Norbit (2007)

Norbit arrived in 2007 as a DreamWorks comedy built on a simple premise: Eddie Murphy plays three roles, chief among them Rasputia, an abusive wife of enormous girth, and the gentle orphan Norbit who endures her. The plot concerns a childhood sweetheart, a scheme to convert an orphanage into a strip club, and a great deal of prosthetic makeup. It opened at number one and earned 159 million dollars worldwide. It also won three Golden Raspberry Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Makeup, a pairing that tells you most of what you need to know.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the film is a near-total blank. Its central comic engine is the mockery of an obese woman's body, which places it in direct opposition to any body-positive sensibility. Critics at the time described a general fear and loathing of women running through the material, so the feminist ledger stays empty. Black activists called the Rasputia performance a minstrel turn; that is an accusation of stereotype, not evidence of racial consciousness, and the film offers no racial commentary of its own.

Environmental themes are absent. The Latimore brothers run an extortion racket and a strip club, but the criminality is a plot device, not a critique of capital. No neurodivergent characters appear. No history is revised, because there is no history here to revise. And the film lectures no one: it is a lowbrow gag comedy with no message to deliver. The single flicker of note is a predominantly Black ensemble, which reflects the ordinary casting of a Black-led studio comedy and is never remarked upon by the film itself. Everything else registers at zero. We mark it down and move on.