behind the curtain
Diet culture and disordered eating in the film industry.
Author’s note: I remember the first conversations I had with Kit about this film set; there’s a way that work culture subtly intertwines itself within the psyche. What I find most fascinating about her story is not the prevalence of eating disorders in entertainment, which is almost a cliché at this point, but the unique POV that Kit’s story offered. What does it mean to show up to a workplace everyday, where you have to collect a paycheck to survive, to then exist as a helpless bystander to others with the same illness as you? It’s a complex and powerless position, and Kit’s openness in this conversation led to an intriguing and important story on society.
[Name changed for privacy]
Kit wanted to be a screenwriter, but no one just becomes a screenwriter.
We sit around the dark wooden table in my apartment, sipping on leftover craft beers from a camping trip, and Kit describes her scattered journey in entertainment. After transferring colleges twice and graduating with a pile of debt, Kit slipped into roles in costume departments on the Atlanta film scene. The industry in Atlanta had been accelerating for over a decade and there was no need to be anywhere else, even if Kit did occasionally fantasize over packing up her car and moving out west.
Kit began her professional career as a costume assistant, which meant completing a hodgepodge of low-stakes and high-stakes support tasks, standard for anyone early in their career. The role included driving around the greater outskirts of Atlanta to pick up outfits for scenes, assisting with clothing returns, and ensuring that all set members were provided lunch. She describes the distinctions between scripted and unscripted films, with a seeming bias towards the latter. The former entails a full costume department with various roles, while the latter does not have a costume department and includes mediums such as documentaries. There are exceptions, she acknowledges, such as The Bachelor, where everything is debatably performative, including the clothing.
She pulls her arms over her head, stretching her shoulders in a reverse rag doll pose, and walks me through the hierarchy of roles within a costume department, from the supervisor down to the assistants. The sky outside is a clear turquoise, and I catch the sun diving onto the round porch table through the window. We jumped in the ocean a couple of hours before and the ends of her hair, dyed with a pop of color, are still wet from the salt water. The Pacific was frigid and sharp, like jumping into a sea of needles, though neither of us acknowledged that it was winter, and neither of us cared. The ocean was near us, and therefore we would be in it.
Gigs in film for Kit have been serendipitous, and she rarely plans her life more than a few months in advance. “It’s just what you do,” she explains. “It’s even more chaotic [to plan] in unscripted. Those people never have families.” Kit lands her gigs through connections and cold emails, and if she isn’t working, she packs up her car and disconnects from the world on one of America’s extensive backpacking trails. She doesn’t seem to want a plan, though. It doesn’t fit her personality.
There is one film gig from Kit’s past that I want to understand today. “You really want to know the shit that went down on that set?” Kit looks at me from across the table, a matter-of-fact expression on her face. She already knows that I want to know, but I nod anyway.
“Then the first thing you must understand,” she says, “is that lunch was always political.”
Lunch was always political because you take a dozen different people with a dozen different preferences and you try to please everyone, but you never do.
“I sure did try though,” she says. You could say Kit really tried, that she tried as hard as one could, given the circumstances. She’d narrow down a district on the outskirts of the film’s set with enough suitable food options to please most people. She’d write down everyone’s order on a note on her phone, waiting patiently as they carefully scrolled through their options, contemplating this dish and that, throwing vicious comments at items on the menu like a judge on a talent show. Eventually, she’d hop into her old white Subaru before everyone’s designated break and throw on her cat-eye sunglasses, hoping that she wouldn’t be cutting it too close that day.
They’d always make sure to tell her what compromise they’d made.
She’d walk into each restaurant and try not to feel embarrassed as she’d run through the list of special requests for each item. None of this topping, no sweetener in that, and would they mind providing extra sauce? The cashier would always glance at her with screw you eyes. As an hourly employee herself, living paycheck to paycheck, Kit felt her own shame boil in her cheeks.
There was always an outlier order. And if that outlier order was the supervisor’s, you were sure to make the extra trip.
Kit would balance stacks of drinks and to-go boxes in the back of her car, hoping that the Atlanta drivers would be calmer that day so she wouldn’t have to pump the brakes in a sudden stop on the highway in bumper-to-bumper traffic—the kind of sudden brake that would send the food flying in her backseat like a slingshot. Then she’d march back on set, trying to remember if Peggy had wanted this, or Sasha that, and she’d watch in silence as they’d carefully pluck apart the items with scrutiny.
It was always chaotic.
It was always chaotic because not only were her colleagues bound to have varying degrees of preference, but most of them displayed their own version of disordered eating. So, you’re really dealing with a bunch of wishy-washy, overworked, sleep-deprived people—some malnourished—all of whom have this whole other voice in their head that they can’t control, dictating what they should and shouldn’t eat.
In everyone’s heads, lunch choices were life or death. And no one was ever happy with the results.
This was the bane of Kit’s existence on the film set—managing lunch. Sometimes she’d stop to question the irony. She’d tasted every flavor of disordered eating too. Kit’s had an eating disorder since she was seven, though of course no one on set knew that.
Or maybe they did.
That’s the thing with eating disorders. You’re gifted a special lens through which you view the world, even if you’d rather float along in ignorance. Which means that every time that one colleague says no, they can’t eat that food because it will make them fat, you’ll be sure to associate that food with fatness forever.
So, if you’re one of us, you see it. Those who know, know. And those who don’t are just going to work.
For Kit, working in costumes wasn’t entirely random. It wasn’t impersonal, either.
She recounts her early experiences with clothes. It was always unclear where her place in a store was, rotating between the tween, teen, and adult sections in middle school. She’d learned from an early age that clothes weren’t designed for people like her. Conventionally, at least. Shopping for clothes involved going through a maze of stores in a mall, playing a sizing guessing game, and spending hours just to find a single pair of pants.
Kit could always sense her mother’s shame when she’d take her to section after section to find additional sizes because none of the conventional brands fit properly. She’d stare at the floor as her mother tried to hide her frustration. Her mother simply did not know what to do. She had not been prepared to have a daughter like Kit. During Kit’s childhood, her mother took her to Weight Watchers (a detail of Kit’s journey she has chosen to deny in present day) and forced insincere smiles when Kit would need to go shopping again for additional clothes for her fluctuating sizes, pairs of pants frequently becoming too big or too small. Regardless of fault, it was always a burden, because their family didn’t have much money to spend on clothes. Maybe her mother could have done better to lessen Kit’s shame, but Kit doesn’t know, because she’s never been a mother.
As she grew into adulthood, Kit became accustomed to understanding clothes as a source of joy and inspiration for others but not for herself. Working in costumes was a convenient mechanism for being a chameleon. She could shop in various departments and marvel at beautiful clothing without acknowledging its inherent discrimination. She felt genuine enthusiasm in dressing up others on sets and driving around to various thrift stores and sifting through clothing.
There’s something about admiring what you can’t have.
Working in the costume department became an extension of systematic issues Kit experienced in her earlier life. First, no one ever wanted to shop for plus-size actors (few of which there were). Getting assigned a plus-size shopping project was akin to being hazed. The rare endeavor was both dreaded by her colleagues and complicated from a technical standpoint. It meant that instead of shopping in a candy store, you were scraping gum off a sidewalk.
Every costume for every actor was highly specific, and finding clothing items that matched the vision in plus-sizes required making multiple stops at multiple stores, only to sacrifice the original vision anyway. It was one thing to not find plus-size clothing as a middle schooler, but these were adults with adult clothing stores, where options should theoretically be plentiful. They never were, though, and Kit was forced to re-experience her personal shame through the plus-size actors on set.
“I’d feel a personal responsibility for this person to have options, but I also only have so much time in the day and I was always operating on intense deadlines. It shouldn’t be hard to find a pair of plain black slacks, but it was.” Kit pauses. “But I also didn’t want them to feel shitty. They have to act in what you dress them in and they need to feel comfortable to perform. It’s a small piece of a big picture. It does matter.”
Then, there was the diet culture. Working on this costume set meant you were a forced listener to comments everyone made about their own body and eating choices in conjunction with comments they made on yours. The film industry was nothing like new-age corporate culture. No perky wellness initiatives promoting exercise competitions in January for weight loss. No conversations flooded with “science-forward” euphemisms to justify malnourishing diets over water coolers. No corporate enterprise deals nudging employees on a health app that large populations of teenage girls with anorexia have been champion users of since the late 2000s.
No, the environment on the film set was far more cutting. Everything was as blunt as you look skinny and you look fat. Nothing was wrapped up in modern corporate euphemisms. Just age-old comments thrown around, blunt as could be, and not dissimilar to how Kit imagined an early 2000s backstage runway show to be. “Or [The] Devil Wears Prada,” she jokes, half-heartedly. Though, she couldn’t help but admit she preferred it that way.
At least one could call a spade a spade.
“You were hitting every type of disordered eating in this group,” Kit shares, and describes behaviors reflective of anorexia, binge eating disorder, orthorexia, and bulimia. “You could almost sniff it in the room when someone had some type of challenge. You’d hear the bathroom door close and you knew exactly what was going on. You’d walk around and watch as employees tiptoed around the act of eating for as long as they could.” She tells me she once witnessed a woman who was seven months pregnant work over ten hours without a single bite of food. You need to eat now, Kit told her. Kit looked at the woman’s face and it was like she was walking on a tightrope, knowing she should get off but unable to jump.
Ensuring her fellow crew members ate was both a moral and legal obligation. In film production in America, there are regulations in place to ensure that members of the crew eat within reasonable periods of time. If crew members are not granted time to sit down and eat a meal within a designated time period, a meal penalty is incurred. Meal penalties on Kit’s set added up for every fifteen minutes that passed, and if continuously broken, could significantly impact the film’s budget.
Kit reflects on her role as being both the enabler and the nurturer, in between everyone else’s disordered habits while also managing her own. Kit was the enabler because she knew exactly what she was doing on every food run: allowing others to perpetuate their own disordered eating habits through their choices.
“Did you know what was happening?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“Of course,” she says. “But I couldn’t just say no to X request and Y demand. I always knew what was happening.” She was also the nurturer, because she grew to learn what each person struggled with and how to delicately nudge them to take care of themselves. We sit without words for a minute, as if a moment of silence is needed for how powerless such a position can be.
The sky outside is black now, and the porch chairs through the glass doors look like lopsided silhouettes. I get up to turn on another light. We’ve been tiptoeing around dissecting a detail of Kit’s story, perhaps the most germane.
“Before starting this job, where were you at in your eating disorder journey?” I ask. She knows what I’m getting at. It’s like an unspoken truth.
“Listen, I’m not saying I looked at [working in] costumes like a diet. But I knew some things would trigger me, and I lacked purpose, and I was trying to find a new purpose.” She refers to the gig as a fresh start, but what she means is it was a new chance to lose weight, to fall off the cliff again. Eating disorders tend to work in cycles–one chapter of life could be fine, only for one to turn the page and fall into another state of turbulence. She tells me she doesn’t think of her eating disorder as an illness or an identity that she has, but rather an unconscious response to a conflicting state of emotional turmoil or loss of direction.
“I was not in a good place at the time,” she says. “It’s a predictable crutch.”
As filming continued, Kit describes experiencing a frequent oscillation between mirroring disordered behaviors (including copying others’ lunch orders that she knew were a byproduct of their eating-disorder voice and diet-culture influence) and avoiding triggers by eating in her car or blocking out conversations taking place between colleagues.
“Sometimes I’d do exactly what they were doing. Other times, I’d run away from it and isolate myself,” she says.
We find ourselves in awe at the complexity of her place of work, how one can find themselves in an environment where one is constantly forced to look inward. How can a workplace come to be so self-referential?
I ask Kit if it is possible to not pay attention, to not be affected by the toxicity of the environment. She references a female coworker in her current job who has a healthy relationship with her body and no history of disordered eating. “She wouldn’t clock any of this. If you don’t have these challenges, it’s just a normal workplace. But if you do, you see it. And you see it in everyone else.”
“It’s a lot of time to live in that cycle,” she says with a hint of defeat in her voice, and references a forty-year-old colleague whom she fears she could become. “I know who I can and can’t work with now.” Kit recognizes that there are varying degrees of this limitation in her own career growth, particularly in an industry where eating disorders are pervasive, though she seems set on this boundary.
“I don’t like to facilitate situations for other people that are going to throw them off. Maybe I’m not throwing anyone off, but I’m perceiving a reality that is going on for a lot of people, because I also live that reality. That relationship is what I resent. Being in a position where I have to earn money and move up the chain in the field that I want to be in, where in the most messed up way, I’m still in the trenches with something I’ve always struggled with and it is manifesting in the workplace, which should be separate from my personal trauma. Yet, it’s all just woven together, like kudzu.” Kit pauses and looks at me. “Do you know what kudzu is? That invasive plant in the South? I don’t want to be the vine that branches out and sucks people in and contributes to this problem—for myself or anyone else. It keeps growing and growing, taking over everything, even if you try to hack it back and burn it.”