Netflix’s To The Bone is Honest but Sometimes Uninspired
To The Bone is a drama written and directed by Marti Nixon and starring Lily Collins that is Netflix’s latest shot at creating real and insightful programing targeting an audience of young adults.
Ellen, a twenty-year old artist, struggles with anorexia nervosa. She comes from a dysfunctional family that includes her half-sister (If I Stay’s Liana Liberato), her talkative and often overbearing step-mother (True Blood’s Carrie Preston), her absentee father (who we don’t even see in the film), her biological mother (Mystic Pizza’s Lili Taylor), and her mother’s lesbian partner (Bates Motel’s Brooke Smith). She’s been to four inpatient groups and her family is ready to give up on her – no matter what they say or do, Ellen seems to be dying right in front of their eyes and she doesn’t seem to want to get any better.
It’s not until her step-mother gets her an …show more content…
At Threshold, Ellen’s housemates include predominantly white women, with only one woman of color rounding out the crew. Women of color are commonly misrepresented in films about eating disorders despite the fact they do represent a large chunk of the women reporting them – and To The Bone promotes the stigma that eating disorders are a disease for white women. Eating disorders don’t discriminate and with the pressure to conform to a European beauty standard, women of color are not immune to the disease.
Similarly, the film fails to represent other forms of eating disorders with the same care that it does anorexia. The three characters suffering with bulimia are barely given screen time and there are no characters with OSFED or EDNOS (or Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder or Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, which was added to and classified in the DSM-IV), which makes up a whopping 60% of the people who seek treatment for an eating disorder.
To The Bone is a drama written and directed by Marti Nixon and starring Lily Collins that is Netflix’s latest shot at creating real and insightful programing targeting an audience of young adults.
Ellen, a twenty-year old artist, struggles with anorexia nervosa. She comes from a dysfunctional family that includes her half-sister (If I Stay’s Liana Liberato), her talkative and often overbearing step-mother (True Blood’s Carrie Preston), her absentee father (who we don’t even see in the film), her biological mother (Mystic Pizza’s Lili Taylor), and her mother’s lesbian partner (Bates Motel’s Brooke Smith). She’s been to four inpatient groups and her family is ready to give up on her – no matter what they say or do, Ellen seems to be dying right in front of their eyes and she doesn’t seem to want to get any better.
It’s not until her step-mother gets her an …show more content…
At Threshold, Ellen’s housemates include predominantly white women, with only one woman of color rounding out the crew. Women of color are commonly misrepresented in films about eating disorders despite the fact they do represent a large chunk of the women reporting them – and To The Bone promotes the stigma that eating disorders are a disease for white women. Eating disorders don’t discriminate and with the pressure to conform to a European beauty standard, women of color are not immune to the disease.
Similarly, the film fails to represent other forms of eating disorders with the same care that it does anorexia. The three characters suffering with bulimia are barely given screen time and there are no characters with OSFED or EDNOS (or Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder or Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, which was added to and classified in the DSM-IV), which makes up a whopping 60% of the people who seek treatment for an eating disorder.