In the past decade, films such as Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West and Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure have grappled with the tensions and contradictions of influencer culture. Their arguments are extensions of classic inquiries into broader celebrity culture run amok, and they tend to be defined by skepticism or self-seriousness, proclaiming the inherent fakery of the culture or rationalizing and justifying the influencer’s place in a new economic structure.
John Early’s Maddie’s Secret is satisfyingly more difficult to characterize. Early stars as Maddie, a food influencer whose shift into a front-facing cog at a culinary content studio called Gourmaybe specializing in vegetarian recipes, only amplifies the dissonance between who she feels she is (someone who relishes her passion for cooking) and who her growing audience wants her to be (a “real” girl who cooks with an ingenuity for mixing flavor profiles from a variety of cultures). A new and intense scrutiny reinvigorates a once-dormant eating disorder in Maddie, propelling the newly minted micro-celebrity to purge in the bathroom between setups.
Maddie is pointedly aware of being constrained by people’s expectations of her. Her best friend (Kate Berlant), husband (Eric Rahill), and boss (Conner O’Malley) all call her perfect, and as she goes viral and more people start calling her that too, she starts coming undone. It doesn’t help that others are making cruel comments about her behind her back, which only brings out her insecurities. And it all can be traced back to her relationship with her estranged mother (Kristen Johnston), who seems capable of only talking about Maddie’s body, even when Maddie shares the good news of being promoted from dishwasher to on-camera talent at Gourmaybe.
This tonally expansive and confident film, which draws inspiration from Marnie, Polyester, Showgirls, among others, at once lampoons a spectatorship culture that drives creators to madness and cherishes the naïvete of everyday people who want to share their passions with people on the internet, all while delivering these ideas in the guise of something akin to a TV movie-of-the-week. Maddie’s Secret isn’t winking or smirking, but the blast of its character’s sincerity—shooting a video, Maddie chirps, “Today, I am determined to prove to you how much carmaelization you can get out of tofu”—has an “if you know, you know” quality.
Though Early neatly conveys the difference between Maddie’s on- and off-screen personas, the enthusiasm of her (and the rest of the cast’s) dialogue readings cleverly blurs the lines of the natural and unnaturalness of the film’s world more generally. Maddie might be a woman of today, trying to make it in a new media marketplace where her corporeal and spiritual self are bought and sold, as her videos rack up views and likes, but, as an archetypal figure, she’s not all that different from burgeoning professionals like Joan Crawford’s eponymous character in Mildred Pierce or Maureen O’Hara’s Judy O’Brien in Dance, Girl, Dance.
Early is deft at deploying somewhat destabilizing tones, and his work here suggests something that Todd Haynes, master of dissection and resurrection of a certain kind of woman’s picture, might have made if the Far from Heaven auteur had a background in sketch comedy. (Max Lakner’s lush cinematography even invites comparison to Haynes’s postmodern melodrama.) But if Haynes tends to regard his characters through the lens of semiotic analysis, Early takes Maddie’s humor, innocence, passion, brokenness, and irrepressible spirit on their face, and with naked sincerity. More than just a prototype of womanhood, Maddie, so constrained by the hypermediated world that she inhabits, is seen by Early in all her humanity.
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