Leonard Cohen in the Eating Disorder Ward

Synopsis

ONE-LINE SYNOPSIS: "after reading a couple dozen extreme-dieting statements by or about the late singer Leonard Cohen, a hungry queer/trans poet imagines encountering Cohen in a hospital ward for disordered eaters." 150-WORD SYNOPSIS: Leonard Cohen – disordered eater? The fedora-capped crooner was hospitalized after a twelve-day fast. He had what a friend called a “lifelong obsession with his weight.” Even though Cohen was quite open about his hungers – as he once wrote, “food tastes good but I’d rather not eat” – this aspect of the complex artist’s life has been ignored by fans and scholars alike. But it would be far too easy to diagnose Cohen post-mortem! His poetry frames hunger as a spiritual practice and secret pleasure rather psychiatric symptom. (And remember, this was a proud Jewish man who cherished his years as a Buddhist monk, cooking austere meals for his teacher.) Rather than pathologize or pity Cohen, then, this speculative animation aims for connections, both between the queer/trans filmmaker and the departed celebrity, and between the many contexts of Cohen’s hunger (from the use of fatphobic imagery in nazi propaganda, to Jewish masculinities, to the understudied matter of men’s body image issues and foodways).