I often like John Early’s work. I love John Early’s taste. I came to one of my favorite movies, the bracing, pensive 1990 Canadian docudrama Strangers in Good Company, after he hosted a screening of it at New York’s Metrograph in 2021. On both TV and film, he’s regularly cast as frustrated and venal divas on the verge of collapse: the high-strung theater kid Logan in Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, or Jerome, Jenna Maroney’s son via long-ago egg donation on 30 Rock. This particular type reached its acme in Early’s most fully realized role, Elliott Goss on TBS’s Search Party. Goss is a malignant, cancer-faking accomplice to murder who reinvents himself as a homophobic right-wing talking head and frequently resorts to banal therapy-speak to avoid (in no particular order) work, justice, accountability, difficult conversations, professional deadlines, personal responsibility, and the basic social needs of other people. He will contort himself impossibly to deflect even the smallest amount of square, head-on honesty. Early plays dishonesty magnificently, although he has typically focused on the dishonest and venomous, not the dishonest and kind.
Which brings us to Early’s first feature-length movie, Maddie’s Secret. In July I attended a screening primarily for a chance to see, in the supporting cast, the leads (Emily Allan, Leah Hennessey, and Ruby McCollister) of the remarkable 2013 web series “Zhe Zhe,” which followed bandmates Mona DeLiza, Jean D’Arc, and Chewie Swindleburne as they pursued glamour, pain, fame, and revenge. A representative episode description declares: “Rest and relaxation are not in the cards for Mona as she suffers a mysterious illness”; a representative line, delivered dully by Jean, moments after being stabbed, to a hysterical Mona: “You’ve got local vomit all over your angora.” Regrettably, there is no line in Maddie’s Secret anywhere near as striking. It is rarely more than gently funny.
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 Early’s 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 and a loving mockery of its foursquare values. But Early seems to be making a very personal film with a 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.
Every time Maddie takes another step closer to her dream, her eating disorder escalates, as does her need to guard her privacy from those who love her most. After she collapses at an exercise class, her doctor informs her that she’s courting death and she enters inpatient treatment. Her roommate, Julie, played by a charmingly glassy-eyed Vanessa Bayer, is a naif who can seemingly do nothing but smile vacantly and attempt to secretly perform crunches when the staff are not looking. When Maddie escapes (in order to make her final interview for the Boar job, serving a home-cooked meal to the show’s producers), Julie takes her friend’s rule-breaking as tacit permission to relapse too, twisting doggedly back and forth in bed, counting all the way up to nine before the film cuts to news of her death. After this sacrificial loss, Maddie can at last “really” commit to her treatment, and she rapidly moves through the remaining beats of the rehab plot: she is now socially accepted by the previously standoffish veteran patients, cries at the expected moments during a therapy session with her wicked mother (Kristen Johnston, who is tremendous), produces a legible origin story that allows the staff to permit her to graduate, and returns home.
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 also hates 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.
A great deal of the critical reception to Maddie’s Secret has, somewhat oddly, praised the film for its earnestness. The headline for IndieWire’s review is “John Early’s Directorial Debut Comedy Is More Sincere Than Satirical,” while The Film Stage calls it a “sincere satire.” I suspect, although I cannot be sure, that what people mean when they call this movie sincere is something between “I found John Early’s drag to be effective and consistent” and “I do not think this movie is trying to make fun of people with eating disorders,” both of which are certainly true.
But Maddie is a woman incapable of speaking sincerely, who refuses honesty at every turn, who stages a phony breakdown/recommitment to “the process” in order to sneak out of rehab for a job interview, who never admits to anything. I think Early likes ingenues and wanted to play one, and he does a creditable job; if anything, I found Berlant’s drag as a butch lothario false and off-putting. Her every gesture, every line, hits a cartoonish note. I was sorry to see a diva so miscast in bad wolf drag. It was the most I have ever disliked her onscreen, and I normally find her a great deal of fun to watch.
Maddie is literally tight-lipped. The audience might rightfully anticipate a burst of, if not vomit, repressed cathartic speech at some point in the rehabilitation plot, but Early presents us with a heroine who cannot or will not be evacuated. Maddie does not behave sincerely, but she is bombarded with sincerity—sincere admiration, sincere concern, sincere therapeutic treatment, sincere abuse—and is in fact scarcely able to survive it.
This instinctive retreat from intimacy exists in all directions. In another movie, the problem of Maddie’s horrified discomfort at the prospect of experiencing support, care, and desire from her loving husband would be solved by Deena’s obvious romantic overtures; Jake could easily be turned into a truly bad husband so that the audience could celebrate a lesbian cuckolding. But in Maddie’s Secret Deena’s subplot is moved further and further from the film’s center once Maddie befriends her fellows in rehab. Deena eventually gets herself admitted to the ward by faking an eating disorder of her own, after which Maddie reveals that she has reported her to the hospital administration (offscreen), and blankly watches Deena break down as she is transferred to a different psychiatric unit. Maddie goes from being superficially unconscious of Deena’s sexual interest to coldly rejecting, pitying, and denying it, insisting in her sweet condescension that their separation and Deena’s subsequent detention is for the best. Nothing could be more sincere than Deena’s desire for Maddie. Nothing but sincerity could horrify Maddie into not just rejecting her but seeing to her incarceration.
When it comes to onscreen representations of vomiting, the trend in the last forty years (from Stand by Me to Triangle of Sadness) has been toward the explicit and the detailed, but Maddie’s Secret remains, like its heroine, conspicuously discreet; bulimic episodes are signaled by shots of Maddie tying her hair into a ponytail with grim determination before the camera tastefully pans away. On the other hand, most scenes involving food consumption are quite explicitly off-putting. The camera lingers on sheens of grease and stray crumbs, while sounds of slurping, belching, chewing, and rumbling are magnified tenfold.
Maddie’s Secret does, I think, rely on the earnestness of the midcentury melodrama in the same way that Airplane! relies on the earnestness of Zero Hour, but it does not produce any new earnestness of its own. There’s a real interest in revulsion, in nausea, in messiness, escalation, and the post-binge climactic clarity of self-disgust, but a remarkable resistance to catharsis. The film is less concerned with “fixing” its ingenue than in mourning her absence—as a vehicle for melodrama, kitsch, and drag—from the contemporary star-making system: today’s ingenue does not receive a starring role in a romantic drama with a $40 million budget; she eats a burrito in her car while a friend films her exaggerating a cheese pull, in the hopes that she can be a food stylist for a middlebrow television show. What are we going to do with actresses if we don’t give them films to live on? They’ll eat themselves, they’ll break down like plastic bottles in a landfill, they’ll self-digest, they’ll get fractured as they stay big and the screens get smaller.
The closest the movie gets to offering a moment of disclosure comes during a forced joint-therapy session between Maddie and her monstrous mother, during which Maddie haltingly recites a litany of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse inflicted upon her as a child. But the monologue is cut jarringly short (“Careful, Maddie, you’re hurting my knee,” her mother says, halfway between alarmed and contemptuous, jumping up to leave with the admission that “this is all I can do for today”), and the emphasis remains on narrative rather than on feeling. This particular encounter must take place because it is at this point in the rehab plot that the heroine must confess and cry in front of her therapist, and while it is certainly believable that Maddie has been thoroughly abused by her mother, it never seems like the start of a new basis for living. “I never needed the love of a father,” Maddie cries right before her mother leaves. “I needed your love, Mommy.” But both Maddie and the audience were already perfectly aware that Maddie is desperate for love, affirmation, and praise. If anything, her vulnerability and fragility have been her most effective weapons in the fight against self-awareness; for clarity to even possibly produce something like change for her, it would have to look very different from “I need love.”
Like Maddie herself, Maddie’s Secret is motivated by evasiveness. The film itself often lurches away from possible plot developments, usually at the last moment. (One of the many comforts of bulimia is that it always provides its sufferer with the opportunity to change her mind. Go ahead and eat dinner now! You can always take it back later.) A timid conversation between Maddie and Jake at the very end of the movie—a scene that may suggest he is moving out, or may not—confirms that she will not break down, nor admit to anything true:
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” he asks, referring to her insistence that she hasn’t had a setback.
A deep inhale, a shaky look at the middle distance, a small smile that grows in self-assurance—Early is a master interpreter of the ingenue’s catalog of gestures—“I guess you don’t.” There will be no new era of openness between them.
Once the secret of an eating disorder is made public, sincerity in the form of concern and pressure and observation is brought to bear upon the subject until she offers up an emotional disclosure. Until this disclosure is purged, she has no hope of being left alone. (Early has discussed elsewhere his own experience growing up as an evangelical Christian in the American South, a culture where frequent public confessions are prized, the more frequent and the more debasing the greater the social reward.) Maddie’s greatest and most-cherished secret is that she wants to have nothing to say, and no one is going to take that from her.