"The Whale"

We went to see The Whale the other night. Based on the stage play of the same name, The Whale recounts the final week in the life "the whale," morbidly obese Charlie, as he attempts to put various relationships to right. With the help of prosthetic makeup designer Adrien Morot and a "NASCAR-size pit crew", actor Brendan Fraser to all appearances was a 600-lb. man. 

The initial scene sees Charlie watching gay porn on his laptop computer while discretely pleasuring himself when a knock comes on the front door of his second-floor apartment. Thinking that Liz, a nurse and his long-time caregiver has returned, Charlie unwittingly invites young Thomas into his home.

Thomas purports to be a missionary from the local New Life Church and has come to share the Gospel with Charlie. Charlie reacts with anger and over the course of the film we come to learn that Alan, Charlie's deceased young lover, was the son of an elder at the church (and brother of the adopted Liz) and had committed suicide because his father and church would not accept his commitment to a same-sex relationship with Charlie. We never see anyone from New Life Church in the film, which lets it serve as an easy target for the homophobia Charlie and Liz attribute to evangelical Christianity.

Thomas remains undeterred by the attacks of Charlie and Liz. While he is never allowed to make anything like a complete gospel message, Thomas's own deception is gradually revealed. Through the manipulation of Charlie's daughter Ellie, Thomas eventually discloses that he has fled his family and another "bad" evangelical church in his hometown with over $2000 of the church's cash. By the end of the film, however, Thomas happily reports that his family has contacted him with a word of forgiveness and an invitation to return home. The open forgiveness for Thomas's sin contrasts with the unforgiving (but silenced) New Life Church.

Still, I must credit screenwriter (and original playwright) Samuel Hunter for permitting Thomas not to draw the simple conclusion that sin exists only to be forgiven. While forgiven, Thomas does not become Woke. Indeed, the character of Thomas ends his part in the film by reading a highlighted passage from a Bible that Alan had left behind, calling on followers of Christ to put to death a wide variety of sins and vices

The Whale reflects the Augustinian theme of disordered loves in a distinctively modern, Western context: Charlie simply had no choice but to put his passions for Alan ahead of the goods of marriage and fatherhood. Authenticity refracted through the aesthetic is the only virtue of this age. Charlie's final words to his class of online English Comp students are the "moral" of the movie when he shouts that there is no need for them to write well but only to write what is true to themselves.

What drivel. (I immediately thought that Charlie should offer to refund their tuition.)

The age of expressive individualism is based on a false anthropology. It generates approaches to living that are hostile to human persons and which undermine any notion of the common good and the institutions in which common goods come to fruition. We see its morbid symptoms: breakdowns in trust, social fragmentation and psychological distress. Charlie's pathologies are real but the "double-down-on-more-of-the-same" solution proffered in The Whale will only make the problems worse.

If the only good is what is good to me, if our chief end is only to satisfy ourselves, then there is no moral reason for me to respect you. Ever-increasing personal sovereignty is too thin a reed to ground life in any real community. And life apart from community is not human. Thus the refrain of ever-more personal (especially sexual) freedom that characterizes the principle frame of discourse of the West. As we turn the tools of technology upon ourselves, we convert pursuit of the good into relentless pursuit of what makes us feel good. We are seeing the triumph of the therapeutic and thus find ourselves in an age of emotivism. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, we are watching the abolition of humanity. 

Many Progressives have criticized The Whale for its perceived fat-shaming. Many Christians have criticized it for being anti-Christian. But more fundamentally, The Whale is anti-human.