THE STORY: Benno Blimpie is an enormously fat and desperately unhappy young man who is literally eating himself to death. Rejected by his coarse family, and a world which holds him in contempt, Benno watches bitterly as the history of his life is played out in scene after scene around him. His foul-mouthed, unloving mother; his gross, derisive father; his sex-obsessed grandfather, who courts disaster with a teenaged nymphet—all subject him to derision and scorn. Trapped beneath Benno's gross exterior there is a sensitive and feeling person, with needs that cry out for fulfillment. But he learns that a love of beauty is not enough and, trapped within his ugliness, he can only shut himself away and methodically eat himself into oblivion.