The San Diego Book Festival and a movie review

Next week I’ll be at the San Diego Book Festival on Saturday, August 22nd. I’m on a panel with a few other authors at 1:30 on the USD campus, you can find more details about the event here. The topic up for discussion is “Complicated characters” but I pledge not to use any of the following terms:

• likeable

• unlikeable

• “difficult women”

• relatable

• redeeming qualities

• audience sympathy

If I do, please throw something at me and I’ll try to take the line again.

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I also have a review out today of Maddie’s Secret, John Early’s debut movie, in the New York Review of Books. There was a great deal to like about it, but on the whole I think it compares unfavorably to The Brady Bunch Movie:

I like the way Early displays his influences openly, like an auctioneer at an estate sale: here is a shot from Douglas Sirk, here is a scene from Showgirls, here is Fly by Jing chili crisp. In Maddie’s Secret, Allan, Hennessey, and McCollister play a trio of bad girls with eating disorders opposite his good girl with an eating disorder. At the plot level the film follows its source material, the 1986 bulimia melodrama Kate’s Secret, quite faithfully, and its stagey quality is recognizable to anyone familiar with Seventies- and Eighties-era after-school specials. It does not, however, precisely parody the style of Very Special TV episodes, unlike, say, The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), which might otherwise be Maddie’s Secret’s closest spiritual relative. The Brady Bunch Movie uses the exact visual grammar of the original sitcom, as well as its hokey, aw-shucks tone and earnest plotting to get its satire across. It’s both a sarcastic rendition of the corny, flat style of the old show anda loving mockery of its foursquare values. But Early seems to be making a very personal film with a certainly lovely, distinctly Sirk- inflected aesthetic that is nevertheless somewhat at odds with the story being told.

Maddie Ralph is an ingenue dishwasher turned online influencer who is given the opportunity—spoken with the same whispered, urgent excitement as a member of Heaven’s Gate scanning the skies for the arrival of Comet Hale-Bopp—to become a food stylist for a TV show called The Boar. Like all ingenues, she is blonde and has precisely two enemies, a work rival and, of course, her mother, but is otherwise beloved by all. She is particularly beloved by her lesbian best friend, Deena (played by Kate Berlant as a sort of comic shark—Deena’s jaws snap ceaselessly, as though she is always chewing gum; whenever her eyes have the opportunity to roll, they do), and her dim, adoring husband, Jake. Jake is played by Eric Rahill as a sort of simple child; motivated by affection and hunger, easily outmaneuvered, he always seems to be on the verge of saying, “Look at what I can do!” before attempting a somersault…

Jake might be described in modern online parlance as “an eater,” someone who readily telegraphs a mighty appetite for pussy and food. He openly lusts after Maddie (although he stops just short of offensive perversion), eats whatever she cooks with obvious relish, and instinctively shuts down her self-deprecating comments, seeing no faults in either her body or her cooking. He is beautifully paradigmatic of the oblivious partner of someone with an eating disorder: he can be easily dismissed and lied to without guilt, since he’s too unobservant or stupid to realize he ought to hate her, as she hates herself.

And Maddie’s secret, or at least one of them, is that she does hate her husband (although she will never relinquish her compulsive affect of warmth toward him), not least for refusing to treat her with the sort of operatic cruelty that her mother does. On multiple occasions, when backed into a corner, she tells him that she is pregnant rather than disclose her bulimia relapse(s); the more excited he gets about the idea, the more disgusted and dispirited she becomes with it, and with him.

You can read the rest of it here (and I hope you do).¹

1. I do encourage you to subscribe to the NYRB, but I also realize no one can purchase unlimited subscriptions; shoot me an email if you’d like me to send you a PDF of the final copyedit and I’ll be happy to do so.