**½/****
directed by Lauren Greenfield
by Alex Jackson Everybody hates the anorexic/bulimics. It's a disease exclusive to spoiled white girls with "negative body image"–a pseudoscientific catchphrase of the pseudoscientific psychiatric community that dominated in the diagnosis-happy 1970s. While people in the rest of the world–the rest of the country, even–starve from hunger, these rich brats "restrict" themselves or "purge." Not helping matters any for Thin, the rare documentary to revolve around something other than Iraq or exotic animals, is that it's a film about an upper-middle-class disease targeted at an upper-middle-class audience. This is an easier subject for them to give their attention to, as well as an easier subject through which to vicariously enjoy victimization. In light of all that, I was very excited to see Thin: as a major in Family, Consumer, and Human Development, I'm fresh off studying the stage of adolescence where one of the chief obstacles is establishing order and direction in your life. Eating disorders are the purest form of achieving this–it's adolescence distilled to its very core. The anorexic/bulimic has a direction and a means of achieving order in her life. She wants to lose weight and will readily abuse her body in order to achieve that. Photographer-turned-documentarian Lauren Greenfield has made a compulsively watchable (and certainly professional) film, but I'm not sure that it really tells us anything about eating disorders. She's one of those objective observers, standing on the sidelines filming the girls doing their thing, which includes, yes, purging. No gory close-ups of the chucking, just an icy and tasteful medium shot through the doorway. Greenfield sidelines saying something about eating disorders by getting obsessed with the minutiae of disorder-centre politics, facilitating lots of good storytelling but little in the way of great art. It's not the lack of velocity or passion that gets to me, it's Greenfield's naïve idea of Truth. She seems to think that Truth is achieved by absolving yourself from a perspective, whereas I believe it's achieved through taking on multiple perspectives. I kept wanting to hear something like West Side Story's "I Feel Pretty" on the soundtrack, or see anorexic/bulimics equated with the monks who forgo worldly pleasures and flog themselves. I wanted something a little nutty, something that would charge me up and get me thinking, but the film is unilateral and unblinking.
