedback loop, where as a person gains weight they become less active and thus burn fewer calories, thus gaining weight faster, becoming even less active, and so on. The endpoint becomes the very obese people who ride scooters around, using almost no calories at all.
Obesity is really just an example of poor self-discipline. ANYONE can lose weight if they consume fewer calories then they use for a long enough time.
You still didn't answer the question as to why they should have to, why we are apparently constrained by some sort of social or moral obligation to work at getting and staying thin. In the democratic West we've learned to more or less tolerate most other forms of human diversity and difference, and yet the majority of the populace are still irrationally offended and outraged by the sight and existence of fat people.
Even though (despite scientists efforts to prove otherwise) an individual's fat is not contagious, and (unlike secondhand smoke for instance) has no negative effect on anyone else, the world still considers the size of another person's a$$ its business.
Part of me suspects that it's closely linked to the lingering remnants of the Protestant ethic of self-denial and personal discipline, something that is fundamentally threatened by anyone who lives 'hedonistically' (fat people are stereotyped as eating what they want whereas everyone else has to restrict caliories and spend $$$s on gym memberships etc) but even that doesn't entirely explain it, since no-one gets on the case of those people who can eat and eat as much crap as they like and never gain a pound.
It's only when it's visible that it becomes regarded as a 'problem' requiring drastic and frequently illiberal 'solutions'. Maybe we really are just that shallow, but it annoys me when the powers that be try to twist science in order to justify the fact they don't like to share the world with fat people.
"We have no past | We won't reach back | Keep with me forward all through the night"
Do I really need to justify a negative moral judgement about people who overeat to the point of immobility, premature death, and burial in a nearly 4 foot wide casket? I'm not talking about mild obesity, which might actually be healthier than very low body fat levels, but about MORBID obesity, where the mass of body fat far exceeds the mass of all non-fat tissue. Doctors named it MORBID obesity because it drastically increases the chance of death.
Morbidly obese people are really no different the severe alcoholics, who drink so much alcohol that they destroy their liver and to some extent their brain. Are you going to argue that alcoholism is a valid lifestyle we need to embrace and that anyone who says alcoholics need to stop drinking alcohol is a bigot? Morbid obesity is JUST as harmful as severe alcoholism and is also caused by an addiction. Just as their is Alcoholics Anonymous their is also Overeaters Anonymous, to treat that addiction.
This is a personal issue with me as a I had a cousin who was well over 500 pounds for most of his adult life, until he died at the age of 42. He wasn't able to use stairs, he needed a machine to help him breath while sleeping because there was too much fat on top of his lungs when he laid flat, and he needed to use a funnel to urinate because his penis was basically surrounded by fat to the point that it could not be aimed. Sorry for being so graphic but people need to realize what life is really like at this kind of weight.
rich, I'm curious to know if you were fed a healthy diet (i.e. plenty of fruits and vegetables and a limited amount of sweets and fried food) when you were young. Which favorite fruits and vegetables do/did you eat on a regular basis?
Even though (despite scientists efforts to prove otherwise) an individual's fat is not contagious, and (unlike secondhand smoke for instance) has no negative effect on anyone else, the world still considers the size of another person's a$$ its business
Protestant ethic of self-denial and personal discipline,
no-one gets on the case of those people who can eat and eat as much crap as they like and never gain a pound.
I'm so happy to not live in a country that has advocates of the dredful "PC" stupidity and actually rallying FOR an unhealthy lifestyle and brushing it under some weird pseudo-religious rug.
Also distortioning things like "some" people overeat, where we all well know that MOST people become overweight due to the 2 factors : overeating and underusing their body.
Unlike situatons like being handicapped or having a certain skin colour, which you cannot chose or stop, being overweight is a situation which you CAN control and therefore this "PC" mess shouldnt be brought up by you. Shame on you.
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There will always be somebody somewhere in the world who finds something in a piece offensive. The movie says nothing about fat people, stop looking into things too deeply.
Harry Potter is my signature
I was wondering in what age did people EVER lock fat people in cages and leave them on a hill???
it didn't make sense.
Silly!
At what age was there ever a house that ate kids!
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Believe me, it happened. The 'fat lady' was often a popular attraction amongst circus freakshows and other travelling fairs on both sides of the Atlantic during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The treatment of these people, who were invariably toward the top of the weight scale in the 500lb+ range and sometimes had what we'd now recognise as related conditions such as Prader-Willi, autism or Down's, depended on circumstances: some (such as the woman portrayed in Monster House) were little more than slaves, allowing themselves to be treated like dirt because the alternative was destitution and social isolation, whilst others were semi-celebrities in their own right, albeit nevertheless mocked and exploited.
Nowadays they've largely been replaced, not because we're any more enlightened, tolerant or respectful toward larger people (if anything society holds them in much lower regard than in the days when a curvy woman was considered alluring and even moderate 'obesity' was seen as representative of a wealthy lifestyle of plentiful food and leisure) but because exploitative 'belly telly' such as the Biggest Loser and the slough of similar 'OMG!' reality TV about fat people is much more effective at targetting huge numbers of people.
"We have no past | We won't reach back | Keep with me forward all through the night"
Are you simply arguing against stigmatization or are you advocating overeating as part of a healthy and socially responsible lifestyle?
shareWho cares? Fat people are lazy, consuming, pigs. If they don't like how society sees them, work out and eat less, don't expect society to change to their way of bad unhealthy thinking.
there's absolutely no reason to be fat except over-indulgence.
--
What's the difference between a chicken
Because there's no such thing as a fat person that is healthy and productive, right?
You're derping all over my herp. There are plenty of over achieving, active fat people, there are also over weight people that can jog miles. I'm 6'3, 200lbs and can't run for more than a few seconds.
Or maybe I'm fat too.
I could care less about the movies interpretation, that's just for a story. However, people's ignorance is troublesome. Enjoy hating the majority, because obesity is the epidemic in most first world countries now.
It wasn't just that she was morbidly obese, but that she had lived as a freak in a freak show, taunted and laughed at by everyone. That's what pushed her over the edge the day she died, because kids were mocking her again, etc. So my point is, she wasn't just ANY fat woman, lol.
I did think it was interesting that there was this kinda abusive relationship twist in the end. She was obviously destructive and tormented but he had this codependt kinda relationship going on that ulimately wasn't good for either of them. haha
Kinda a strange premise for whoever wrote it! I often wonder how thought processes go with screenplays or stories. Like, which part did they think up first. "Let's have a big evil house eating people...okay ... let's make it really...possesed by the soul of... a big fat woman who likes eating a bunch of stuff!"
do you think he could have been a "feeder" and their is this whole commentary going on about morbidly obese people and their caretaker.
"I think I liked it better when I thought Sylar ate brains."
I would have thought more people might have read a bit more into this, it really isnt that subtle a message, did people miss the fact that it is very openly implied that the ridicule and mockery by others that Constance suffered, contributed to her murderous rage?
She is a tragic character in this movie, the house is really just a personification of all her negative traits, as well as Nebbercracker's unwillingness to move on from her death.
Once the house was gone it was a release for both of them, afterall she was as trapped in the house as anyone else, perhaps more so, did you miss the scene at the end where he bid her spirit fairwell?
Usually fat people are portrayed as laid back fun loving people who indulge a little way too much.
Constance was not usual because she had a temper tantrum that was her downfall.
Mr Nebercracker accepted too much from her. Loving someone is loving hem as they are. But when they start to eat other people is really overstepping the border, and therefore the point where you should show your loved one some tough love or else you will both live miserably.
And that is a very good life lesson for all couples to learn.
It is not what you love but how you love, and it's not how you eat, but what you eat.