To the Bone: Anorexia in the Cinema

Nihal Candan, who was known for her participation in a fashion competition, was arrested on charges of being a member of a criminal organization and qualified fraud, and was released with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa after spending about a year in prison. However, the seriousness of this disease was not sufficiently understood by the public or the media. People did not refrain from making cruel comments about this young woman who was rapidly losing her body. It was very sad; she lost her life shortly after. The fact that anorexia became a cause of death in prison screams out that this disease is not a personal problem but a political wound. Eating in prison is a tool of power, a claim on the body; not eating is the most radical way to reject that claim.

Perhaps Nihal was also shouting a “no” with her body that no one else heard. But we dismissed this cry as a “personal weakness.” Considering anorexia as a medical disorder alone renders the systems that create it invisible. While psychiatry classifies this disease with diagnoses, it often remains silent about beauty norms, media representations, class pressures, and gender roles. Thus, anorexia is reduced to an individual’s “deficiency.”

ANOREXIA IN CINEMA

Following Nihal’s death, “To the Bone” (2017) shows how these silent tragedies are aestheticized and rendered harmless. 20-year-old Ellen, who struggles with anorexia, is accepted into a clinic that uses unconventional methods with one last hope after many attempts at treatment. Here, she begins living with young people like herself and is forced to rediscover both her body and her identity. This Netflix film draws attention with its effort to make a complex and painful mental disorder like anorexia nervosa visually “appealing.” Lily Collins’ bony body and pale face present a “morbid elegance” on screen, but are reduced to a stylized melancholy disconnected from reality. However, the face of anorexia is a collapse that cannot be covered up with cracked skin, falling hair, blank stares and make-up. In order to make this pain “watchable,” the film transforms the anorexic body into a dangerous object of “thinspiration.” The narrative is woven with clichés. The charismatic male doctor figure played by Keanu Reeves frames the disease with a male-dominated savior myth. The female characters, on the other hand, are presented as fragile, hysterical, and disintegrated figures. Real treatment processes do not require a heroic narrative; they require collective support, patience, and structural transformation. However, the film dramatizes even recovery and markets it as an aesthetic transformation. The most problematic point is that anorexia is presented as an identity aesthetic. However, this disease is not a “choice,” but the last defense mechanism of the individual surrounded by gender roles, beauty myths, and an obsession with control. “To the Bone” misses this depth. It settles for a superficial representation that serves the “cult of elegance” it claims to criticize. Lily Collins' sleepy acting, the clichéd pasts of the characters, and the film's use of anorexia as a mere dramatic setting make it not an "awareness project" but a speculation that aestheticizes reality.

Cinema should not be content with just telling; it should question how it tells, which structures it reproduces, and what it renders invisible.

WHAT SHOULD CINEMA HAVE DONE?

Nihal Candan’s death can be grasped not through superficial representations like To the Bone, but through narratives that reveal the naked reality of the system. Because eating disorders are not individual choices; they are silent witnesses of systematic oppression, gender, and power established on the body. Nihal’s death is not only the slow erasure of a woman; it is the echo of the collective silence of society, prison, medicine, media, and cinema. In order to break this silence; Cinema should represent anorexia not as a “female drama,” but as a political body resistance. Texts such as Michel Foucault’s Birth of Prison (disciplining the body), Judith Butler’s Fragile Life (politics of mourned bodies), and Carol Adams’s Sexual Politics of Meat (relationships of food, gender, and power) can be guiding in order to deeply comprehend these issues. Also powerful alternatives for understanding the complexities of anorexia are HBO's striking documentary Thin (2006) and Todd Haynes's aesthetic-political narrative Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987).

A POLITICAL DISEASE

It’s no coincidence that anorexia has historically been described as “hysterical woman.” Medicalized by Sir William Gull in the 19th century, this disorder, combined with Freud’s assumptions about “female deficiency,” coded women as irrational, uncontrolled, and incomplete beings. This idea was engraved in the language of medicine. However, feminist literature rejected this approach and revealed that anorexia is a social disease. It was read as a kind of “silent sabotage” against the myth of beauty and the constant surveillance of the female body. The anorexic body can be a desexualized body that defies the patriarchal gaze, one that denies desire. Food is not just food; it is a cultural, sexual, and class symbol. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams shows that eating meat is coded as a sign of masculine power, while veganism is coded as a pacified femininity. In this context, anorexia is not at war with food; it is with patriarchal consumer culture. “Not eating” is not just going hungry; To reject passivity is to break obedience. Especially for women prisoners, food is not only a source of nutrition, but also a means of reproducing authority. To give it up is the last refuge against being trapped in the identities and roles imposed by the system. The anorexic body is a scream that echoes in this refuge. The name of Nihal, who unfortunately raised awareness on this issue with her death in our country, can take its place in the struggle for prison reform and women's bodily autonomy.