Successfully and deliciously fugacious: re-interpreting the “failed” fat relationship in Percy Adlon’s Zuckerbaby (1985)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Often overlooked in lieu of his Oscar-winning film, Bagdad Café (1987), Percy Adlon’s German film Zuckerbaby tells the tale of a nameless fat woman. An excessively mundane mortuary assistant, she falls in love with a married nonfat man, Huber. The protagonist stalks Huber at his job, coaxing him with food until he finally comes over for dinner. There, their passionate affair begins and abruptly ends – “unsuccessful” and fugacious – typically leaving the fat protagonist alone once again. Yet Zuckerbaby’s complex form and seemingly straightforward end beg to be re-interpreted via formal film techniques to showcase the complicated nature and rich lasting presence of this fat/nonfat relationship. Using notions of serious camp and fatt queer history, I explore how elements of perishability permeate the lovers’ relationship and create a formal, visual cinematic space without hierarchy of future and past. This allows both the film's protagonist lovers as well as the film's viewers to resist normative romantic notions of the future and instead revel in the fulfilling elements of a new present influenced by the past, or idea “the fat before” of serious camp. Just as the protagonist extends her hand and offers the viewer a candy bar, I argue the audience is beckoned to look with new notions of delicious fugacity in the present. Liberating their affair from mundane plot elements and an oppressive, one-dimensional fat love rooted in notions of a “successful” future, Adlon’s Zuckerbaby offers a movingly rich, fulfilling, and complexly present portrayal of a fat relationship when re-read via an academic lens.