The Heavy (Panda) Bear

This weekend the movie Kung Fu Panda was on TV. I watched some of it with my kids and with some friends after lunch. It reminded me of the poem Susan Bordo inserts at the beginning of her book, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. The poem by Delmore Schwartz, called "The Heavy Bear," explores the relationship between the body and the true self. The poem characterizes the body as an unwanted, heavy, encumbrance with base, animal desires that inhibits expression and cripples relationships.

 In Kung Fu Panda, the protagonist--Po--is an overweight Panda Bear who is accidentally named the "Dragon Warrior," a legendary fighter who would bring peace to the land (and the heart of a kung fu teacher). He initially fails in his efforts to learn martial arts and to embody the legend foretold about him (supposedly). He works for his father, a noodle restaurant owner, and struggles with his weight.

Po begins his training in earnest, but loses heart as his peers and teachers doubt his potential. Po is overweight, slow, uncoordinated, and untrained. In an emotionally charged scene (for an animated movie) with his teacher, the teacher asks Po why he hasn't left the school/palace. Po responds by saying that anything was better than returning to what he was before, an unhappy, overweight, restaurant waiter. Susan Bordo's explanation of the historical "construction of the body as something apart from the true self and as undermining the best efforts of that self" ring true for Po in that moment. Since his youth he had dreamed of being a hero and a master of the art of Kung Fu, but his body, his very species--he is continually questioned about being a fighting panda--prohibits this expression of his true self. Humorously enough, the teacher realizes that Po just needs the proper motivation (food) in order to make his training more successful. In one of those motivational training sequences put to music in fighting films, Po completes his training, developing his own style that makes use of his mass, his belly, and his proclivity for stuffing his face with food. And in the end, he does become a hero who masters his body, accepting it and learning to use its attributes for him instead of letting them work against him.

I doubt this story would work very well for a woman, however. The pressure of society and media to remain slender, especially for women, ensure that roles like these in movies are by-and-large filled by men. Bordo notes society's expectations of the active/passive dichotomy within gender: males are active and striving; women are passive, waiting for men to act. While we have many examples in media of women being proactive and independent protagonists; it seems a minority of women do so by embracing overweight or heavy bodies. Bordo states, "representations of men and women eating . . . exhibit a dualistic pedagogy instructing women and men in very different attitudes toward the 'heavy bear' and its hungers: women's appetites require containment and control, whereas male indulgence is legitimated and encouraged."