Dolan Morgan
Despite the physical lengths Christian Bale notoriously embraces for a role, both gaining and dropping weight, expanding and contracting his body like a furious bellows, any hopes of earning an Oscar for his most recent film required an even greater weight loss, demanding he drop more pounds than his body in fact contained. Though he starved himself dutifully, his managers and conscience continued to chide him about a skeletal frame that stubbornly remained one skeletal frame too fat. Out of anger and persistence, he valiantly innovated a new and dangerous form of thinness, now trending as an A-List diet plan. "Imagine the actor and his body," his trainer explained, "as a parabola on a plane, where Bale's size and form are represented through the outreaching curve on a graph; then imagine that arc, in tandem with his body, waning over time, its two arms closing in on each other like a hug in slow motion, until finally they meet in an embrace, as the limbs of a ghost passing through the limbs of a ghost." Such was his method, the only method: via meditation and deprivation, his girlfriend recalls, "Bale's flanks moved inward like the shrinking curve, until he became merely a line, then the notion of something having been there, then the absence of everything," and ultimately, in an explosion of strength and will, TMZ reports, the parabola of his body completely inversed—and began again in a flash of light to grow larger, in a way that was not fat at all but instead the negation of thinness, a type of thin that can only be expressed as girth, where the lack of mass forms a frightening and daring kind of heaviness. But how? "As reference," People magazine suggests, "think now on the way your own thoughts can become painfully circular, swimming around one another in your head, the paradox of their futility measured against their pervasiveness, where only the most trivial of ideas retain gravity or weight, and then imagine this neurosis manifested as a type of body image or health regimen." Likewise, Bale's frame moved outward against its own shape, expanding beyond the confines of his wardrobe, then his home, then all of LA, and even California, absorbing and negating the mass of those things around him, the mere idea of his thinness destroying, according to CNN, everything in its path. Existing now as all things in totality, including our lives and our thoughts, Christian Bale simultaneously aborts and awaits the commence of production.