DUAL: disgust, disconnection and destruction of our bodies.
Fighting against your body is exhausting. Whether you’re taking physical action to change how you look, or just thinking about the ways in which you feel you should change how you look, the intense pressure to morph into the narrow societal ideal takes a toll on both our physical and mental health. So why do we keep up the fight?
Discomfort. That’s why. When we feel chronically inadequate, we also feel ashamed and embarrassed of our below-par bodies. When shame and embarrassment are not released, they linger and fester and build up within the body, creating a visceral sense of unease and discomfort in one’s skin, a sensation I can only describe as an itchy-scratchy restlessness that swells and wobbles, reminding you of your inadequacy. Naturally, because it feels fucking awful, we want to get rid of this discomfort, and we have been taught by diet culture that fighting our bodies and changing the physical skin we are in is how we do exactly that. Vicious cycle maybe?
Director Scarlett Pivaro Monaghan will interrogate this battle between our minds and our bodies in her upcoming film DUAL (2023). An abstract analysis of how body dissatisfaction disconnects us from our bodies, and the resulting mistreatment of them.
DUAL illustrates the conflict with our bodies using two metaphorical figures: ‘The Creator’, representing the tortured mind, and ‘The Creation’, representing the body at the mercy of The Creator’s anguish. Through the lens of those that struggle with eating disorders or body dysmorphic disorder, The Creator may be recognisable as a depiction of their illness, but could just as easily be recognised, universally, as a heightened version of our cruel inner critics.
I spoke to Scarlett about her own experience with an eating disorder, and how coming out the other side of it, she realised how traumatising it was to be so consumed with how her body looked, “Looking back, it’s so weird how disconnected I was from my body, I can’t believe what I put my body through in trying to make it something it wasn’t.”
When we feel hatred towards our body, it’s easy to lose sight of the harm we may be causing it. Many people fantasise about violating their bodies, such as ripping their flesh off, or even carving it off with a knife in their pursuit of thinness. Scarlett described her experience of this, “I had this feeling of wanting to wrap ropes around my body and squeeze it and twist it as tight as possible, like I was trying to compress something”.
DUAL does not shy away from this masochistic attitude, it highlights the horrific reality of feeling trapped in a body you want to disown. The film aims to be an uneasy watch, provoking discomfort and distress in the audience. Scarlett wants them to connect with the intense pain of hating your body, “(DUAL) is supposed to be an experience as opposed to a piece of entertainment”.
To compliment the disturbing themes of the film, DUAL will take on the aesthetic of a surreal body horror. The work of artist Francis Bacon has been a visual inspiration, with his paintings depicting surreal figures with contorted and manipulated bodies. “It’s like all the characters in his paintings are in some kind of nightmarish space, when I saw them, I felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, which is often how I felt within my body during my eating disorder”, Scarlett says.
Like Bacon’s paintings, DUAL is an abstract and experimental film, unbound by the limitations of character motivations and plot points. The creative team want to express a feeling rather than tell a story, so making the film surreal allows them to hone in on the visceral emotions and sensations that come with body hatred, and not be distracted by the exact identities of The Creator and The Creation.
The abstract nature also leaves space for anyone to identify with it. Giving eating disorders a specific look will always leave the majority of people who suffer with them feeling invalidated. The media is guilty of this, often focussing on the external ‘look’ rather than the internal mindset; depicting emaciated white girls refusing treatment in private hospitals, until they find a man and finally see they were beautiful all along *cough cough* To The Bone *cough cough*…
DUAL, however, explores the internal turmoil of body hatred and obsession, focussing solely on the thoughts, feelings and sensations as they are, as opposed to who is experiencing them. Scarlett’s aim is for the audience, no matter who they are, to see themselves in the film “We’ve made both The Creator and The Creation genderless, and the narrative voice, which is made up of voice recordings from interviews, will be modified to sound like one, universal voice so that the film is as inclusive as possible”.
Right now, a film like DUAL is more important than ever. Whilst the pressure to change our bodies is unfortunately likely to always be there, at a particular time when eating disorders are at a record high, and the return of heroin chic looms large, we need to be reminded of the mental and physical cost of fighting against our bodies. Body dissatisfaction is so normalised, and so common, that we’ve become desensitised to the distress that comes with feeling unhappy in the skin we’re in. DUAL will slap us in the face, and remind us of how fucked up it really is to go through life feeling such disgust towards ourselves.
DUAL, as with most things, cannot be made without sufficient resources, and in order to bring their vision for DUAL to life, and do it the justice it deserves, Scarlett and her team need to raise money to access those resources. Below is a link to their Instagram to find out more about the amazing project, and their crowdfunder page where you can donate however much you are able to in support of the film. I urge you to follow DUAL’s progress, and get familiar with the message it is trying to spread. We need art to stand up and speak out for us, and that’s what DUAL is here to do.
