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It’s common knowledge that Henry VIII had six wives. But the cataclysmic love triangle between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn gets all the airtime, while wives three to six are an afterthought.
In director Alexander Korda’s rollicking film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Katherine Parr (wife six) was reduced to a throwaway joke in the film’s last moments. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s upcoming film Firebrand is the first to bring Parr to centre stage – and not before time.
Right on cue, new evidence has come to light giving an intriguing glimpse into Parr’s relationship with her capricious husband. Namely, the discovery of Henry’s notes in a book authored by his wife.
Katherine Parr was unlike her five predecessors. Aged 30 and already twice widowed in 1543, the king made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, forcing her to break off another planned marriage. The increasingly disabled Henry had finally stopped pursuing nubile broodmares and sought out a companion instead.
Parr deftly navigated the tangled politics of the royal family, brokering a reconciliation between the king and the two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, he had declared to be bastards. She may even have helped in restoring them to the line of succession.
Henry certainly came to trust her judgment. When he set off for his final, futile war in France in 1544, he made her regent in his absence. Part of the appeal, it seems, was her bookish piety. Parr was the first English queen to publish a book and the first English woman to publish under her own name.
Her three books were pious exercises, beginning with a safe collection of translated texts titled Psalmes or Prayers (1544) and becoming more daring thereafter. The Lamentation of a Sinner (1547) was written during Henry’s husband’s lifetime, but its theology was too assertively Protestant to be published until he was safely dead.
The earlier books, though, seem to have delighted the king. He inscribed the queen’s own copy of Psalmes or Prayers: “Remember this writer / when you do pray / For he is yours”. He had always been theatrically pious and in his last years – brooding, in pain, nurturing his many humiliations – he turned to religion with melancholy intensity.
We know what Henry thought religion should mean to his subjects: a tough, moralistic faith without much room for forgiveness, whose keynote was obedience to himself. But what about his personal faith?
Enter a new discovery by Canadian literary scholar Micheline White.
Queen Katherine ordered a few luxury copies of Psalmes or Prayers printed on vellum, with delicate hand colouring. One of these, now in Buckinghamshire’s Wormsley Library is festooned with marginal markings and “manicules” – little doodled hands with fingers pointing to a passage some reader wanted to emphasise.
White has established, by meticulously comparing these distinctive manicules with others whose provenance we know, that this attentive reader was none other than Henry VIII.
It’s no surprise Henry should have taken comfort in the Biblical psalms. They were supposedly the work of a pious but lecherous king, David, with whom he strongly identified.
The passages Henry marked are a telling glimpse of the extent – and the limits – of his self awareness. His illness and other troubles are much on his mind: he marks prayers to “take away thy plagues … turn away thine anger”.
He is also drawn to prayers lamenting sin and asking God for wisdom. “Give me a new heart, and a right spirit, and take from me all wicked and sinful desires.”
The sentiments indicate a man who was serious both about his kingly responsibilities and personal spiritual predicament. Unlike many other murderous narcissists, Henry VIII did know he was a sinner who needed forgiveness. But his confidence “that my sins may be purged” suggests tension between the eagerness with which he sought grace and his refusal to countenance mercy – royal or divine – for his subjects.
Queen Katherine, as the popular rhyme tells us, “survived” her marriage, but it was a close run thing.
In 1546, the last summer of Henry VIII’s life, she was suspected – on good grounds – of nurturing a nest of religious radicals at court. Henry allowed himself to be persuaded that all her pious talk was actually an attempt to allure him into heresy.
According to a late but well-informed account by the martyrologist John Foxe, she got wind of the danger and immediately threw herself on his mercy. Katherine protested that she, a “poor woman so much inferior in all respects of nature unto you”, had simply been seeking his religious guidance.
“Not so, by Saint Mary,” Henry replied. “You are become a Doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed, or directed by us.”
No, she protested: she had only sought to distract him with talk during “this painful time of your infirmity” and had in the process learned a great deal from his wisdom. With someone else, that might have been laying it on too thick, but she knew her man.
“And is it even so, sweetheart?” Henry replied. “Then perfect friends we are now again.” The arrest warrant was cancelled.
Months later, the king was dead. Unfortunately, Queen Katherine married the man she’d kept waiting with almost indecent haste – only to be cold shouldered when she fell pregnant and left to die in childbirth. History is thin on happy endings.
Alec Ryrie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
If you’ve ever had the eerie sensation there’s a presence in the room when you were sure you were alone, you may be reluctant to admit it. Perhaps it was a profound experience that you are happy to share with others. Or – more likely – it was something in between the two.
Unless you had an explanation to help you process the experience, most people will struggle to grasp what happened to them. But now research is showing this ethereal experience is something we can understand, using scientific models of the mind, the body, and the relationship between the two.
One of the largest studies on the topic was carried out as long ago as 1894. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) published their Census of Hallucinations, a survey of more than 17,000 people in the UK, US and Europe. The survey aimed to understand how common it was for people to have seemingly impossible visitations that foretold death. The SPR concluded that such experiences happened too often to be down to chance (one in every 43 people that were surveyed).
In 1886, the SPR (which numbered former UK prime minister William Gladstone and poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson among its patrons) published Phantasms of the Living. This collection included 701 cases of telepathy, premonitions and other unusual phenomena. For instance, the Reverend P H Newnham, of Devonport in Plymouth, told the story of a visit to New Zealand, where a night-time presence warned him away from joining a boat trip at dawn the next morning. He later learnt that all on the voyage had drowned.
At the time, phantasms was criticised for being unscientific. The census was received with less scepticism, but it still suffered from response bias (who would bother responding to such a survey except those with something to say). But such experiences live on in homes across the world, and contemporary science offers ideas for understanding them.
Many of the accounts SPR collected sound like hypnagogia: hallucinatory experiences that happen on the boundaries of sleep. It has been suggested that several religious experiences recorded in the 19th century have a basis in hypnagogia. Presences have a particularly strong link with sleep paralysis, experienced by around 7% of adults at least once in their life. In sleep paralysis our muscles remain frozen as a hangover from REM sleep, but our mind is active and awake. Studies have suggested more than 50% of people with sleep paralysis report encountering a presence.
While the Victorian presences documented by the SPR were often benign or comforting, modern examples of presence triggered by sleep paralysis tend to exude malevolence. Societies around the world have their own stories about nighttime presences – from the Portuguese “little friar with the pierced hand” (Fradinho da Mao Furada) who could infiltrate people’s dreams, to the Ogun Oru of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, which was believed to be a product of victims being bewitched.
But why would an experience such as paralysis create a feeling of presence? Some researchers have focused on the specific characteristics of waking up in such an unusual situation. Most people find sleep paralysis scary, even without hallucinations. In 2007, sleep researchers J. Allen Cheyne and Todd Girard argued that if we wake paralysed and vulnerable, our instincts would make us feel threatened and our mind fills in the gap. If we are prey, there must be a predator.
Another approach is to look at the commonalities between visitations in sleep paralysis and other types of felt presence. Research over the past 25 years has shown presences are not only a regular part of the hypnagogic landscape, but also reported in Parkinson’s disease, psychosis, near-death experiences and bereavement. This suggests that it’s unlikely to be a sleep-specific phenomenon.
We know from neurological case studies and brain stimulation experiments that presences can be provoked by bodily cues. For example, in 2006 neurologist Shahar Arzy and colleagues were able to create a “shadow figure” that was experienced by a woman whose brain was being electrically stimulated in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The figure seemed to mirror the woman’s body position – and the TPJ combines information about our senses and our bodies.
A series of experiments in 2014 also showed that disrupting people’s sensory expectations seems to induce a feeling of presence in some healthy people. The way the procedure the researchers used works is to trick you into feeling as if you are touching your own back, by synchronising your movements with a robot directly behind you. Our brains make sense of the synchronisation by inferring that we are producing that sensation. Then, when that synchronisation is disrupted – by making the robot touches slightly out of sync – people can suddenly feel like another person is present: a ghost in the machine. Changing the sensory expectations of the situation induces something like a hallucination.
That logic could also apply to a situation like sleep paralysis. All our usual information about our bodies and senses is disrupted in that context, so it’s perhaps no surprise that we may feel like there is something “other” there with us. We might feel like it’s another presence, but really, it’s us.
In my own research in 2022, I tried to trace the similarities in presences from clinical accounts, spiritual practice and endurance sports (which are well known for producing a range of hallucinatory phenomena, including presence). In all of these situations, many aspects of the feeling of a presence were very similar: for example, the subject felt that the presence was directly behind them. Sleep-related presences were described by all three groups, but so were presences driven by emotional factors, such as grief and bereavement.
Despite its century-old origins, the science of felt presence has really only just begun. In the end, scientific research may give us one over-arching explanation, or we may need several theories to account for all these examples of presence. But the encounters people described in Phantasms of the Living aren’t phantoms of a bygone age. If you’re yet to have this unsettling experience, you probably know someone who has.
Ben Alderson-Day receives funding from Wellcome and is the author of "Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other" (Manchester University Press).
With homeownership slipping out of reach for millions and soaring rents, the dearth of genuinely affordable homes is seeing property guardianship on the rise.
Property guardians live in empty or disused premises that are usually awaiting development by the landowner. UK TV viewers may be familiar with the concept from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Channel 4 comedy Crashing, which featured six young, university-educated, twenty-something artists living as guardians in a disused hospital in east London.
Despite this oft-promoted image of guardianship as an alternative lifestyle choice, across Europe many people – from key workers to students – are opting for this kind of housing solution primarily for financial reasons.
Under what are commonly termed “licence agreements”, instead of rent they pay discounted occupation fees. But these agreements do not afford the same protection from quick eviction and the right to repairs that tenancy agreements must.
My research looks at the legal complexities of guardianship. Its very existence – and its growing popularity – speaks to the wider state of housing precarity in the UK.
Property guardianship emerged in the Netherlands in the 1980s as an anti-squatting measure. Squat actions had taken off in the 1960s when students in Amsterdam, faced with a dire lack of housing, criticised the city for boarding up buildings due for demolition, thereby making them uninhabitable. They called for their peers to take control of vacant premises and by 1980, the squatter movement is estimated to have counted upwards of 20,000 people among its ranks.
In the 1980s, as opposition to the movement grew, property management agencies multiplied. Working on behalf of owners, these agencies developed what became known as antikraak or “anti-squatting” strategies, recruiting people to live in abandoned schools, leisure centres, monasteries and even former police stations. They paid no rent, only utility bills. And they enjoyed neither privacy nor protections – evictions could happen with only two weeks’ notice.
This trend spread across Europe to capitals in Ireland, France, Germany and Belgium. It arrived in the UK in 2001, with property guardians setting up home in Scottish mansions, 14th-century charterhouses and Merseyside observatories, as well as empty townhouses, office blocks and council buildings in Brighton, Bristol, Manchester and London.
Assessing the true scale of this is challenging due to a lack of reliable data. Government estimates in 2017 put the number of property guardians in the UK at between 5,000 and 7,000. Figures from the Property Guardians Providers Association in 2019, however, showed it is closer to 60,000.
Landowners with empty properties allow intermediary agencies to find people to occupy them as guardians. Guardianship is generally presented by these agencies as a win-win business model. In return for guaranteeing the security of the premises, guardians pay below-market value fees in otherwise expensive residential areas: a £4.5 million Grade-II-listed mansion in London’s Primrose Hill, say.
Agencies market guardianship to both landowners and those seeking accommodation as flexible, affordable, adventurous – and even as a solution to the cost of living crisis.
For landowners, as well as having their sites secured against unwanted intruders or squatters, they avoid the higher rates of non-domestic council tax that would otherwise be attached to commercial premises. They also avoid the greater responsibilities and tighter regulations of standard tenancies.
Compared with standard lease agreements, guardianship arrangements operate under what are labelled “licences”. Unlike tenancies, these offer few safeguards and can be brought to an end very easily and speedily, leaving guardians vulnerable.
These agreements also do not guarantee guardians much protection in terms of repairs, which is a significant problem. Research has found housing conditions to be poor across the guardianship sector.
Furthermore, reports have highlighted how, as the industry has grown, agencies have sought to maximise their profits by squeezing more guardians into poorly divided spaces: plywood walls, no natural light or ventilation.
The economics of the UK housing market means demand outstrips supply, which forces up costs. House price growth might have slowed in recent months, but figures from the Office for National Statistics show that private rents in the UK increased by 4.2% in the 12 months prior to December 2022 – representing the largest annual percentage change since January 2016 with no signs of slowing.
Landowners often sit on empty properties awaiting financing for redevelopment or navigating the time-consuming planning process. Guardianship sits at the heart of this, perfectly encapsulating the disconnect between property as investment and property as home.
As early as 2013 , housing activist Rueben Taylor put it plainly:
The guardianship industry legitimises keeping buildings empty and makes it a profitable thing to do. It also represents the legalisation of a two-tiered system of tenants’ rights – those who can afford to have rights and those who can’t.
Were more affordable housing options available, a large proportion of current guardians would arguably turn to more stable, longer-term, housing options. “I’m in a catch-22,” one property guardian told me in my research in 2022. “I don’t want to be a guardian, but I can’t afford not to be.”
Chris Bevan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
You’re walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Now suddenly, instead of noticing all the goings on in the city around you, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. Hearing that piece of music takes you right back to where you were, who you were with and the feelings associated with that memory.
This experience – when music brings back memories of events, people and places from our past – is known as a music-evoked autobiographical memory. And it’s a common experience.
It often occurs as an involuntary memory. That is, we make no effort to try to recall such memories, they just come to mind spontaneously.
Research has recently begun to uncover why music appears to be such a good cue for invoking memories. First, music tends to accompany many distinctive life events, such as proms, graduations, weddings and funerals, so it can play an important role in reconnecting us with these self-defining moments.
Music also often captures our attention, due to the way it affects our minds, bodies and emotions.
When music draws our attention, this increases the likelihood that it will be encoded in memory together with details of a life event. And this then means it is able to serve as an effective cue for remembering this event years later.
In recent research my colleague and I found that the emotional nature of a piece of music is an important factor in how it serves as a memory cue.
We compared music with other emotional memory cues that had been rated by a large group of participants as conveying the same emotional expression as the music excerpts we used. This included comparing music with “emotional sounds”, such as nature and factory noises and “emotional words”, such as “money” and “tornado”.
When compared with these emotionally matched cues, the music didn’t elicit any more memories than the words. But what we did find was that music evoked more consistently positive memories than other emotional sounds and words. This was especially the case for negative emotional stimuli. Specifically, sad and angry music evoked more positive memories than sad and angry sounds or words.
It seems then that music appears to have the ability to reconnect us with emotionally positive moments from our pasts. This suggests that using music therapeutically may be particularly fruitful.
The familiarity of a piece of music also, perhaps unsurprisingly, plays a role. In another recent study, we found that more familiar music evokes more memories and brings memories to mind more spontaneously.
So part of the reason music may be a more effective cue for memories than, for instance, our favourite film or favourite book, is that we typically reengage with songs more often over our lifetimes compared to films, books or TV shows.
The situations when we listen to music may also play a role. Previous research shows that involuntary memories are more likely to come back during activities where our mind is free to wander to thoughts about our past. These activities tend to be non-demanding in terms of our attention and include things like commuting, travelling, housework and relaxing.
These types of activities align almost perfectly with those recorded in another study where we asked participants to keep a diary and note when music evoked a memory, along with what they were doing at the time it happened. We found that daily activities that often go hand in hand with listening to music – such as travelling, doing chores or going for a run – tend to lead to more involuntary memories in the first place.
This contrasts with other hobbies, such as watching TV, which can require our mind to be more focused on the activity at hand and so less likely to wander to scenarios from our past.
It seems then that music is not only good at evoking memories but also the times when we are more likely to listen to music are the times when our minds may naturally be more likely to wander anyway.
Music is also present during many life events that are distinctive, emotional or self-defining – and these types of memories tend to be more easily recalled.
Indeed, the power of music to connect us with our past shows how music, memories and emotions are all linked – and it seems certain songs can act as a direct line to our younger selves.
Kelly Jakubowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
From the fairy tales read to us as children to the costumes every Halloween, the figure of the witch has been with most of us for our entire lives. Unkempt and warty, the witch of our childhood was generally a repulsive creature flying on a broomstick beside her toad or black cat.
Yet recent years have marked a reinvention of this ancient character, giving her a modern twist in a new subgenre of literature that some are calling “witch lit”.
The novels that have been categorised as belonging to this new subgenre often take inspiration from historical events such as the witch trials of the medieval and early modern periods.
A.K. Blakemore’s award-winning novel The Manningtree Witches (2021), for example, is set in the town of Manningtree in 1643 just as Matthew Hopkins begins his hunt against witches. Jenni Fagan’s short novel Hex: Darkland Tales (2022) revolves, in part, around the story of Geillis Duncan, one of the first women to be accused of witchcraft in the North Berwick witch trials.
We can see this resurgence in film and TV too. In Netflix’s Wednesday (2022), the young protagonist learns about her magical heritage through her ancestor Goody Addams, who was accused of witchcraft in the 1600s.
Popular shows like Outlander (2014), The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) and A Discovery of Witches (2018) also prominently feature historical witchcraft beliefs and practices.
The witches featured in this new media are rarely comparable to the dirty hags that appeared in older stories. The new witch is often beautiful, at once dark and gothic and ethereal and wild.
Even Disney’s sequel to Hocus Pocus (2022) features a more sympathetic version of the Sanderson sisters. Winnie Sanderson, although still a child-killing witch, now becomes a woman who values her coven of sisters above all else.
In all of this, one thing is clear: the story of the witch is being rewritten and a new type of tale is taking its place.
An important addition to the witch lit sub-genre is Kirsty Logan’s Now She is Witch (2023). It perfectly captures the magic of this kind of story. The novel follows Lux, a girl who sells poisons and poppets, and the mysterious Else who is seeking revenge against a lord who kills women for witchcraft.
Many of the elements we have come to expect from witchcraft literature are evident in this tale. Through her protagonist, Logan picks at the hypocrisy of the rhetoric used to condemn witches. As Else puts it: “Men desire women but it is not their fault, it’s because women are wicked”.
Lux is also on a journey of self-discovery. She is trying to understand the place that she occupies in the world and the names that have been given to her, be it maiden, mother, crone or witch. Where this novel really finds its brilliance, is in the moments that it strays from the path that has been set out for it in this genre.
The medieval setting of Logan’s story feels real and textured but there is also an otherworldly, almost carnivalesque feeling to the novel. The journey that Lux takes through woods populated by a colourful cast of characters, is almost reminiscent of the voyage Little Red Riding Hood takes to her grandmother’s house. Though Lux is as much a wolf as she is a lost little girl.
In her novel, Logan is making use of not only historical beliefs around witchcraft but also folklore and fairy tales. Her witch is complicated: powerful and somehow also powerless, woman and sometimes man and sometimes neither and sometimes both, real and made up, dangerous and innocent, girl and wolf.
Read more: WitchTok: the rise of the occult on social media has eerie parallels with the 16th century
At the centre of the story is a hunger from both Lux and Else to be allowed to be more than just one thing, to simply exist without worrying about what word or role will be used to define them.
It is not only in television and literature that the witch has gained popularity in recent years. Feminist activists and writers such as Silvia Federici and Mona Chollet are turning to the witch as a figure of injustice, power or rebellion.
One glance through the section of TikTok that has been affectionately named WitchTok reveals a number of people identifying as witches and calling out for power through the use of healing crystals or tarot cards.
At a time when female bodies are still policed in many parts of the world, the witch retains the power to speak through history and across generations. Perhaps this process of rewriting the witch is actually giving writers a new way to tell the stories of women.
Lucy Atkinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Monkeys, apes and lemurs are cute, familiar and lovable. But an estimated 60% of all primate species are listed as vulnerable, threatened or endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a network of environmental organisations.
You’ve probably heard about the main problems, like deforestation and the loss of habitat. But primates are a diverse group of animals with a wide geographical range, so there are many more subtle ways our actions as humans put these wonderful animals at risk.
Everywhere we go, our best friends are likely to go with us. Our review shows that dogs are present in many primate habitats. These predators sometimes kill and injure primates, but they also may simply chase and harass them, disrupting their socialising or foraging.
Being on the lookout for harassing dogs is stressful and causes primates to use more energy. Reducing these potentially lethal encounters depends on conservationists communicating with dog owners, who often don’t recognise the danger their dogs pose to such wildlife.
When diseases jump between animal species, they can cause serious harm to a species that does not have the necessary resistance. Dog diseases such as canine heartworm and parvovirus can be passed from dogs to primates, and could potentially be fatal. There’s also the possibility that pathogens – viruses, bacteria or parasites – could evolve to spread more easily or become more deadly.
If you live outside a country where primates live, you may never see a live primate outside of a zoo. Nevertheless, your media choices can still affect their conservation.
Researchers have discovered that our choices of what we watch on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok can end up fuelling the use of primates as pets or in entertainment. Primates are cute, and we love to watch videos of them. However, many of these pictures and videos show them in artificial contexts, such as primates wearing clothes or interacting with office equipment.
When people view such content, they often say they want a primate as a pet and are less likely to believe that these animals are endangered.
We can help to protect primates by not viewing or sharing videos that show animals in unnatural situations. The responsibility for interacting with primates respectfully is even higher for those who live near primates or those who embark on wildlife tourism.
People’s activities can affect where primates live, what food they eat, and how they live their lives. Many tourist destinations in these types of locations cater to people’s desire to interact and take pictures with primates by keeping them as pets or encouraging feeding or similar interactions.
Our research found that these practices harm the animals, increase the poaching or the trade of primates, and can lead to dangerous situations for both the primates and people. Photographs that show monkeys posing with humans alarm primatologists because we understand the risks of being bitten or of passing on diseases. But the wider public may be unaware of these dangers.
The potential for disease transmission between humans and primates is high, partly because of our closely related biology. When diseases move from animals to humans they are known as “zoonoses”. And when they are transferred from animals to human beings, they are known as “anthroponoses”.
The African apes – chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas – seem to be particularly vulnerable to human respiratory infections. Protecting these endangered animals from infectious disease is an important conservation goal.
The risk of disease transmission between humans and nonhuman primates is worsened by close contact. Some primate species have always lived near people. But as human need for space grows and primate habitats become more fragmented, these encounters become more common.
Primate tourism also brings humans closer to wildlife, with people sometimes even holding the animals or sharing food with them. The pet trade goes further and brings wild primates into our homes, where animals can contract illness from their owners and vice versa.
Preventing the primate pet trade and encouraging safe and respectful interactions with wildlife are vital for both human and nonhuman primate health.
These are only a few examples of the ways humans impact wild primates. And animal biologists are increasingly interested in such human-generated issues for wildlife conservation.
Tracie McKinney is affiliated with the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group's Section for Human-Primate Interactions (SHPI).
Michelle Rodrigues is affiliated with the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group's Section for Human-Primate Interactions (SHPI).
Sian Waters is affiliated with the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group's Section for Human-Primate Interactions (SHPI)
The Whale debuted at the 2022 Venice Film Festival to a six-minute standing ovation for its Academy Award-nominated lead, Brendan Fraser, who has returned to the big screen after a considerable hiatus.
Fraser’s fame was amplified in the 2000s by his starring role in The Mummy saga. He was consistently cast as the six-packed hunk, in such films as George of the Jungle (1997) and Gods and Monsters (1998).
A lot has changed since then. In 2018, Fraser spoke up about an alleged sexual assault, saying he was inspired to do so by the Me Too movement.
Fraser claimed that speaking up about the alleged incident saw him blacklisted in Hollywood, put him off acting and nearly ended his career. In doing so, he joined a growing list of actors who have made similar allegations.
These are not unimportant details in the controversy surrounding The Whale, which stems from Fraser’s embodiment of 600lb, partly closeted English teacher, Charlie, and the prosthetics he wore to do so. In the film Charlie leaves his wife and daughter after falling in love with one of his male students.
As an expert in men and masculinity on film, I find the contrast between Charlie’s fat body and the memory of Fraser’s old muscular self interesting in what it reveals about ageing, body size and the objectification of male bodies on the screen more generally.
The Whale introduces the issue of shame from the opening sequence. Filmed from behind in almost complete darkness, and partly obscured behind several half empty bottles of soda, Charlie is shown vigorously masturbating to gay pornography.
He nearly has a heart attack as he climaxes but is interrupted by a handsome young missionary (Ty Simpkins) who claims to be part of the Christian group New Life. He happens to knock on the door just in time to save Charlie’s life – and perhaps his soul.
The complex mix of health, religion and sexuality in the first sequence of the film prepares viewers for its controversy-inciting ideological tensions.
Critics and audiences alike have objected to the use of makeup and prosthetics to add 300 pounds to 54-year-old Fraser’s now heavier frame, described in some reviews as a “fat suit”. Many see the prosthetic as problematic, especially as the film does not shy away from presenting Charlie’s semi-nude body as a spectacle.
Reviews have largely focused on the now unavoidable issue of authentic casting. Can a straight man – who has a heavy frame, but is still half Charlie’s weight – play a queer fat person?
The controversy has led Fraser to try to justify his casting with reference to his own traumatic experiences with injuries and surgeries and being the father of an autistic son who has a difficult relationship with food.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times podcast, The Envelope, director Darren Aronofsky explained that the original play drew from the real experiences of playwright Samuel D. Hunter. In a separate interview for The New Yorker, Hunter explained that the story had been inspired by his struggle with sexuality and religion, leading to eating disorders during his university years.
The Whale is unambiguous in condemning the role of organised religion at the centre of Charlie’s trauma, a critique explicitly voiced by Liz (Hong Chau), nurse and sister of Charlie’s tragically deceased partner.
This is one of the film’s redeeming aspects, alongside Charlie’s genuine love for his estranged family and much-missed lover and his short-lived flirtation with his pizza delivery man – another stranger who shows genuine concern for his customer, who is always hiding behind closed doors and blinds.
The black screen in Charlie’s zoom call with students (he pretends that his laptop camera is broken) further The Whale’s exploration of shame. This is emphasised in other scenes where Charlie binges, stuffing his face with greasy slices of pizza or chocolate bars.
For me, the ominous soundtrack to these scenes reflects his sense of guilt and abandonment, as opposed to the judgement of fat people lacking self control that some reviewers have inferred.
The predominance of closeup shots that in part objectify Charlie’s body also augment the sense of claustrophobia that dominates his secluded life, confined to his apartment. Charlie’s enclosure and hiding contrasts sharply with the all-access voyeuristic gaze that the film allows us, the spectators.
In his pioneering book on fat masculinity, Fat Boys, historian Sander L. Gilman claims that the cultural association of fatness and women has eclipsed the rich history of fatness and masculinity from ancient Greece.
His examples reveal different attitudes to large male bodies, but also a recent tendency to foreground damning clinical discourses and representations that associate obesity with effeminacy or a sense of failed masculinity.
Film scholar Niall Richardson’s fascinating book Transgressive Bodies – which focuses on film and popular culture – and cultural historian Christopher Forth’s study of fat men in film noir observe similar patterns.
While it would be difficult to argue that The Whale diverges much from this negative perception of fat male bodies, the film dares to confront its viewers with an invasive camera that over-invests on a type of male body rarely seen on the screen and that appears in almost every scene.
The memory of Fraser’s past typecasting as a hunk – and the personal and professional struggles that followed – add considerable complexity and richness to The Whale and to the representation of fat queer masculinity on the screen.
In the current academic year Santiago Fouz Hernández is Walter Mangold Fellow at the University of Melbourne and has received funding from The CASS Foundation to start a new collaborative project on men, masculinities and male bodies on film.
British prime minister Rishi Sunak recently declared that the “golden era” of UK-China relations is over. The next day, the government removed China General Nuclear Power Group, a Chinese state-owned company, from the construction of the UK’s Sizewell C nuclear power station.
Other countries have made similar moves in recent years. In 2020, for example, then-US president Donald Trump attempted to ban social media platform TikTok in the US. The move was subsequently stopped by two US judges following a lawsuit by TikTok, and eventually dropped by current president, Joe Biden.
But such government decisions based on national security concerns could affect the future international growth of Chinese business. This is particularly important given that international investment and trade by China has increased in recent years, enabling it to emerge as a powerful challenger to the global economic order.
Indeed, Chinese companies and investors often refuse to take such national security changes lying down. With varying degrees of success, firms have mounted a range of formal and informal challenges in recent years. This includes lobbying, media campaigns and diplomatic assistance or support from business associations, but also contesting national security decisions in domestic courts.
A relatively new strategy for China, however, is to challenge national security decisions before international tribunals using a method called investor-state dispute settlement. These tribunals are usually set up to handle specific disputes, with arbitrators appointed and paid for by one or both of the parties involved. The suits tend to claim that national security decisions have breached host countries’ obligations to Chinese investors under bilateral investment treaties (BITs). These treaties grant foreign investors certain standards of treatment and allow them to sue host states for alleged violations.
Most recently, Chinese tech giant Huawei made an investment treaty claim against the Swedish government over its exclusion from the rollout of the country’s 5G network. And my research shows that Huawei’s legal challenge to Sweden’s ban might only be the tip of the iceberg since Huawei equipment is also currently banned in other countries that have signed BITs with China. In the UK, for example, the government has committed to exclude Huawei’s technology from the country’s 5G public networks by the end of 2027.
The outcome of Huawei’s dispute with Sweden could affect public interest there and in other countries like the UK. If the tribunal finds in Sweden’s favour, preventing the use of Huawei equipment could delay 5G rollout by years and inflate prices for mobile phone users.
It’s also worth noting a 2019 tribunal decision that ordered Pakistan to pay US$6 billion in compensation to an injured foreign investor, mining company Tethyan Copper. If Huawei wins this or any other similar legal challenge, financial liabilities could be passed on to taxpayers.
Huawei’s challenge of Sweden’s national security decision shows how brewing tensions and increasing distrust between China and western countries is affecting international trade and business.
Indeed, when countries adopt an expansive concept of “national security” in domestic law, companies might see it as a pretext for protectionism or a tool of geopolitical rivalry. Certainly, there is no conclusive evidence that Huawei products, for example, are inherently unsafe versus similar products from other companies, or that Huawei poses a national security threat.
To complicate matters further, some early Chinese BITs – between China and Sweden, and China and the UK for example – do not explicitly allow host states to prohibit foreign investment based on national security concerns. And so Huawei’s recent legal challenge should help determine:
But what could this case mean for 5G rollout? In this specific example, Huawei is likely to fight an uphill battle to persuade a tribunal that Sweden’s decision is inconsistent with the China-Sweden treaty, for three reasons.
First, any potential threat to the security of 5G networks constitutes a national security risk because it means a country’s communications could be brought down by espionage, sabotage or system failure. Second, 5G networks are so complex that it is virtually impossible to find and eliminate every significant vulnerability. This means attempts by Huawei to argue for screening and control of software, for example, may not defuse national security concerns. And third, tribunals usually defer to a host country’s national security decisions.
Of course, tribunal decisions can go the other way. For example, several tribunals found against the Argentinian government that the country’s financial crisis in the 2000s was severe enough to qualify as a national security issue. But generally, these tribunals tend to decide that governments are best placed to make such judgements.
Huawei has not brought a case against the UK yet, but western countries generally should think about how to maintain and improve technology infrastructure – even if innovation comes from regions with which tensions are strained. Failure to do so could significantly impact consumer costs and access to cutting-edge technology.
Ming Du does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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