Warped reality disorder tv#

If it feels as though Sheila’s experience hits close to home, that’s because the show was written from a place of truth. She’s compulsive and consistent, and controlling food makes her feel as if she has control over other things, like the way her husband treats her. She sees it as a method of subterfuge, and other people’s kind offers of nutrition are their way of sabotaging her. For her, food is many things: an enemy, a payment, a ritual. The obscenity of Sheila’s gorging shows that for many, disordered eating is not as linear as just starving all the time. The altar-like spread of burgers in the hotel room Sheila carrying an entire cake to the bathroom to devour those dripping fistfuls of honey. Unlike other, grittier depictions, Physical handles Sheila’s disordered mind with levity, showing just how absurd her thinking can be. Set in perfection-obsessed Southern California in the ’80s, Physical captures the onset of home-exercise tapes and low-carb diets. Diet culture, particularly from the ’80s to the 2000s, left many of us with warped ideas of normal eating. Many people go undiagnosed and untreated, in part because they don’t recognize their symptoms as disordered. Binge-eating disorder, which Sheila exhibits symptoms of but the show does not name, is three times more common than anorexia and bulimia combined, but it’s rarely shown. All types of eating disorders are far more common in women than men, and they are rarely as straightforward as we see on-screen. That dedication makes her mean and short-tempered, which is a painful truth known to many who have dealt with disordered eating.Įating disorders affect at least 9 percent of the population in the U.S., although the number of undiagnosed people struggling with disordered eating is likely far higher. “Nobody thinks this much about food,” she tells herself, and she’s right. She promises herself a tiny bit of cobbler in exchange for “good” behavior, avoids places where she might be expected to eat, and judges others who “give in” and feed themselves. By centering on gratuitous shots of meals, ritualistic plate-setting, and slow shots of people eating, Physical captures a different reality.

Warped reality disorder tv#

Lazy representations of eating disorders on TV and film, like Netflix’s To the Bone, often show pure anorexia or bulimia, with pale, bone-thin sufferers checking themselves in the mirror and joylessly pushing food around on their plate. Sheila may be a mean, imperfect heroine, but that only makes her more relatable for many who’ve experienced the warped fixations of eating disorders. The transactional nature of her disorder extends to her relationships with other people, and she will only speak to them as long as she can get something out of the conversation: child care, votes for her husband’s political campaign, sign-ups for her aerobics classes.

Her myopic control of her own body makes her cruel about other people’s. Her inner monologue is vicious, and she walks around sneering at everyone she encounters in her mind while being saccharine sweet to their faces. She is loyal only to her own obsessions and desires. Variety is right, if kind: Sheila is a bitch. Variety, in an early review, called the character “gratuitously cruel,” ultimately finding that her personality does the show a disservice. Sheila, played uncomfortably well by Byrne, is caustic and self-involved. After conning a speed-loving aerobics instructor, Sheila finds strength through discipline, becoming an instructor herself to replenish the family finances that her bingeing depleted. Set in San Diego in the 1980s, the show follows Sheila as she grapples for power - with her husband, her child, her estranged parents, and her body. That scene, from the first episode of new Annie Weisman ( Desperate Housewives, Dead Like Me) drama Physical, starring Rose Byrne as the obsessive Sheila, captures the battle between restraint and loss of control that encapsulates many eating disorders. It’s a scene of gruesome overindulgence and loathing, one meant to leave us feeling at once uncomfortable and unsatisfied. It’s never enough: She goes to a bank, retrieves $50, puts in a mammoth fast-food order, and checks into a hotel to meticulously lay out the food, stripping naked before eating all of it.

It’s obscene, almost erotic, but she’s not satisfied. She sticks almost her whole fist into the jar like a self-flagellating Winnie the Pooh, scooping fistful after fistful of gooey, glistening honey into her mouth. A woman sitting alone in her car grabs a pot of honey from the backseat.