Tag: TV

It was a sweltering Monday evening a bit before the end of the school year when I flopped into my favorite chair and played with the remote, landing on a cartoon black and white image of a heavy-set woman who had a dark cloud over her head.

And I was hooked.

I dropped the remote the first time I watched Plum, the main character, undress for a doctor’s appointment.  The plastic surgeon marked her full body with a sharpie, an action that felt as crude as rape itself.  Plum’s face contorted in confusion as the doctor rattled off all the different ways he could remake her physicality.

The next day I ran to the library to get Sarai Walker’s book.

And each Monday I plop my own plump butt into my favorite chair to watch Plum’s journey.  Sometimes I watch Unapologetic afterwards.

Because as much as the external story line jumps the shark, I am amazed to see such an honest view of women on television.  Okay…it is cable TV.

And the book, although lacking the diversity represented in the series, is brutally honest about how women are castrated by external expectations, especially when it comes to our bodies.  Unfortunately, the book’s ending felt stunted.  And the series wanders off into lands that Walker does not.  But Dietland‘s sentiment is still the same.

Watching plump Plum wake up to the reality that her life has been spent waiting until she’s thin resonated with me.  Watching her mock the female ideal made me chuckle. And then there have been the interactions between Kitty and Plum that have made me laugh out loud, a rarity since I don’t have much of a sense of humor, or cringe in horror.

Plum makes you want to reach out and hug her. She saves her birth name, Alicia, for that perfect body and goes as far as buying clothes for Alicia, not Plum, which made me uncomfortable. Listening to her counseling sessions with Verena made me cry.  I was so uncomfortable when she fought with one of her few friends, who in the series is a gay Black man, as they battled it out in a game of “You don’t know what it’s like”.

Self-hatred is buried deep within Plum.  And at this point in the season when she decides to free it, albeit at others, she is confronted with a society that still cannot accept her.  And maybe that is the lesson.  All you need to do is accept yourself.

Rarely does television evoke emotion from me anymore.  So much feels like super sweet candy that gets stuck in the back of your throat and makes you gag.

And watching Dietland‘s characters’ raw emotion can be painful.

But Dietland sheds painful truths on what it means to live as the “other” in our society.

I hope enough people have the guts to watch. Or better yet…read the book.

JMonell