Disability is in Everything (Including our Villains): CERDITA (PIGGY)

TW: Mentions of Fatphobia, Cyberbullying, Eugenics, Desirability Politics, White Supremacy, Highlighting the treatment of minors' bodies in Piggy and in other artistic media, and Bullying.

Warning: HARK! There are spoilers here, traveler. Take the road less littered with thought.

The release of the trailer for Piggy(2022), a film made, directed, and expanded from the short film, Credita(2018) by Spanish film writer Carlota Pereda, was (well at least to me) a nerve-wracking, looking through my fingers, procedure; watching the strikingly young Laura Galán be chased by her bullies in a string pink and blood stained bikini on the public streets, while also being denied a cover-up to protect herself from the lingering threats of groping and torturous stares from her small town, who do not miss a beat to casually reference and gawk at her body like they're entitled to it, as well....a film that required me to come into it with a little trust. A trust that, keep in mind, is non-existent when it comes to filmmakers not only failing to respect adolescent bodies but overwhelmingly demonizing fat bodies, whether young or old, and painting them as either the butt of a joke all the way to associating physicality to a person with a set of corrupted morals - A body could never render proof of someone's existing values! And yet, in a world where deviating from puritanical and eurocentric standards causes real, material consequences (I.e. the state's need to self-manufacture moments of racism, cissexism, transmisogyny, fatphobia, and ableism, etc, in order to uphold a continued history of violence.) to who or whom is deemed "desirable". Desirability no longer becomes a conversation about preference, but a violent band of vagabonds, stealing and parceling out the remaining portions of safety to people privileged enough to be seen as human. And even then, that would change and be taken at any given moment. Where being called "ugly", a word historically associated with white supremacist eugenics, hurts more than just the hurling slap or sting of an insult, but is a cry of war. A direct attack on your associative relationship with life.

And this is why I loved Piggy, and other horror movies much like it. Let me be clear that the initially sensational elements of the trailer, the one I pained about above and the months after I saw it, do showcase some exploitation of the body (I.e. Pereda in an interview said that one of her inspirations behind the pale-fleshly colors on the set design and costumes, along with the more invasively "close" shots we have of Galán's body, was none other than the meatful masterpiece of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.) that Pereda and the movie's photographer fully intended to be as anxiety-inducing as possible. Why? Well, do you remember when you were a teen and the tension you felt with a difference? Remember how terrifying it was to not be homogenous and in the soft bosom of the status quo, leaving you out in the fabricated prickles plucked directly by your peers? It's practically a life lived on the stove. Where the water heats slowly around you, the metal bowl of your life shrinking and waning with the pressure to be beautiful enough to feed those claustrophobic eyes, and you just sit there, boiling in your wait and waiting to boil. The breath never catches and you sweat, thinking about all that luck that's already been used: they haven't noticed This time. They'll notice Next time - they've noticed you all already. Since you were born. Since you were punished for your non-ableness by people who fail to see what exactly waits for them around the corner; I like Piggy, because I like pushback. I like when young people see the oppressive systems at hand and instead of focusing on the inevitable internalization all of us miserably have shoveled into our brains, there are scratches clawed all the way out the door. Celebrating a more conscious repulsion against pedophilic surveillance, manifested first externally and then dealt with through interpersonal exchanges from adults and peers we're told to trust, while simultaneously recognizing and growing out manufactured and packaged shame and letting it influence your personal dealings of the world and who is recognized as a source-network for solidarity.

Piggy, and other horror movies that (more obviously) challenge our society, and their love for dealing out acts of disabling, are awesome in the way it spits in the face of both resilience and pity. How our final girl herself is the final act for redirection of a perspective and models someone who refuses to be "rewarded" by the same agents of, in this case, fatphobic ideals and does not ask them at the end, if they're now worthy enough to be alive, after saving them.