Christopher's Body
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between March 21, 2021 and April 2, 2021. It was composed of 3,231 words across 71 tweets.
CW: weight cycling
"The ideal male and female bodies are now unattainable unless having them is your actual job." - Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark), real life mild-mannered reporter
"I used to be a real jock." - Christopher Reeve, pre-SUPERMAN (attributed)
Before it was de rigueur for actors to transform their bodies in order to play superheroes, Christopher Reeve had to fight to do it. When casting the role of Superman, he was initially rejected--he was, in the words of Margot Kidder, "the skinniest, dorkiest thing I'd ever seen."
When Reeve won the role, it was suggested that he wear padding to bulk up his physique. He refused, explaining that he was an avid athlete and outdoorsman, but had lost a significant amount of muscle weight during his time of intense study under Juilliard's Advanced Program.
(While it hasn't been elaborated upon in the materials I've seen and read, this makes me wonder about Reeve's mental and physical health during his time at Juilliard. Abrupt changes in weight and body shape during times of heavy stress is often a sign of disordered eating.)
Reeve explained that, with the appropriate eating and training regimen, he could work his way back up to full musculature. This would enable him to appear suitably impressive in the skin-tight costume without wearing padding underneath. The filmmakers took him at his word.
This was without precedent in superhero TV and movie adaptations at the time. George Reeves, TV's Superman in the 1950s, wore padded muscles to augment his natural physique. Adam West, TV's Batman in the 1960s, didn't do any special training to enhance his already athletic build.
There is a non-superhero example, predating SUPERMAN, of an actor using weight cycling to transform his body for the sake of a role. For Elia Kazan's 1976 screen adaptation of The Last Tycoon, Robert De Niro dropped a significant amount of weight to play movie chief Monroe Stahr.
Reeve would play Superman three more times, resigning the role after SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (Furie, 1987). Later, when asked about the possibility of a fifth SUPERMAN appearance, Reeve would say he didn't think the world was ready for a Superman with love handles.
It would take time for other superhero actors to follow Reeve's example. Michael Keaton, the star of Batman (Burton, 1989) and Batman Returns (Burton, 1992) had an athletic build, but a small frame. Rather than bulk up, he wore a costume decorated with stylized muscles.
It wasn't until the turn of the century, and the sudden spike in the popularity of the superhero genre on movie screens--more than 20 years after Christopher Reeve resigned the role of Superman--that body transformation became a standard practice for superhero actors.
Tobey Maguire trained and ate a high protein diet in order to bulk up for his role in Spider-Man (Raimi, 2002). Special consideration was necessary to accommodate Maguire's vegan lifestyle. "Lots and lots of tofu," he would quip in a making-of documentary featurette for the film.
For Batman Begins (Nolan, 2005), Christian Bale was cast partly due to his chiseled physique in American Psycho (Harron, 2000). The producers were unaware that Bale had since dropped a significant amount of weight to appear sickly and skeletal for The Machinist (Anderson, 2004).
Christian Bale's extreme weight cycling would continue for subsequent movie roles: down for Rescue Dawn (Herzog, 2006), up for The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), down for The Fighter (Russell, 2010), up for The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan, 2012) and American Hustle (Russell, 2013).
Following his role as Dick Cheney in Vice (McKay, 2018), Bale publicly remarked that he intended to discontinue the cycle of rapid weight loss and rapid weight gain for his roles. In Bale's words, "I can't keep doing it. I really can't. My mortality is staring me in the face."
Superhero movies went from merely popular to an industry standard with the debut of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008. Marvel's philosophy towards the bodies of their characters (and, by extension, their actors) is perhaps best typified by their Captain America, Chris Evans.
In Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston, 2011), Evans is altered via CGI and body doubles to appear small and sickly. The first appearance of his actual, heavily muscled body is celebrated with a lingering shot of his shirtless torso--clean-shaven, oiled, gleaming.
There are shirtless shots in the movies previously mentioned. (In Spider-Man, for example, Maguire is shocked and delighted with the overnight transformation of his physique.) But this shot of Evans is the first to exist purely as an aesthetic celebration of the idealized body.
Captain America: The First Avenger takes place during World War II. It tells the story Steve Rogers, a sickly young man eager to join the fight, but denied entry into the military due to his various physical shortcomings. He is then approached with an offer he can't refuse.
Rogers undergoes an experiment to turn him into a "super-soldier" whose body is advanced to the peak of human ability. That this process transforms him into the sort of Ary*n ideal championed by the enemy he yearns to fight--tall, blond, muscled--goes unacknowledged in the movie.
When Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 (cover-dated June 1938, actually April 1938), his edges were rougher, his treatment of authority figures less palatable. His creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were Jewish children of immigrants, and grew up during the Depression.
During that time, young people with artistic talent often went into fields like architecture or advertising. In the job-scarce 1930s, Jewish writers and artists frequently found themselves locked out of those industries and forced to work in the less prestigious medium of comics.
(It goes without saying that the United States was as prejudiced against Jewish people as anyplace else. During World War II, the U.S. government turned down many requests for asylum from Jewish Europeans attempting to flee the Holocaust, including the family of Anne Franke.)
Superman, and by extension, the superhero genre, was birthed by Jewish creators. It's not a stretch to imagine that Superman himself, with his baby Moses origin story and his mop of curly dark hair, was intended by Siegel and Shuster to appear Jewish--whether overtly or not.
Creating Superman was a reaction against the hopelessness and frustrations of the day. It seemed that powerful people didn't do much but take advantage of powerless people. Siegel and Shuster invented the most powerful person of all, who expressly took the side of the powerless.
Superman's early design consciously evokes the 1930s circus strongman--big, burly, wearing tight clothes that emphasized not so much his musculature as his sheer bulk. Having no precedent, his appearance had to telegraph his incredible physical power to the reader.
When the Depression and the war ended, Superman's priorities shifted. He no longer busied himself so much with deadbeat husbands, landlords, crooked politicians, and greedy businessmen. He defended all Americans, rich and poor alike, from more fantastical science fiction threats.
The new Superman was family friendly. He was on the side of the cops, the military, the politicians. In an unfortunately timed comic story from 1964, Superman strikes up a friendship President John F. Kennedy, and even trusts him enough to let him in on his secret identity.
Likewise, Superman's appearance began to shift. Rather than cloth draped over the body of a strongman, he gradually came to resemble an anatomical study, colored blue to assure the reader (and parents) that there was some sort of exotic cloth perfectly conforming to his skin.
By the time the Superman role found its way into the custody of Christopher Reeve, the rough edges--his Jewish undertones, his anti-authoritarian tendencies, his penchant for violent resistance--had been sanded down. Normatively attractive, morally upright, ideally American.
Aside from television series like Lois and Clark: the New Aventures of Superman and Smallville, and the strange interlude of Superman Returns (Singer, 2006), the next actor to play Superman as a recurring feature role was Henry Cavill, starting with Man of Steel (Snyder, 2013).
Cavill, following the lead of Christopher Reeve and Chris Evans, put on heavy muscle to look the part of Superman. Unlike Reeve, and like Evans, the camera dwells during his obligatory shirtless shots. (Like Reeve, and unlike Evans, Cavill was allowed to keep his body hair.)
Prior to shooting the scene when Superman emerges shirtless from the water, Cavill went on a severe fasting and training diet to ensure that his muscles would be as pronounced as possible. Once the shot was complete, director Zack Snyder rewarded him with pizza and ice cream.
Chris Evans used caloric restriction and strenuous exercise to maximize his definition for key shots in the Captain America movies. Similarly, in Logan (Mangold, 2017), Hugh Jackman would stop drinking water the day before a shirtless scene to ensure that his muscles stood out.
We not only have access to this information, we are furnished with it by the movie's promotional campaign. In the current superhero marketing pattern, it is routine to disclose, for our morbid entertainment, the ways in which the actors warped their bodies for the leering camera.
Unlike the Christopher Reeve SUPERMAN series, Man of Steel was made with the involvement of the Department of Defense, and includes overt pro-military themes. In one scene, Superman reassures his U.S. Army contact, "I grew up in Kansas, General. I'm about as American as it gets."
Superman is serving up the characteristics of a quintessential American in the right wing imagination: white, male, rural, working class, deferential to the authorities. The unspoken corollary is that one becomes less American the more one deviates from this description.
And, like Chris Evans in Captain America, Cavill is serving up a particularly flattering version of this archetype--tall, lean, muscular, square-jawed. All he lacks is the head of close-cropped blond hair to round out the look. The ideal American. The Ary*n superman.
These movies are showing us idealized versions of ourselves. (At least, idealized from the perspective of dominant culture.) When movies immerse us and saturate us with a certain kind of body as ideal, to the exclusion of others, the movies' ideal slowly becomes our ideal.
And, with our current marketplace straining at the seams with superhero movies--Marvel alone has been churning out two a year on average since the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008--we are, definitively, immersed and saturated with idealized superhero bodies.
It cannot be overstated, how unattainable the superhero body type is. It doesn't exist in the wild. Even people with a genetic propensity for this kind of physical appearance, who exercise and eat well, do not look like this unless they're starving and physically overstressed.
There is nothing wrong with eating a balanced, nutritious diet and getting plenty of exercise. That's not what this is about. Christian Bale, for example, was obviously harming himself--building himself way up, starving himself to a skeleton, and building himself back up again.
Intentional weight gain and subsequent weight loss, or vice versa, is known as weight cycling, or yo-yo dieting. An abrupt shift in daily physical activity and nutritional intake causes your body to change in a way that is unstable and cannot be sustained indefinitely.
A sudden change in the size and shape of your body is a biological crisis. Mechanisms in your body spring into action, fighting to restore it to the most recent stable version of itself. Which is exactly what it will do--your body will fight your efforts until it wins.
All the physical, mental, and emotional health risks associated with being overweight or underweight are also associated with weight cycling. Weight cycling is known to cause permanent changes in metabolism, wrecking your body's normal regulation of hunger and fullness.
"Yo-yo dieting" is a redundancy. The term "dieting," as it is popularly understood, implies yo-yo dieting, or weight cycling. Any diet that promises to permanently alter your body (in defiance of human biology) is a yo-yo diet, whether it calls itself that or not.
For the better part of a century, research has consistently shown that about 98% of diets fail to produce permanent changes. In other words, in 98% of cases, people attempting to change their bodies ended up right back where they started, or even slid in the opposite direction.
How many cases, in that remaining 2%, are people in a similar position to our actors? Who hire trainers, dietitians, and personal assistants, so they can dedicate a majority of their day to physical fitness? Whose professional reputations revolve around looking like superheroes?
A 98% rate of failure cannot be explained by a simple lack of discipline on the part of individual dieters. Successful diets are possible, but they're a statistical anomaly. 98% is more than enough mathematical certainty to state, generally, that diets do not work.
Any diet whose effect is impermanent is a yo-yo diet. If diets in general do not produce permanent effects, then all diets are yo-yo diets, not just the kind of extreme weight fluctuation practiced by Christian Bale. By definition, all of them, not just Bale, are weight cycling.
It goes without saying that none of these actors have been able to maintain their superhero bodies outside of highly specialized circumstances. Bale is one of the few to publicly admit that he was risking his health, but, at the very least, none of them can do this forever.
This is not to blame Reeve, who couldn't have known what he was starting. But we should wonder why he expected this of himself in the first place--what assumptions drove him, why we didn't interrogate our social values that informed his decision, why we clearly still haven't.
The world is a complicated place. When we're feeling troubled or threatened, whether individually or collectively, our instinct is to force the world to be simpler than it is. To make it into something we can understand more quickly, to make our problems easier to deal with.
One of the hallmarks of this instinct is binary thinking. Things are either good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. And we tend to adhere to proscriptive rules for which is which--standards taught to us from the moment we're born, which overrule our own critical judgment.
This extends to the kinds of bodies that are correct or incorrect to have. And it's easier to know which bodies are good or bad if there's one correct kind of body that all bodies are supposed to look like. (This also tells us which kinds of bodies we should be disgusted by.)
This raises the question of where these standards come from. They don't just happen in a vacuum, but, frequently, they stay with us long enough that we forget that they ever had a point of origin in the first place. The answer has some ugly, unpleasant history behind it.
Whiteness was invented in the 17th century as a justifying pretext for the kidnapping and enslavement of African people. In addition to an ideal skin color, whiteness ushered in ideal gender roles, socioeconomic hierarchies, cultural characteristics, and, yes, body types.
A physically trim and muscular body became evidence of a superior civilization--the civilization of white Europeans. By contrast, bodies appearing fat or weak were evidence of intellectual inferiority, moral rot, and primitiveness. This was a justification for chattel slavery.
Whiteness also brought with it a heavy tendency towards authoritarianism. Institutions of power were valorized, fetishized and bestowed with unquestioned respect. In a social hierarchy that includes slavery, power must be viewed as absolute and beyond challenge.
This is all not to say that there were no physically trim and muscular African people, and it doesn't mean there weren't any white people who appeared fat or weak. But, within the logic of white supremacy, those were excusable variations within the normal and natural condition.
Though the time of enslavement is no more, its baggage remains. The standards that divided us and taught us who to value and who not to value still linger. They linger in the culture we produce, and in how we're socialized, in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect.
Our culture teaches us that strength and capability can be determined with a cursory scan of someone's physical appearance. It further teaches us that our visible indicators of strength and capability determine how highly we should be regarded, how well we deserve to be treated.
Remember Chris Evans: a tall, muscular, square-jawed, blond white man. He was suitable for Captain America for the same reasons those characteristics were valued by the N*zis that America was fighting. We see him and understand him to be an agreeable image of the ideal man.
Remember, as well, the slow, steady makeover that Superman got in the comic books between the 1940s and the 1970s--the gulf between the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1 and the premiere of SUPERMAN. The less favorable elements scrubbed out, leaving only the ideal.
This is not to say that Christopher Reeve was bad for wanting to change his body in order to play Superman. Like a majority of us, he was a normal person trying to make sense out of the world, using the tools given to him by the puritanical, unequal culture that socializes us.
Obviously, he was operating within a culture that taught him that being handsome, powerful, and capable meant having a particular kind of appearance, and one kind of appearance only. Obviously, he felt that the worth of a hero was tied to the kind of body that the hero inhabited.
This has implications for the rest of us--how we view each other, how we treat each other, how we treat ourselves. We know what we're supposed to look like, but most of us do not look like that, and we learn to think that it's our fault that our bodies turned out the "wrong" way.
We're taught that our bodies are changeable, that our appearance is a matter of willpower. (The actors who play our superheroes provide us with plenty of examples to justify this idea, whether they mean to or not.) Accordingly, if our bodies don't look right, it's our fault.
And if it's our fault that our bodies don't look right, then our peers are within their right to judge us for falling short of the ideal. And it's appropriate for us to judge ourselves, to develop damaged relationships with our bodies--literally, to hate the skin we live in.
The preponderance of evidence shows no significant correlation between health and appearance, that weight cycling is risky and unhealthy, that policing people's weight harms their ability to maintain their health.
But, like Kryptonians, we stubbornly ignore the evidence.
Perhaps part of being a superhero--someone who moves through the world with confidence and fairness--is accepting that bodies are supposed to be unique, that anybody can be handsome and powerful and capable with the body they have, and that no single body type is the right one.
Maybe Michael Keaton had the right idea. He could have hired a squadron of trainers and nutritionists to build him up and starve him down. Instead, he wore a costume, and he acted.
He may not have had a real life superhero body. But he had his body, and that was enough.
This addendum (3/9/2024) regards the aforementioned possibility that Reeve had an eating disorder between his time at Jiuliard and his audition for SUPERMAN. In 1975, Reeve collapsed onstage during a performance of the Enid Bagnold play A Matter of Gravity.
The doctor who treated him advised him that he needed to eat a healthier diet. Between A Matter of Gravity and his shooting schedule for the soap opera Love of Life, Reeve was so busy (and, likely, overworked) that he had been surviving on coffee and candy bars.
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Published 3/9/2024
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