There has never been and never will be a show like Sharp Objects. That’s why I’ve watched it four times. I’ll see it another four, ten times happily, without blinking. It calls to me. There’s something so true about it, buried deep in the honest melodrama of its structure. Something about being ignored, about having the past constantly throwing up its hands to strangle you.

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CW// EATING DISORDERS

When I was unemployed, I would watch two shows obsessively. One was Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, a restaurant makeover show. The other was the British series Secret Eaters, where people claim to have no idea why they’re gaining so much weight all of a sudden until they’re shown, via hidden camera, all their covert snacking behaviors. Both shows are tailor-made for people with lifelong eating disorders—people like myself. With every discovery of moldy lettuce in the back of an uncleaned walk-in, every late-night binge captured on candid camera, we’re reminded of what we already think we know: that food is essentially a disgusting thing. We need it to survive, but we don’t want to think about it too much. Especially when we’re eating it.

Except that we do think about it, constantly. People who have eating disorders think about food all the time, out of desire or fear or the uncanny mixture of the two as seen on Secret Eaters, which always ends with an unveiling of a banquet table laden with recreations of everything the subject has eaten through the week. We’re meant to feel disgusted. Just look at all that food. Just look at how capable we are of eating absolute garbage all the time. We’re not meant to step back and see that the gross intake from any person’s weekly eating is bound to look crazy. We’re supposed to just sit with that feeling of disgust, and gain strength from it.

For a long time, I’ve sat with Maddie’s Secret, John Early’s brilliant debut. I’ve wrestled with how to write about a movie that’s so close to my past reality. It reminded me of the years I spent in fear of food and what eating it would do to my body. I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel a different kind of fear. I’m worried about relapse. Watching Maddie’s Secret, a comedy about an eating disorder, was enough to bring all those feelings back for about a week, when I became convinced that once again, I was getting “too big” and needed to put the brakes on eating for pleasure. I forgot that while you’re never 100% recovered from an eating disorder, the best way to fight it is through pleasure itself. In a disordered state, we fear the pleasure food gives us. As we heal, we remember that sustenance can feel good, and that feeling good isn’t actually a betrayal of our bodies. It’s the most natural thing in the world. But after years of restriction and restraint, it feels so wrong.

That morality clause lies at the core of Maddie’s specific relationship with food. In recovery—a bleak, all-too-real approximation of the glorified psych ward such places are—another patient confronts Maddie: If it were just about being skinny, she says, you’d take Ozempic. But it’s not about just being thin. It never is. It’s about punishing your body for its sins.

Sin, as we know, is inherited. If we accept the Catholic premise of being sinful from the moment of birth, we also know that even a lifetime of atonement won’t ever fully be enough. Even if you think you start the day clean and fresh and stainless, there’s always the threat of a fall from grace the moment you take your first bite of food. Suddenly, you’re not empty anymore. You’ve failed. Eve bites the apple, and it gives her knowledge. We’re never told whether or not the apple tastes good—I’ve always assumed it did.

Sin is just one facet of Maddie’s many problems with food. There’s the diet culture she grew up in, courtesy of her Atkin’s-loving, hard-vaping mother, and there’s the fact that she lives in LA as an adult and works for a content company that develops recipes and the screen personalities that sell them. In LA, it’s acceptable to like food, as long as it costs a lot of money and doesn’t taste all that good. Consider Erewhon, the elite grocery store that sells $20 smoothies and $40 buffalo cauliflower from the hot bar—on top of the price of membership, of course. On every social media platform, you’ll see people swearing up and down that they love this shit, but there’s a deadness behind their eyes as they say it. It’s not food they’re consuming, it’s what it represents. It’s a trend. It’s not about eating healthy—it’s not even about eating. It’s about taking one bite of something that looks good on camera, making a face, and then turning the camera off. How many influencers have climbed this exact ladder to success, leaving a trail of uneaten meals in their wake?

Maddie’s problems are almost exactly my problems, and those problems are a big part of why I left LA. The moment I did, the part of myself that obsessed over thinness started dying. I realized that, contrary to what I’d always thought, I didn’t hate food. I loved it too much. People who don’t love food don’t spend all day thinking about it. In LA, I was often resentful of the compromise this love forced on the part of myself I wanted to have the most control over, my body. Maddie wants to be thin as well, because in LA thinness is currency. But she wants more. She doesn’t want to be a “try hard Susie homemaker.” She hates the fact that her brand of popularity is more midwestern than cosmopolitan. So she tries to change it, through bulimia.

It doesn’t work out for Maddie, though in a sense it does. She gets treatment, she stops lying to the people who care about her. She moves forward, which is all any of us can do. Like alcoholics, we are never quite free of the problem. We can’t say that we had an eating disorder, because we know it’s still somewhere in there, waiting. What will awaken it? A pregnancy? A death in the family? Getting laid off? We don’t know. But it’s there, a sleeping dragon. When it wakes, it will speak to us in a familiar voice. Hello emptiness, my old friend. How good to talk with you again.

Maddie’s Secret is a melodrama dressed up as a comedy. If it wasn’t so serious, it wouldn’t be funny, and if it wasn’t as awkwardly funny as it is, we’d be less inclined to take it seriously. It’s a balance, like living in LA and remembering to eat for pleasure. Like wanting to be successful but also wanting to just be a person. Like remembering that your relationship with food can be passionate, in a good way, even if it is the try-hard Susie homemaker way. Maddie’s life and struggles are serious, in the same way that Divine being romanced by Tab Hunter in Polyester is serious. In one sense, it’s so ridiculous. But when he kisses her, it’s such a real, wonderful thing. Douglas Sirk couldn’t imagine a life like Maddie’s, making food content in the hopes of getting a culinary consultant gig. But he knew everything about her emotions, her lush internal landscape. His heroines had sleeping dragons inside them, too. For better or worse, they always wake up.

Next week: Family ties.

I’m never not thinking about comp het, i.e. compulsory heterosexuality. This is the entrenched, invisible presence that forces women into relationships with men they don’t like or respect, because being single or gay is the same as failing. Last year’s Companion made me think about it: this year’s viral hit Obsession takes the same premise and threads the needle. What if the love and companionship of women was guaranteed for men, but in a synthetic way? Would they care? Do the women they desire sexually count as people, or is the promise of a relationship mainly a promise of sex, inconveniently attached to an autonomous human?

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Where I live, there’s a lot of discussion of illness and death, because my parents are older, and their community is reaching the age where you have to talk and think about this stuff. They spend a lot of time thinking about mortality, which is fine by me, because I’ve spent most of my mental energy this way since I was 8. Death is something I think abo…

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I kept waiting for it. The moment when Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) does a complete about-face and reveals himself for the evil bastard he is. In The Firm, a thriller about a legal team that exists to create shell companies and offshore accounts for the mafia, you expect everyone to be a good old boy, until the moment they’re not. It’s full of beloved character actors from Hal Holbrook to Margo Martindale to Holly Hunter in an egregious wig, and they’re all given one directive: be as sweet and gentle as possible so that the sinister corruption behind the “we’re all family here” firm is easier to see. We need to feel as scared as Tom Cruise’s up-by-the-bootstraps, just-out-of-grad-school lawyer is to learn that the big money associates he’s in bed with are all Bad Guys.

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In Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps, an expressionistic portrait of pre-war Vienna, one character starts talking in annoying freshman-in-college terms about art. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg thread about music and harmony. Was there harmony before there was music, or have they both always existed independently of each other?

There are so many ques…

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Martin Short came up in an era of sketch comedy just slightly before my time. By the time I knew who Short was, he was starring in a string of well-paid flops (A Simple Wish, Jungle 2 Jungle) that always made me a little embarrassed for him. I knew this guy was supposed to be a legend—so why was he always doing these cash grab kids movies?

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I was in a reading slump until I picked up Lillian Roth’s I’ll Cry Tomorrow. It’s one of the first celebrity alcoholism memoirs, written in the 50s when AA was still very young, which is why I wanted to read it. Despite the as-told-to format1, I was not disappointed. It was tremendous. Much like another favorite addiction memoir of mine—Oscar Levant’s Me…

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I like the Beatles about as much as most people my age. I had a phase in middle school where I had them on repeat (Revolver and the White Album) and now I listen to them sometimes only sometimes, and I admire them. They’re a great band, and for many people of my generation, it doesn’t feel like there’s that much more to say about it.

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I had fond memories of Advise and Consent as a livelier-than-usual political drama notable for one thing only: Hollywood’s “first official gay bar,” Club 602. A Mormon senator visits the club late in the film, right before committing suicide. He’s about to be outed to his wife and his colleagues. As Frank Rich explains in 2005, “for a public official to…

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Slang was a big deal in the 20th century. Specifically the 1920s, the moment when it leapt out of its lower class bunker and into the mainstream. Slang was a pulse-taking, a shared language more about the feeling of words than their meanings, and it felt genuinely new. It helped that slang itself kept reinventing itself with each decade, as a new cycle of teenagers adopted their own version.

This constant renewal made for a short shelf life: no sooner would one set of kids create their own “slanguage” than a new version started to spring up among even younger kids determined to set themselves apart from the previous generation. This is the problem Gary Cooper encounters in the charming, delightful screwball comedy Ball of Fire, which combines nearly all of my favorite tropes. It’s a story that exposes the silly ineffectiveness of words, and explores a painful dual reality: If language can be used to clarify and communicate, it can just as easily be weaponized to obscure and deceive.

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We were having a hard time. My whole community was and is having a hard time. So my friend and I had a movie night. I said listen, let’s watch something guaranteed to make us happy. For people who love movies, that can mean anything. For me, it means Singin’ in the Rain.

My friend agreed. “It’s a happy pill,” he said. Happy pills wear off, but Singin’ i…

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I don’t really get the dinosaur thing. The thing where people over the age of five love them and want to hang out with them. I saw the Land Before Time and it ripped my heart out of my body, but cartoon dinosaurs are different than giant man-eating lizards in a petting zoo where something always goes wrong.

But I was on a plane, and when you’re on a plane you count on movies to get you through many hours wobbling through the sky at intense speed. On the way to Italy, I made the mistake of choosing The Departed, a movie both too serious and too stupid to do the trick. Coming back, I was smarter. I chose Jurassic World. I figured I’d bust through at least two, if not three of the films in the new franchise—not to be confused with the original trilogy from the 90s, which I also don’t care for. But I’ve been thinking lately that I need to do a better job of meeting the culture where it’s at. I don’t have to like it, but I can at least glance in its direction.

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I started watching Undone again. It came out years ago and I started watching it then, but immediately I knew it was too perfect and I stopped watching because I didn’t want it to end. Undone is rotoscoped, which is one of my favorite things in the world. The real world get overlain with a colorful, living skin that adds a surreal quality to everything …

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Let me tell you, you really find out who your friends are when you’re partying in a Zeppelin that suddenly bursts into flame. Which is a thing that absolutely happens in Cecil B. DeMille’s second talkie, the diabolically bizarre Madam Satan. The plot is very 1930, and very DeMille: a wife realizes that since marrying her husband, she’s made the unpleasant (for him) switch from whore to Madonna, and as a result, he’s gone right out and found himself another whore to “have fun” with. So she plots her revenge: at a masked ball held in a pre-Hindenberg blimp, she’ll disguise herself as Madam Satan, a woman so evil and seductive, he’ll beg to go back to his Madonna in the morning. As long as he never realizes they’re the same person.

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There’s something undeniable about a loser. When I see a couple on the street, or a group of friends, or any broad collection of people seemingly having a good time, it doesn’t pique my curiosity. All I feel is resentment. How did these people find each other, and how did they decide to like each other? Was it easy? Did it happen in college, or at a job…

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Phoebe Cates’ father made an almost perfect, delightfully creepy psychopathia sexualis thriller that, until last year, practically nobody had seen. Why? It has Sal Mineo playing a psycho and Elaine Stritch playing a lesbian! It’s got crazy, frantic editing, wild club scenes, and a take on male sexuality far ahead of its time.

Maybe that was the problem.

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I like it when a woman makes a radical life change without giving it much thought. Ride a Cockhorse, Summertime, Muriel’s Wedding. In these stories, they throw away everything about who they were and what they were doing just for a chance at something different. Not necessarily better, but unknown.

This is how I make decisions, too. I reach a point where…

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It’s a bold film that can meld a popularized understanding of Plato’s symposium, comp het critique, and gender identity into one, and stick the landing. I’m shocked and pleased to report that Together figures it all out, leaving no loose ends in the process. Almost.

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Mel Brooks had a long flop era. You’d be forgiven for not knowing about it. We think of people like Brooks as stumbling into success early and living there. We don’t think about the peaks and valleys. But Brooks, a risk taker, won’t let us forget it. He doesn’t try to disguise failures as successes. He owns up to the rare career misstep, and to the depr…

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