Andrew Cuomo’s resignation as governor of New York might have been a godsend for CNN. The network faced a nearly intractable conflict of interest: The governor was a major national figure, but his brother, Chris, was also one of CNN’s prime-time stars. Instead, the fallout from Andrew Cuomo’s departure has made Chris Cuomo’s position untenable. He should resign; if he doesn’t, CNN should sack him.

On Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose investigation into sexual-harassment complaints against the Democratic governor precipitated his August resignation, released new documents that show how Chris mixed his roles as brother and broadcaster. The documents show that he was engaged in passing information to a top aide to the governor, Melissa DeRosa, as his brother’s team scrambled to respond to accusations. “I have a lead on the wedding girl,” he texted DeRosa, referring to a woman who complained that Andrew had made an unwanted advance at a wedding.

“When asked, I would reach out to sources, other journalists, to see if they had heard of anybody else coming out,” Chris explained in an interview with the attorney general’s office. He said he had only been seeking info about whether other complaints against his brother were forthcoming, not trying to dig up dirt on accusers. “I would never do oppo research on anybody alleging anything like this. I’m not in the oppo research business.”

[David A. Graham: America’s Andrew Cuomo problem]

This is not the first revelation about Chris Cuomo’s flawed handling of the scandal. Long before the allegations against Andrew, CNN had tried to find a finely sliced solution: Chris wouldn’t cover his brother’s travails on air, and he could confer with his brother on a personal basis, but he shouldn’t deal with the governor’s staff. The Washington Post reported in May, however that Chris had participated in meetings with staff members. He apologized on air, and CNN issued a statement saying, “It was inappropriate to engage in conversations that included members of the Governor’s staff, which Chris acknowledges,” but that he had not been disciplined.

The new revelations demonstrate more serious errors of judgment. When Chris Cuomo simply offered advice to staff members, he failed to observe the rules CNN had set for his private behavior. But by gathering information from “sources” and passing it to his brother’s staff, Cuomo committed the more egregious step of directly mixing the journalistic work of calling sources and gathering information with his personal, familial commitments. He was wise not to go further into the realm of “oppo research,” but he still went far beyond the bounds of propriety.

Perhaps few can blame Chris Cuomo for being “family first, job second,” as he said in May. “Being a journalist and a brother to a politician is unique, and a unique challenge, and I have a unique responsibility to balance those roles.” Whether that balance was ever truly achievable is debatable, but the conflict between the roles eventually became irreconcilable. He could have chosen to step down from his job to back his brother, or he could have chosen to distance himself from the scandal and commit to journalism. Instead, he tried to have it both ways. In using his journalistic skills and access to aid his brother, Cuomo broke trust with his employers and, more important, his audience.

CNN bears some of the blame. For years, the network banned Chris Cuomo from interviewing his brother, a commonsense precaution. But in the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus ravaged the country, Andrew Cuomo presented himself as a competent counterpart to Donald Trump’s pandemic bungling. CNN, knowing ratings gold when it saw it, decided to put the brothers on air together, apparently concluding that the rules mattered less in the midst of a crisis.

[David A. Graham: CNN is picking ratings over ethics]

The exchanges between them were entertaining—lots of brotherly jibes about who was the favorite child and who hadn’t called Mom recently—and sometimes poignant, as when Chris fell sick with COVID-19 and interviewed Andrew from basement isolation. Journalistically, however, the shtick was appalling, as I wrote in May 2020. Rather than ask tough questions of his brother, Chris grilled him on whether he’d run for president. Again, no reasonable person would expect Chris to hold his own brother’s feet to the fire. The mistake was allowing them on air together in the first place. The puffy news coverage helped make Andrew Cuomo a liberal hero (briefly) and also helped obscure the serious shortcomings of New York’s pandemic response, including deaths in nursing homes that the governor tried to cover up. As it turned out, the rules mattered even more in a crisis, when watchdog journalism could be literally a matter of life and death.

Just like the coronavirus, karma is highly transmissible. The adoring coverage of Andrew Cuomo fueled a backlash against his long-standing bullying. A legislator who’d challenged him over COVID-19 said the governor had threatened to “destroy” him. Soon after, a former aide publicly aired allegations of sexual harassment, which were quickly followed by many more. The process took a few months, but Andrew Cuomo’s fate was sealed. (Chris Cuomo has faced his own allegations of sexual harassment. A former colleague at ABC wrote in a New York Times column in September that he had groped her in 2005. Cuomo acknowledged and apologized at the time of the incident and again when the column was published.)

When he was advising his brother earlier this year, Chris Cuomo encouraged Andrew to dismiss calls for his resignation as “cancel culture,” and perhaps he will take the same view against calls for his own resignation. But the defense doesn’t stick here. Hosting a prime-time television show is a privilege, not a right. Chris Cuomo doesn’t need to be drummed out of journalism, but he does need to face repercussions. By keeping Cuomo on the air and in his job, CNN would send the message that journalistic ethics are only for the little people and viewers are on their own. Cuomo should take some time off and reflect on his chosen profession—and if and when he comes back, perhaps he should choose a new beat.

Andrew Cuomo’s resignation as governor of New York might have been a godsend for CNN. The network faced a nearly intractable conflict of interest: The governor was a major national figure, but his brother, Chris, was also one of CNN’s prime-time stars. Instead, the fallout from Andrew Cuomo’s departure has made Chris Cuomo’s position untenable. He should resign; if he doesn’t, CNN should sack him.

On Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose investigation into sexual-harassment complaints against the Democratic governor precipitated his August resignation, released new documents that show how Chris mixed his roles as brother and broadcaster. The documents show that he was engaged in passing information to a top aide to the governor, Melissa DeRosa, as his brother’s team scrambled to respond to accusations. “I have a lead on the wedding girl,” he texted DeRosa, referring to a woman who complained that Andrew had made an unwanted advance at a wedding.

“When asked, I would reach out to sources, other journalists, to see if they had heard of anybody else coming out,” Chris explained in an interview with the attorney general’s office. He said he had only been seeking info about whether other complaints against his brother were forthcoming, not trying to dig up dirt on accusers. “I would never do oppo research on anybody alleging anything like this. I'm not in the oppo research business.”

[David A. Graham: America’s Andrew Cuomo problem]

This is not the first revelation about Chris Cuomo’s flawed handling of the scandal. Long before the allegations against Andrew, CNN had tried to find a finely sliced solution: Chris wouldn’t cover his brother’s travails on air, and he could confer with his brother on a personal basis, but he shouldn’t deal with the governor’s staff. The Washington Post reported in May, however that Chris had participated in meetings with staff members. He apologized on air, and CNN issued a statement saying, “It was inappropriate to engage in conversations that included members of the Governor’s staff, which Chris acknowledges,” but that he had not been disciplined.

The new revelations demonstrate more serious errors of judgment. When Chris Cuomo simply offered advice to staff members, he failed to observe the rules CNN had set for his private behavior. But by gathering information from “sources” and passing it to his brother’s staff, Cuomo committed the more egregious step of directly mixing the journalistic work of calling sources and gathering information with his personal, familial commitments. He was wise not to go further into the realm of “oppo research,” but he still went far beyond the bounds of propriety.

Perhaps few can blame Chris Cuomo for being “family first, job second,” as he said in May. “Being a journalist and a brother to a politician is unique, and a unique challenge, and I have a unique responsibility to balance those roles.” Whether that balance was ever truly achievable is debatable, but the conflict between the roles eventually became irreconcilable. He could have chosen to step down from his job to back his brother, or he could have chosen to distance himself from the scandal and commit to journalism. Instead, he tried to have it both ways. In using his journalistic skills and access to aid his brother, Cuomo broke trust with his employers and, more important, his audience.

CNN bears some of the blame. For years, the network banned Chris Cuomo from interviewing his brother, a commonsense precaution. But in the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus ravaged the country, Andrew Cuomo presented himself as a competent counterpart to Donald Trump’s pandemic bungling. CNN, knowing ratings gold when it saw it, decided to put the brothers on air together, apparently concluding that the rules mattered less in the midst of a crisis.

[David A. Graham: CNN is picking ratings over ethics]

The exchanges between them were entertaining—lots of brotherly jibes about who was the favorite child and who hadn’t called Mom recently—and sometimes poignant, as when Chris fell sick with COVID-19 and interviewed Andrew from basement isolation. Journalistically, however, the shtick was appalling, as I wrote in May 2020. Rather than ask tough questions of his brother, Chris grilled him on whether he’d run for president. Again, no reasonable person would expect Chris to hold his own brother’s feet to the fire. The mistake was allowing them on air together in the first place. The puffy news coverage helped make Andrew Cuomo a liberal hero (briefly) and also helped obscure the serious shortcomings of New York’s pandemic response, including deaths in nursing homes that the governor tried to cover up. As it turned out, the rules mattered even more in a crisis, when watchdog journalism could be literally a matter of life and death.

Just like the coronavirus, karma is highly transmissible. The adoring coverage of Andrew Cuomo fueled a backlash against his long-standing bullying. A legislator who’d challenged him over COVID-19 said the governor had threatened to “destroy” him. Soon after, a former aide publicly aired allegations of sexual harassment, which were quickly followed by many more. The process took a few months, but Andrew Cuomo’s fate was sealed. (Chris Cuomo has faced his own allegations of sexual harassment. A former colleague at ABC wrote in a New York Times column in September that he had groped her in 2005. Cuomo acknowledged and apologized at the time of the incident and again when the column was published.)

When he was advising his brother earlier this year, Chris Cuomo encouraged Andrew to dismiss calls for his resignation as “cancel culture,” and perhaps he will take the same view against calls for his own resignation. But the defense doesn’t stick here. Hosting a prime-time television show is a privilege, not a right. Chris Cuomo doesn’t need to be drummed out of journalism, but he does need to face repercussions. By keeping Cuomo on the air and in his job, CNN would send the message that journalistic ethics are only for the little people and viewers are on their own. Cuomo should take a little time off and reflect on his chosen profession—and if and when he comes back, perhaps he should choose a new beat.

In 2001, doing press for Shallow Hal, Gwyneth Paltrow spent a lot of time talking about the fat suit she wore to play Rosemary, the film’s romantic lead. She spoke in particular about an experiment that she and the film’s makeup-effects designer had undertaken to test the suit’s credibility out in the world. At a fancy hotel in New York, Paltrow donned the fake weight. She walked through the lobby. She walked to the bar. She noticed how people looked at her, and how they refused to. “It was so sad,” she told one reporter. “I didn’t expect it to feel so upsetting,” she told another. “I thought the whole thing would be funny, and then as soon as I put it on, I thought, well, you know, this isn’t all funny.”

Paltrow’s assessment of this experience—apparently funny, not all funny—doubles as a pretty decent review of the film she was trying to promote. Shallow Hal is a fat joke with a 114-minute run time. From the moment it premiered, in early November of 2001, it was poorly aged. It’s tempting, 20 years later, to look back on Shallow Hal and feel we have cause for congratulation: The movie is bad, and we know it’s bad, so progress must have been made. (Paltrow herself, expressing regret last year about her part in the film, called it a “disaster.”) But Shallow Hal has not been relegated to the annals of cinematic shame. On the contrary, it has retained a revealing currency. It has expanded its reach through streaming services, where it is popular and even beloved. And it speaks to a culture that still interprets fatness as a condition that deserves whatever mockery it might get. Shallow Hal could never decide whether Rosemary was a human or a humiliation. Its confusion remains all too timely.

The story goes like this. Hal Larson (played by Jack Black) is a generally sweet guy with an overarching flaw: He judges women by their appearance, refusing to pursue romantic relationships with women who don’t look like models. One day, through the combined forces of magical realism and the self-help seller Tony Robbins, Hal gets an attitude adjustment. Robbins hypnotizes Hal, ensuring that he will see people’s inner beauty reflected on the outside. Then he meets Rosemary Shanahan (Paltrow), who is smart and funny and fun and kind, and who weighs about 300 pounds. Rosemary looks like Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit. Filtered through Hal’s new gaze, though, she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow. That interplay of vision and reality—the cosmic wrongness of Hal’s perception—is the film’s defining joke. “The biggest love story ever told,” its promotional poster promises with a wink.

Twentieth Century Fox / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy

Does the spell eventually break? Does Hal finally see Rosemary as she is? Does this celebration of Rosemary’s personality offer a torrent of jokes about Rosemary’s body? Yes. Over the course of the movie, Rosemary breaks not one but two seats: a flimsy chair at a burger joint and a booth at a fancier restaurant. When she and Hal go canoeing, Hal’s side of the boat tips into the air, like a seesaw trapped in the upswing. And when she and Hal go swimming, Rosemary, diving in, creates a wave so powerful that it deposits a kid into a tree. “Sorry,” she says, somehow both defined by her size and oblivious to it.

Shallow Hal was directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, who had previously brought to the world Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and other films known for their giddy unions of humor and heart. In promoting the film, the Farrellys tried to argue that Shallow Hal was similarly nuanced. The people who were offended by the movie, they insisted, had missed the point; the film was challenging callous stereotypes, not endorsing them. It was exploring the meaning of a big body in a world that makes space only for small ones. That it treated Rosemary’s weight as setup and punch line at once was apparently just part of the satire. “This movie’s heart is in the right place,” Peter Farrelly insisted when Shallow Hal premiered. The film’s makeup-effects designer, Tony Gardner—the orchestrator of Paltrow’s fat suit—echoed this claim. The Farrellys, he said, “are not making fun of [Rosemary’s] weight, they are embracing her weight. Peter calls it a valentine for overweight people.”

[Read: When beauty is a troll]

If so, the film is a dubious gift. And its grim condescensions remain familiar. Rosemary’s primary function in Shallow Hal, beyond absorbing the movie’s mockeries of her, is to facilitate Hal’s self-improvement. Both roles are demeaning. But the film suggests that she should be happy for whatever she can get. “Personally, I don’t feel any gratitude for a movie that profits at my expense,” the fat activist Marilyn Wann told the Chicago Tribune shortly after Shallow Hal premiered. The singer Carnie Wilson, whose weight had been tabloid fodder for years, called the movie “hurtful in my heart.”

“Rosemary breaking things” is not the only strain of humor in this film. Shallow Hal also has great fun with the notion of “Rosemary eating things.” Early on, she explains to Hal that she long ago realized she’d be the same size whatever she ate. It is the most empathetic line in the film. (In the world beyond the movie, studies show that some 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail.) But the brief moment of grace is overshadowed by the film’s more deeply held conviction: that a fat woman caught in the act of eating is comedy gold. We see, for example, Rosemary and Hal sharing a large chocolate milkshake; when he turns away for a few seconds, she speed-drinks the entire thing. Later, she asks Hal’s co-workers for a piece of the cake they’re carrying—and then helps herself to an extremely large slice. Cut to Rosemary walking away, clutching the cake in both hands as she munches.

No real person would do that. But Shallow Hal, for all its lofty claims of charitable humanism, is not interested in what real life would be like for Rosemary. It is interested merely in mining her body for LOLs. After a while, even its lazy jokes make an accidental argument: They suggest that Rosemary’s body is a problem, not just for her, but for others. Over and over again, her weight—the food she eats, the space she occupies—takes something away from other people, whether it’s a milkshake meant for two or a cake meant for 20 or a pool meant for all. Shallow Hal is bad because it treats Rosemary’s body as comedy. But it is insidious because it treats her body as tragedy.

And the movie casts a long shadow. Many Americans still see other people’s weight in precisely the same way that Shallow Hal does: as a problem that affects everyone (“the obesity epidemic,” “the war on obesity,” etc.), and is therefore the business of anyone. A New York Times column published earlier this year reported that some people had put on pounds as they navigated the traumas of a global pandemic. Noting the correlation between weight and COVID mortality, the piece chided these people for their negligence. Its author went on to explain her superior practice of self-control: “My consumption of snacks and ice cream is portion-controlled, and, along with daily exercise, has enabled me to remain weight-stable despite yearlong pandemic stress and occasional despair.”

The brand of thinking underlying such smugness—that fat people are merely thin people who aren’t trying hard enough—is mythology that easily expands into bigotry. One of the grimmest elements of Shallow Hal is that, underneath it all, it understands Rosemary’s weight to be more than a matter of will. But it mocks her anyway.

The years since Shallow Hal premiered have seen several paradoxes at play in American culture. Scientists have been learning more about the genetic factors that contribute to body weight, and about the metabolic adaptations that make weight loss, if achieved at all, extremely difficult to sustain. Over the same period, bias against fat people has grown. (A Harvard study of some 4 million implicit-bias tests taken between 2007 and 2016 noted a drop in several biases measured, including those related to race and sexual orientation. Bias based on body weight was the only one that increased.) As the lexicon of body positivity has made its tentative forays into American mass culture, that culture as a whole also continues to conflate thinness with wellness, wellness with health, and health with moral superiority.

[Read: Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show is painful to watch]

In one of the decidedly unpoetic ironies of this moment, the woman who described the “sad” minutes she spent navigating the world in a fat suit is helping to enforce those equations. But Paltrow’s is only one voice in a chorus that treats big bodies as deviant bodies: Adele, having lost weight, is portrayed as triumphant; Lizzo, having not, is portrayed as “brave”; Donald Trump is criticized not only on the grounds of his harms, but also on the grounds of his heaviness. The ABC sitcom American Housewife, which ran for several seasons starting in 2016, dedicated its pilot episode to its main character’s realization that, after a woman she calls “Fat Pam” moves away, she will be the “second-fattest” woman in town.

Hollywood has given us many other characters who are thus flattened, among them Fat Amy and Fat Betty and Fat Thor and Fat Monica and Fat Schmidt. It has served up cruelties in the name of comedy. The actor and comedian Olivia Munn, “joking” in her memoir: “I will fix America’s obesity problems by taking all motorized transport away from fat people. In turn, I will build an infrastructure of Fat Tunnels, where all the fat people can walk. This will create jobs and subsequent weight loss.” The comedian Nicole Arbour, in a viral video: “Fat-people parking spots should be at the back of the mall parking lot. Walk to the doors and burn some calories.” The TV host Bill Maher, on his show: “Fat-shaming doesn’t need to end; it needs to make a comeback. Some amount of shame is good.”

What’s notable about the “jokes,” beyond the fact that they barely qualify as jokes at all, is that they are framed as expressions of concern. They embrace Shallow Hal’s wayward logic: that making fun of fat people is a way to help fat people. The creator of Insatiable, the revenge fantasy of a fat-turned-thin teenager that streamed on Netflix starting in 2018, tried to rationalize the show’s bland bigotries in the same way that Shallow Hal’s creators had: by insisting that they were critiquing weight stigma, rather than perpetuating it. The 2018 movie I Feel Pretty takes the Farrellys’ premise—magic that makes one see the world differently—and aims it inward, at a woman who becomes convinced that she looks like a model. The film’s creators also insisted, unconvincingly, that they were going for satire.

[Read: Can television destroy diet culture?]

When Shallow Hal premiered, some reviews echoed its creators’ marketing messages. The Times dubbed the movie a Critic’s Pick, claiming that the Farrellys “cunningly transform a series of fat jokes … into a tender fable and a winning love story.” Roger Ebert argued that the Farrellys were “not simply laughing at their targets, but sometimes with them, or in sympathy with them”—and concluded that “Shallow Hal has what look like fat jokes … but the punchline is tilted toward empathy.”

The bar, in those assessments, is so low. And it remains low. Shallow Hal’s reviews on Amazon Prime, where it is currently rated 4.7 out of 5 stars, include praise for its “moral message” and its “surprisingly deep premise.” The raves are at home in a world that still treats fat not as a neutral description, but as a degradation. Even in its triumphal final scenes, its romantic messes having been tidied, Shallow Hal returns to its easy inertias. Hal tries to lift Rosemary up, and the camera zooms in on him as he strains, his face twisted with exaggerated effort. A few moments later, as the couple prepares to drive off into their happily-ever-after, they get into a car. Rosemary crushes her side of it. These are the true physics of a movie obsessed with weight. Shallow Hal does what so many people have done over the years, because American culture says they should: It looks at a fat person and sees nothing but a joke.

In 2001, doing press for Shallow Hal, Gwyneth Paltrow spent a lot of time talking about the fat suit she wore to play Rosemary, the film’s romantic lead. She spoke in particular about an experiment that she and the film’s makeup-effects designer had undertaken to test the suit’s credibility out in the world. At a fancy hotel in New York, Paltrow donned the fake weight. She walked through the lobby. She walked to the bar. She noticed how people looked at her, and how they refused to. “It was so sad,” she told one reporter. “I didn’t expect it to feel so upsetting,” she told another. “I thought the whole thing would be funny, and then as soon as I put it on, I thought, well, you know, this isn’t all funny.”

Paltrow’s assessment of this experience—apparently funny, not at all funny—doubles as a pretty decent review of the film she was trying to promote. Shallow Hal is a fat joke with a 114-minute run time. From the moment it premiered, in early November of 2001, it was poorly aged. It’s tempting, 20 years later, to look back on Shallow Hal and feel we have cause for congratulation: The movie is bad, and we know it’s bad, so progress must have been made. (Paltrow herself, expressing regret last year about her part in the film, called it a “disaster.”) But Shallow Hal has not been relegated to the annals of cinematic shame. On the contrary, it has retained a revealing currency. It has expanded its reach through streaming services, where it is popular and even beloved. And it speaks to a culture that still interprets fatness as a condition that deserves whatever mockery it might get. Shallow Hal could never decide whether Rosemary was a human or a humiliation. Its confusion remains all too timely.

The story goes like this. Hal Larson (played by Jack Black) is a generally sweet guy with an overarching flaw: He judges women by their appearance, refusing to pursue romantic relationships with women who don’t look like models. One day, through the combined forces of magical realism and the self-help seller Tony Robbins, Hal gets an attitude adjustment. Robbins hypnotizes Hal, ensuring that he will see people’s inner beauty reflected on the outside. Then he meets Rosemary Shanahan (Paltrow), who is smart and funny and fun and kind, and who weighs about 300 pounds. Rosemary looks like Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit. Filtered through Hal’s new gaze, though, she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow. That interplay of vision and reality—the cosmic wrongness of Hal’s perception—is the film’s defining joke. “The biggest love story ever told,” its promotional poster promises with a wink.

Twentieth Century Fox / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy

Does the spell eventually break? Does Hal finally see Rosemary as she is? Does this celebration of Rosemary’s personality offer a tirade of jokes about Rosemary’s body? Yes. Over the course of the movie, Rosemary breaks not one but two seats: a flimsy chair at a burger joint and a booth at a fancier restaurant. When she and Hal go canoeing, Hal’s side of the boat tips into the air, like a seesaw trapped in the upswing. And when she and Hal go swimming, Rosemary, diving in, creates a wave so powerful that it deposits a kid into a tree. “Sorry,” she says, somehow both defined by her size and oblivious to it.

Shallow Hal was directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, who had previously brought to the world Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and other films known for their giddy unions of humor and heart. In promoting the film, the Farrellys tried to argue that Shallow Hal was similarly nuanced. The people who were offended by the movie, they insisted, had missed the point; the film was challenging callous stereotypes, not endorsing them. It was exploring the meaning of a big body in a world that makes space only for small ones. That it treated Rosemary’s weight as setup and punch line at once was apparently just part of the satire. “This movie’s heart is in the right place,” Peter Farrelly insisted when Shallow Hal premiered. The film’s makeup-effects designer, Tony Gardner—the orchestrator of Paltrow’s fat suit—echoed this claim. The Farrellys, he said, “are not making fun of [Rosemary’s] weight, they are embracing her weight. Peter calls it a valentine for overweight people.”

[Read: When beauty is a troll]

If so, the film is a dubious gift. And its grim condescensions remain familiar. Rosemary’s primary function in Shallow Hal, beyond absorbing the movie’s mockeries of her, is to facilitate Hal’s self-improvement. Both roles are demeaning. But the film suggests that she should be happy for whatever she can get. “Personally, I don’t feel any gratitude for a movie that profits at my expense,” the fat activist Marilyn Wann told the Chicago Tribune shortly after Shallow Hal premiered. The singer Carnie Wilson, whose weight had been tabloid fodder for years, called the movie “hurtful in my heart.”

“Rosemary breaking things” is not the only strain of humor in this film. Shallow Hal also has great fun with the notion of “Rosemary eating things.” Early on, she explains to Hal that she long ago realized she’d be the same size whatever she ate. It is the most empathetic line in the film. (In the world beyond the movie, studies show that some 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail.) But the brief moment of grace is overshadowed by the film’s more deeply held conviction: that a fat woman caught in the act of eating is comedy gold. We see, for example, Rosemary and Hal sharing a large chocolate milkshake; when he turns away for a few seconds, she speed-drinks the entire thing. Later, she asks Hal’s co-workers for a piece of the cake they’re carrying—and then helps herself to an extremely large slice. Cut to Rosemary walking away, clutching the cake in both hands as she munches.

No real person would do that. But Shallow Hal, for all its lofty claims of charitable humanism, is not interested in what real life would be like for Rosemary. It is interested merely in mining her body for LOLs. After a while, even its lazy jokes make an accidental argument: They suggest that Rosemary’s body is a problem, not just for her, but for others. Over and over again, her weight—the food she eats, the space she occupies—takes something away from other people, whether it’s a milkshake meant for two or a cake meant for 20 or a pool meant for all. Shallow Hal is bad because it treats Rosemary’s body as comedy. But it is insidious because it treats her body as tragedy.

And the movie casts a long shadow. Many Americans still see other people’s weight in precisely the same way that Shallow Hal does: as a problem that affects everyone (“the obesity epidemic,” “the war on obesity,” etc.), and is therefore the business of anyone. A New York Times column published earlier this year reported that some people had put on pounds as they navigated the traumas of a global pandemic. Noting the correlation between weight and COVID mortality, the piece chided these people for their negligence. Its author went on to explain her superior practice of self-control: “My consumption of snacks and ice cream is portion-controlled, and, along with daily exercise, has enabled me to remain weight-stable despite yearlong pandemic stress and occasional despair.”

The brand of thinking underlying such smugness—that fat people are merely thin people who aren’t trying hard enough—is mythology that easily expands into bigotry. One of the grimmest elements of Shallow Hal is that, underneath it all, it understands Rosemary’s weight to be more than a matter of will. But it mocks her anyway.

The years since Shallow Hal premiered have seen several paradoxes at play in American culture. Scientists have been learning more about the genetic factors that contribute to body weight, and about the metabolic adaptations that make weight loss, if achieved at all, extremely difficult to sustain. Over the same period, bias against fat people has grown. (A Harvard study of some 4 million implicit-bias tests taken between 2007 and 2016 noted a drop in several biases measured, including those related to race and sexual orientation. Bias based on body weight was the only one that increased.) As the lexicon of body positivity has made its tentative forays into American mass culture, that culture as a whole also continues to conflate thinness with wellness, wellness with health, and health with moral superiority.

[Read: Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show is painful to watch]

In one of the decidedly unpoetic ironies of this moment, the woman who described the “sad” minutes she spent navigating the world in a fat suit is helping to enforce those equations. But Paltrow’s is only one voice in a chorus that treats big bodies as deviant bodies: Adele, having lost weight, is portrayed as triumphant; Lizzo, having not, is portrayed as “brave”; Donald Trump is criticized not only on the grounds of his harms, but also on the grounds of his heaviness. The ABC sitcom American Housewife, which ran for several seasons starting in 2016, dedicated its pilot episode to its main character’s realization that, after a woman she calls “Fat Pam” moves away, she will be the “second-fattest” woman in town.

Hollywood has given us many other characters who are thus flattened, among them Fat Amy and Fat Betty and Fat Thor and Fat Monica and Fat Schmidt. It has served up cruelties in the name of comedy. The actor and comedian Olivia Munn, “joking” in her memoir: “I will fix America’s obesity problems by taking all motorized transport away from fat people. In turn, I will build an infrastructure of Fat Tunnels, where all the fat people can walk. This will create jobs and subsequent weight loss.” The comedian Nicole Arbour, in a viral video: “Fat-people parking spots should be at the back of the mall parking lot. Walk to the doors and burn some calories.” The TV host Bill Maher, on his show: “Fat-shaming doesn’t need to end; it needs to make a comeback. Some amount of shame is good.”

What’s notable about the “jokes,” beyond the fact that they barely qualify as jokes at all, is that they are framed as expressions of concern. They embrace Shallow Hal’s wayward logic: that making fun of fat people is a way to help fat people. The creator of Insatiable, the revenge fantasy of a fat-turned-thin teenager that streamed on Netflix starting in 2018, tried to rationalize the show’s bland bigotries in the same way that Shallow Hal’s creators had: by insisting that they were critiquing weight stigma, rather than perpetuating it. The 2018 movie I Feel Pretty takes the Farrellys’ premise—magic that makes one see the world differently—and aims it inward, at a woman who becomes convinced that she looks like a model. The film’s creators also insisted, unconvincingly, that they were going for satire.

[Read: Can television destroy diet culture?]

When Shallow Hal premiered, some reviews echoed its creators’ marketing messages. The Times dubbed the movie a Critic’s Pick, claiming that the Farrellys “cunningly transform a series of fat jokes … into a tender fable and a winning love story.” Roger Ebert argued that the Farrellys were “not simply laughing at their targets, but sometimes with them, or in sympathy with them”—and concluded that “Shallow Hal has what look like fat jokes … but the punchline is tilted toward empathy.”

The bar, in those assessments, is so low. And it remains low. Shallow Hal’s reviews on Amazon Prime, where it is currently rated 4.7 out of 5 stars, include praise for its “moral message” and its “surprisingly deep premise.” The raves are at home in a world that still treats fat not as a neutral description, but as a degradation. Even in its triumphal final scenes, its romantic messes having been tidied, Shallow Hal returns to its easy inertias. Hal tries to lift Rosemary up, and the camera zooms in on him as he strains, his face twisted with exaggerated effort. A few moments later, as the couple prepares to drive off into their happily-ever-after, they get into a car. Rosemary crushes her side of it. These are the true physics of a movie obsessed with weight. Shallow Hal does what so many people have done over the years, because American culture says they should: It looks at a fat person and sees nothing but a joke.