Americans are fat, and getting fatter. Millions live inside jellified mounds of excess flesh. They have thighs so huge they can only walk crabwise, midriffs so vast that they cannot sit comfortably on an ordinary chair, hearts and lungs so overtaxed that they cannot breathe or climb stairs, much less lift shopping bags or children. Arriving in Chicago-the nation's sixth fattest city-after ten years in Europe, I thought at first it was the shock of re-entry that made the fat seem especially fat. Then I wondered if it wasn't something about the midwest. Surrounded by thousands of square miles of utterly flat prairie, it seemed logical that the people of Chicago would want to create contours, landcapes, peaks and valleys. Hence their skyscrapers. Hence, too, I thought, their high body-mass index, their own intimate morphologies of crevasses, hills and toppling crags. But the reality is more prosaic; there is simply a lot more fatness around than there was ten years ago. Nearly 60 per cent of Americans are overweight; nearly 20 per cent obese. They are not, it is now to be understood, fat. The word, as used for instance in the "Fat Controller," carries pejorative connotations, a penumbra of weakness and self-indulgence, and fatness is fast being removed from the moral sphere. In the case of the Fat Controller it has already gone. The Fat Controller is the best (indeed perhaps the only) character in the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. But in America he has been renamed. He has not become the Overweight Controller or the Obese Controller. He has become Sir Topham Hatt, after his headgear.
Whoever decided that the Fat Controller had to take his bow had an ear to the ground of influential opinion. The drive is on here to medicalise obesity, to take it into the realm of disease, the hospital and the health insurer. Dr William Dietz, director of nutrition and physical activity at the national Centers for Disease Control, says that America is in the grip of an "obesity epidemic," and that obesity is a "major medical problem." The home page of the American Obesity Association contains a mass of evidence to show that food, like alcohol and nicotine, is addictive, that obesity is the result of that addiction, and that its treatments should therefore (and here's the crux, perhaps) be tax-deductible or payable by health insurance.
But while most of America has been filling out, Hollywood, where the image of what is desirable is created, has been getting proportionately thinner. In Hollywood, there is no scruple about making food and thinness-unless they are associated with anorexia-moral issues. Thin is good; thin is in control; thin is a bigger pay-check; thin is even sexy. Stars who a few years ago had pinchable arms are now mere skin and bone-think of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston-think of almost anyone. Publicists boast how thin their clients are; Julia Roberts, we are proudly told, is 20 pounds lighter than she was when she made Pretty Woman a decade ago. Conversely, Catherine Zeta Jones who is really huge (whoops!) in oestrogen-friendly Italy, has to play the savvy fifties starlet for all she is worth to overcome the disadvantage of her curves, and will never earn as much as her leaner contemporaries.
Fat and thin are connected: two sides of the same coin. And their connection, it seems to me, can be found in the physiognomy of the biggest female star of the day. America is in the grip of an escalating oral fixation which is symbolised by and reaches its apotheosis in the $20m mouth of Julia Roberts. Roberts' mouth is the sexiest thing in America right now. Like the magic tornado in the Wizard of Oz, it is sucking people off the streets and pulling them-millions of gum-chewing, popcorn-popping viewers-into the cinemas. Julia Roberts is not Hollywood's greatest actress. But her mouth, especially magnified 50 times on the wide screen, is the biggest, the lushest, the widest, the most invitingly cave-like. It's the best box office ever. It's a mouth that could swallow America. Roberts may get an Oscar for Erin Brockovich, but her fans will know it's her mouth that is the real winner. If she ate her statuette on television, the nation would faint.
What's going on? Is America regressing to the state of the Freudian infant who was too young to be able to untangle the relationships between food, sex and oral gratification? For many Americans, sex has indeed become oral sex. For others, sex has simply ceased to be of interest, and for some of those, it has been replaced by food, which, going in mouthwards, offers a few of the same satisfactions. Oral sex is fashionable, whether you are a southern Baptist, the president of the nation or a 12 year old in the playground, partly because it is relatively safe, partly because you can say that it's not sex at all. But for all those indulging in office blow-jobs, there are many more who are just too bored or too weary to be doing with it at all. Well over half of all Americans say that most of the time they just can't be bothered, that they'd rather shop, watch a ball game, work in the garden or go out to dinner. In Manhattan and Silicon Valley, young entrepreneurs don't even try. At parties where pheromones should be lustfully circulating, the only thing in the air is the smell of money. Dot.com types say they would rather go to the gym than chat up someone who only wants to check out their share options.
Ah, the gym. Calories again, food and not food; and reigning over it all, for the fat and the thin, the overweight, the anorexic and the obese, is the open, smiling, welcoming, golden mouth of Julia Roberts. It'll take a Deep Throat to tell us where it will all end. n
