Bostonist
Posted by Caroline Roberts
February 27, 2007
The Harris Center for Eating Disorders presents Thin at the Brattle Theater. The movie will screen at 7:00 tonight, and director Lauren Greenfield and Dr. David Herzog will hold a Q&A afterward.
Photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who explored "Girl Culture" in her last work, is in town to screen her documentary about women suffering from eating disorders - the timing is right now that we've seen all the lollipop-headed women parading up Oscar's red carpet.
Greenfield gained access to the Renfrew Center in Florida, where women try to overcome their anorexia and bulimia, and she reveals the pain they're going through as they try to return to a normal life.
At first blush, anorexia and bulimia seem easy to cure - all you have to do is eat something, right? But the clips of Greenfield's documentary that are available online show that anorexia and bulimia are insidious diseases that play games with people's minds.
The mental distortions these women suffer are most evident during the Renfrew Center's art therapy, in which the women are asked to draw their shapes in an outline on a large sheet of paper. Then, the therapist traces their actual shapes. The discrepancies between the reality and the body image are staggering.
In an interview, Greenfield states, "But what you see with the women at Renfrew, and the women who are suffering with a true eating disorder, is that they are committing a form of suicide. And that for many, it has nothing to do with the way their body looks or vanity; it really has to do with control, and it's really a coping mechanism for whatever they are going through."
The image above might seem shocking to some, but it's taken from Greenfield's trailer. A young woman has gone so far into anorexia that she must have a feeding tube. Later on, another woman who underwent the same process was so desperate to keep food out of her body that she figured out how to "trick" the feeding tube.
This documentary doesn't glamorize anorexia like the gossip rags do. This documentary just shows what people go through as they try to get better - or kill themselves trying to be thin.