John Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, is a John Waters melodrama, if those Waters’ serrated edges were draped in soft gauze. Maddie (John Early) speaks with gentle breathiness, and primly tucks away the wisps of blonde hair that fall out of her claw clip. She’s kind, inspired, and earnest. Her life is simple and beautiful. She jogs to work — Maddie’s a dishwasher for a digital content kitchen called Gourmaybe — and pauses to whiff jasmine. Her social circle includes Deena (Kate Berlant, a regular coconspirator of Early’s — would it be insane to extend the Waters metaphor to say perhaps these are modern Dreamlanders? Earlylanders?), a lesbian with a barbed wire tattoo along her bicep and a (mostly) harmless puppy dog crush on Maddie; and Jake (Eric Rahill), Maddie’s handsome, tender, Dad-bodied husband. Cooking brings Maddie genuine passion. Dishwashing is good enough for her, for now. She likes her life.
The world around Maddie is not as tender-hearted as her. Her relationship with her mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson) is cruel and competitive. Maddie’s slimeball boss, Zach (Connor O’Malley), is comically piggish and success-hungry. (There’s an argument to be made that O’Malley possibly has created a niche in doing his own form of hypermasculine drag). Zach fingers Maddie’s hot, bitchy Gourmaybe coworker, Emily (Claudia O’Doherty) with the same two fingers he later jams directly into Maddie’s bubbling sauce. Everything around Maddie — even food, sex, and daughterhood — are transactions. Zach represents the cynical foil to Maddie’s loving sincerity, but he’s also the keyholder to what Maddie presumes is her dream: becoming a recipe developer for Gourmaybe.
As Maddie skirts closer to the success she thinks she wants (not just recipe development, but being the first vegetarian consultant on the hit television show The Boar — the satirical points are not coy), a once-quieted bulimic eating disorder rears up again. Maddie suffers. But crucially, she does not harden. Maddie’s Secret includes loving, detailed sex scenes, sweaty, panting dance sessions, and cooking and eating that is chew-and-crunch heavy in its Foley effects. It’s sensual (though not always pleasurably so) in every sense of the word. All of it is ceaselessly watchable, because Maddie is of the body. In a time where we are encouraged to streamline, tighten up, and become brandable, sleek experiences; Maddie is fully in herself. Maddie’s titular secret may be that she has bulimia (each time someone catches her over a toilet, it’s a soap opera caricature of the event — bloodshot eyes, face powdered ghost white, a sheen of sweat), but she is not avoidant of her existence. She is not looking to escape herself.
Maddie’s movements between traditionally women-centric spaces — a kitchen (and, in our most modern iteration of a woman’s world, the facade of a kitchen designed to pump out short-form video content), a suburban home, a dance workout studio, an eating disorder facility — are presented as chapters, not unlike Waters’ Female Trouble. The dated white nighty Maddie wears (a stark contrast to the scallop-trim tees and trendy, pastel athleisure she wears to work) while she throws herself around an impossibly bright kitchen at night screams of Polyester’s housewife, Francine Fishpaw. Divine and Waters are fingerprinted all over Maddie’s Secret. Like Waters’ work, Maddie’s Secret pokes fun without being brutal. It can be so hard to keep your heart open in the face of a world that rewards taut, easy readability. It’s especially hard for women. Sometimes maybe all we can grasp is an opportunity to laugh. Early’s performance as Maddie is silly, but it is not cruel. He plays Maddie as earnest, emotional, rich in interior, with loving camp but no ham. In the same way that Early’s viral beat-by-beat recreation of Nomi’s dance audition in Showgirls comes from a seeming place of obsessive fascination and affection for the hyperfemininity of the film, Early equally has no desire to mock Maddie, but instead embody her with dignity. I sense that he loves her.
If Waters’ creativity is a serrated bread knife, designed to shove through an especially socially repressed crust with sharp force in order to reveal a warm and loving center, then Early’s work is the smoothing motions of a butter knife. It could be nice to make this retentive and intense place a little better, a little softer, a little more delicious than it currently is.
Maddie’s actual secret is, maybe, open and unselfconscious love for the world, even when if letting that love burst forth and endure looks totally fucking ridiculous. As the credits rolled on Maddie’s Secret, the kindly older woman next to me turned and said, “Well, that actress, she was very good.” Yes, she really was.
