Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Outside is a scary nod to eating and body image disorders
Part of the Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities series, the episode has an open and ambiguous ending that makes it a proper horror flick.
Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead!
Released just in time for Halloween, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is a horror anthology TV series streaming on Netflix. Among its eight episodes, there’s The Outside. Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), the 1-hour long film is inspired on a webcomic by Emily Carroll named Some Other Animal’s Meat, but it’s set in a feverish 80s Christmas dream (or nightmare).
It tells the story of Stacey (Kate Micucci), an average American woman who has her regular pack of anxieties. You know, the usual: spending too much time alone at home, watching TV, eating microwaved meals, being ignored by her coworkers, never getting out of pajamas, fancing an awkward mullet haircut, and having taxidermy as a hobby. She is not particularly good looking, but she wants to change that and the opportunity could be this miracle product called Alo Glo.
It is worth noting that the director uses lens distortion all along the episode. Stacey is not unattractive simply because she doesn’t wear nice clothes or comb her hair: she’s deformed, she has huge crossed eyes, a witch-like nose, she’s ugly in an almost monstrous way. But she is nevertheless loved by her husband Keith (Martin Starr), who always makes sure that Stacey is indeed not an average suburban wife, but that’s exactly why she’s great and he loves her. That is not convincing, though.
It doesn’t matter if her coworkers are finally trying to include her in the gang, because Stacey simply cannot fit. She doesn’t know how to keep up with the acid gossip, how to talk about beauty products or even exchange flatterings comments about one’s perfume or body in an almost sensuous way. She is just this oddball creature who is trying hard to fit in by using the fashionable lotion Alo Glo, despite being crazily allergic to it.
But suffering is part of the process of healing, apparently. So much so that Beyoncé even said that beauty indeed hurts: starving yourself is totally worth the glory you get on stage, even if you are doing this right after a complicated pregnancy. After all, you will always find an excuse: oh it’s a pregnancy, it’s a toxic relationship, it’s a shit job, it’s depression, it’s this or that. If you really want to change, you must go full Shia LaBeouf and do it.
Well my friends that’s exactly the logic behind diet culture and (surprise surprise!) mental disorders like body dysmorphia and distortion, or eating disorders in general. Ana Lily dresses this rhetoric in the corny aesthetics of 80s American TV ads, and turns the lore of the miraculous product into whatever obsession sufferers of these conditions might get. These can be more subjective like having a folder on Pinterest with “body inspo” photos or believing that if you don’t exercise everyday in the week you’ll turn into a pumpkin. But in spite of that, we are still surrounded by Herbalife-alikes and other diet shakes that the Kardashians may be advertising in their social media alongside compressing clothes and what not.
Ana Lily doesn’t tackle weight issues on The Outside, even though we see Stacey eating junk food all the time. What she does is showing how it does not matter if you have people who love and care about you: when you are deep into the sickness, you will just mold reality after your obsession. So much so that Keith tries to warn Stacey about what’s happening to her, but she always corners him to one point that he might even say she is perfect, but never beautiful. It doesn’t matter if she has a great personality, if she’s a great wife, if he loves her. She must be beautiful therefore successful.
She is very sure that Alo Glo will do the trick, as much as many of us might have thought that fitting in a certain clothing size would mean triumph, or that a specific number in the scale would mean victory. That is so obvious that any opposition must be eliminated or that only certainty, that utmost pursuit, will shatter into pieces.
This is where the horror comes in, as Stacey kills her husband with an axe in an act that looks purifying since he was the only “toxic voice” saying that she was wrong. He might have been even “gaslighting” her into believing her discomfort was simply a product of her mind, like all the noises she often hears in the house. In a world of Alo Glo and hot suburban wives addicted to plastic surgery, saying that looks do not matter is just insanity. After all, in practice, being ugly is really tough to Stacey.
That’s exactly how pervasive eating and body distortion disorders are, because everywhere you look there’s reinforcement for this belief. There is always someone who will compliment your weight loss, even if that’s a result of starvation, depression or even cancer. And since beauty hurts, all the hair that you might be losing, your period which has ceased, your bones which are deteriorating, the injuries you got from overexercising, it’s all worth the hairdo, the makeup, the outfit, the compliments, the likes.
This is how The Outside wraps up, but in a very dangerous ambiguity, in my opinion. Stacey eventually becomes beautiful, and it’s worth saying that it’s the same actress, just better dressed, with makeup, and without all the lens distortion. Suddenly, she has all the lexicon to make acid gossip and talk about beauty products. Her coworkers are absolutely obsessed with her and she is literally over the moon as the episode ends with Stacey achieving beauty-nirvana in pure joy.
It is in this awkward last sequence that the lens distortion and the lightning come back to provoke a sense of weirdness in Stacey’s face, as the “ugly Stacey” still lives there despite her transformation on the outside. However, she can hide that. She could stitch her husband back “to life” with her taxidermy skills as much as her coworkers can deal with infidelity and loneliness, provided that they can still do their cosmetic procedures and go shopping.
The message is pretty obvious, but the fact that Ana Lily chose a very ambiguous ending is distressing. Probably on purpose, as this is a horror story, not a self-help guide. I just hope that we understand that the “enlightment” that Stacey achieves by the end of the episode is much closer to that of a bulimic after they throw up than that of a monk in Tibet.
In times when we speak about the return of the heroin chic, it really does not matter if the utmost contemporary model of beauty is depressed. At least she is drying her tears with dollar bills and doing great gigs, becoming an icon. It’s the mentality of “nothing tastes better than skinny”, one of the eating disorders (ED) mottos that I found most distressing and dangerous.
Thankfully, this is changing with all the body neutrality movement and the enlarged access to information. This terrible article about the return of the heroin chic published by NY Post wasn’t received with silence, but with body neutrality advocates like the actress Jameela Jamil speaking up. But in a context like Stacey’s, where your world is just that of the suburban wives and your obsessions, it is really, really hard to find a way out.
Since there are still filter bubbles and sickening silos like ED Twitter out there, that’s how horrifying the end of The Outside can get. For no matter how deep into shit you may be, you will always find places and people to help you keep up with your self-destruction. If not, just look at the tabloids, read the newspapers, and this “reality check” will put you back on track.
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