"Thin," a documentary about contemporary eating disorders, just came out on DVD in July 2007. In the film, director and photographer Lauren Greenfield lets the camera roll on four women at The Renfrew Center's Coconut Creek, Florida residential treatment facility for eating disorders. Her fly-on-the wall approach is unmatched in unveiling the untold horror of anorexia and bulimia nervosa --and how they seduce their victims with promises of thinness.
Still, the film leaves the reader longing for something more satisfying.
The four stories roll on, occasionally intersecting, but more often following their own trajectories. The lack of a cohesive narrative leaves the average viewer rightfully shocked but nonetheless adrift in a sea of seemingly meaningless suffering.
How to make sense of why these diseases happen? And why does recovery here look like regression, one step forward and two steps back?
Greenfield does not answer these questions. Instead, the film seems fixated on the graphic behaviors of patients and their rebelliousness against treatment center staff. This approach paints the women as “bad girls” in need of good punishment -- broken children in need of a good parent -- and their treatment center as a quasi-reform school with arbitrary rules that appear to have nothing to do with healing.
No smoking at the center. No tattoos. Patients who follow these rules, the “good girls,” get rewards like “military leave,” a trip into town for the day. Those who disobey lose privileges. Too far and it’s “pack your bags to go home.” At times, "Thin" seemed like a reality show – who'd get booted off Renfrew Island next?
The tension between rule makers and rule breakers is quietly portrayed by the contrast in body size between the women who are sick (emaciated) and the treatment staff (some of whom are overweight or obese). This leads the viewer to wonder how these patients can trust the support staff, who seem to have unaddressed weight issues of their own. The size contrast becomes aptly metaphoric for a power play in a disease emanating from a desire to gain power by controlling food. The “small” patients break the rules, and the “large” staff (and Greenfield does hone the camera in repeatedly on their excess flesh) retaliate with fiercer punishments, the worst being expulsion for one patient who lied about her antics during a sanctioned trip to town.
The lack of a context leaves the viewer wondering whether such a demeaning boot camp mentality can actually help anyone. Theories of addiction treatment do argue that those who are willing to follow the rules are the ones most amenable to recovery. Rules = structure = support for recovery. But it’s only support. Not a certainty: a person has to want to get better for the rules of recovery to work.
And even then, this structure does not work for everyone.
By leaving viewers without a backdrop for understanding, "Thin" misses opportunities to convey elements of eating disorders that are so critical to recovery, and prevention. For example, two of the most compelling scenes in the film, concern the youngest of the four women interviewed, Brittany, 15, who had been battling with eating disorders since she was a child. Brittany had ravaged her body by abusing food and entered treatment with serious medical problems. In one scene, her mother and sister visit, and the camera follows the family to the dining hall. The viewer gets a first-hand glimpse of a mother-daughter legacy of eating disorders, played out over a plate of chicken and vegetables. Brittany’s mother fiddles with just about every bite of produce on her plate, retrieving only one she deigns allowable to eat. She cuts up her chicken into tiny tiny pieces and nibbles but a few. There are no illusions here as to the source of Brittany’s schooling in anorexia nervosa, brought home by another scene in which the girl tells of her favorite game she and her mother play: chewing and spitting candy, bags of it in a sitting.
This would have been a great opportunity to provide further information about the passing on of eating disorders from mothers to daughters. Even a director's extra that explains the statistics would have been a welcome addition. (We know, for example, that a relative of a family member with an eating disorder is 7-12 times more likely to have one as well And the latest study shows that if a mother has an eating disorder, symptoms such as dieting, bingeing and purging show up in her children by the age of 10 more often than mothers without eating disorders.)
Once again, context is the key – an explanation of how therapists treat eating disorders as family issues, without blaming the parents, would have been a valuable addition.
The preceding shortcomings aside, Greenfield has done the eating disorders community a great service by bringing the realities of these diseases to public attention in such an indelible fashion. Too bad the film was too…thin.