Desire Is a Noun and a Verb
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Sparkling Spreadvants,
If we were to create a word cloud for this newsletter, hormones, Jennifer Lawrence, and postpartum depression would take up significant real estate. So after seeing the new Jennifer Lawrence movie Die My Love, about a young woman who moves with her husband to a falling-down house in the middle of nowhere, then spins out with postpartum mania (psychosis?), we knew we owed it to you to share our Spreaditorial debrief. Here goes:
Rachel: We previously predicted the new Rose Byrne movie (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) would be the Spreadiest film of the year, but I can confidently say that Die My Love is the Spreadiest movie of the year that we’ve both actually seen.
Maggie: As you know, I will always go see a Jennifer Lawrence movie on opening weekend. But careful RB, there is also Hamnet left to come this year and we haven’t yet seen Bugonia with Emma Stone, so I’m keeping my Oscars bets open for now.
Rachel: I’ve seen Hamnet—it’s incredible but so devastating to have to put it on a special shelf in my brain. Also, I’m tired of Emma Stone.
Maggie: Is that feeling plastic surgery-related? But okay, fine.
Rachel: I feared this movie would be dreamy and boring, but I found it gripping.
Maggie: I found that I drifted in and out emotionally for much of the movie.
Rachel: Ouch!
Maggie: Like, among the meta-analysis happening: Why have I never been as animalistic and passionate as Lawrence’s character, Grace, and Edward Cullen are, pre-baby? What’s wrong with me? And so on…
Rachel: The point was that she’d always been a wild woman—which is in part why he fell for her and which made things blurrier and more confusing for him once she slid into the postpartum abyss.
Maggie: According to the New Yorker profile of JLaw, in the book, the baby is more endangered; but JLaw and Pattinson (both parents of young children) said they had to change that in the script.
Rachel: Yeah, thank goodness I’d read that in advance—that was the only reason I was able to relax and get into the movie: I knew the baby was never in danger. I identified with Grace losing her mind and feeling so close to her baby.
Maggie: That felt similar to Nightbitch: No lack of love for the baby, but you can still hate your life when you have one.
Rachel: Should we talk about Jennifer’s go-for-broke performance first? Or should we talk about her body? I was offended to learn that she was 4.5 months pregnant with her second when they began shooting: We see a lot of her body, and it looked nothing like mine at 4.5 into baby no. 2! By the way, readers: We don’t see much of her character’s pregnancy in the movie—we mostly see her postpartum.
Maggie: Her body was fascinating to me. You know I love celebrity bodies, almost to a worrying degree, and I feel like we’ve watched J.Law grow into hers. It’s a weird part of the parasocial relationship that with some of these actors we really know their bodies; like, I know those boobs! Are we thinking that was her actual pubic hair or a merkin?
Rachel: Or you knew those boobs.
Maggie: I also wondered about how well-coiffed JLaw was during her descent into madness. I feel like when I was postpartum, living in the boonies because my husband wanted to, I wasn’t getting a lotta highlights.
Rachel: I did want to see some greasy hair. Like, if she doesn’t have the will to do the dishes, there’s no way she’s washing and blowing out her hair into a Brigitte Bardot ’do on the daily.
Maggie: Exactly. But her jorts were good.
Rachel: I felt invigorated when even in her manic state she paired the jorts with that belt. I’ve never been postpartum and able to wear jorts—too tight.
Maggie: The belt was notably loose. I would like to fact-check that detail while also moving the ball forward here, for the sake of our readers who have things to do: Was there anything new about this as a piece of filmmaking?
Rachel: It’s a performance movie, and while in and of itself that’s not new, just getting to spend two hours watching JLaw in particular unravel felt fresh.
Maggie: You and I both cried at the end. I felt like I was crying not for Grace but for womankind, the mind-fuck of hormones, how little we understand about maternal mental health even now. How, even with help, some cannot be saved.
Rachel: Absolutely. I cried a little when she and Edward Cullen were in the car at the end, patching things up while singing to John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves.” Because it was clear things would take another turn for the worse—it was too good to be true.
Maggie: That song got me—they played it at my wedding and it was kind of “our” song for a long time. I also felt heartbroken that her mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek, wanted to be “the village,” wanted to help with the baby and even reparent Grace—-help was on the way!—but it was too late or Grace wouldn’t take it.
Rachel: I would like to give a standing O for the one-two punch of Sissy Spacek’s mother performances this year. She is transcendent in both Die My Love and Dying for Sex.
Maggie: 100 percent. And an A+ to Lynne Ramsay for giving Grace a psychological backstory without feeling the need to spell everything out.
Rachel: Do you think JLaw will get an Oscar nom? I’m hopeful, but it’s a stacked category this year. I will boycott if Emma Stone gets one and JLaw is snubbed.
Maggie: JLaw? Almost inevitably.
Rachel: Don’t be cavalier! She’s number eight on Gold Derby right now. SHE NEEDS OUR SUPPORT.
Maggie: Look, for the record: I applaud this as a piece of filmmaking, and JLaw for a fearless performance. And I loved the way she physically handled the baby—felt like you could see her own experience of motherhood shining through. And as noted I did cry in the end. And yet: This is not my favorite movie. It didn’t quite “get” me the way I like to be gotten. Holding out for Hamnet.
Rachel: Hamnet will get you, that’s for sure.
Maggie: You know I don’t love an esoteric meditation. I want a little more plot. Do you think Grace was mentally ill already and motherhood pushed her over the edge?
Rachel: Aren’t we all?
Maggie: I thought isolation was as much a part of it as the hormones. Also: did the LaKeith Stanfield character exist, or was that a hallucination?
Rachel: The parking lot scene made me think that he actually did?
Maggie: Bold to cast someone as great as LaKeith and give him zero lines. I couldn’t figure out why he was wearing so much jewelry, but I’ll take it.
Rachel: Do you think this is the best postpartum depression movie yet? How does it compare to Nightbitch and Tully for you?
Maggie: I liked Nightbitch more than a lot of people I know. That one probably wins for me. But Die My Love is more beautiful.
Rachel: I loved Nightbitch. Its accessibility feels important. But I found Die My Love more moving—the word I keep thinking is guttural. I liked Tully a lot too.
Maggie: Both Nightbitch and Die My Love are about female artists who lose themselves and their work postpartum.
Rachel: Did you buy that Grace was an artist? She’s supposedly a novelist, but that didn’t hit with me.
Maggie: She’s a breast milk artist! Yeah, they didn’t do a lot with that, other than her husband and mother-in-law repeating “you could write!” which annoyed me about as much as it annoyed her. Honestly, both Grace and Nightbitch’s “Mother” made me glad I had a job-job after having my first baby. I think having a place to go every day where I could be my separate adult self saved me.
Rachel: Yeah, I’m sure the fact that having my first baby during the height of the pandemic did not help my mental state!
Maggie: Important: Are you attracted to Robert Pattinson?
Rachel: Not really, but I think he’s good in this—I get why Grace was attracted to his Jackson, which was the perfect name for that character. Are you attracted to Robert Pattinson?
Maggie: Are you kidding? “Wan” doesn’t do a lot for me.
Rachel: I guess I did have a T-shirt in college that said, I DIG SCRAWNY PALE GUYS.
Maggie: I wanted to see Grace get some MEDS. Where was the little paper cup of pills in this movie?
Rachel: We def would have given that note had we been producers! Call us, Hollywood. Last thing: Do we recommend this film to Spread Nation?
Maggie: 100 percent. Essential viewing for awards season.
Rachel: Again, not sure JLaw is going to land the nom, Maggie! She needs us all in her corner!
Maggie: Also, in the car afterward, my friend said she doesn’t think JLaw is that beautiful. What?
Rachel: That’s weird. Is your friend Emma Stone?
OK, phew! We hope you stuck with us through that because heeeeeere are the hottest and coolest reads of the week. Ta da!
Off to take our meds,
Rachel & Maggie
All Male Review!⭐!
We can’t remember the last time a magazine cover inspired as much speculation as Vanity Fair’s forthcoming Hollywood Issue, which will be new editor Mark Guiducci’s first. MG has already announced that this cover will shake things up by boldly featuring…only men?! It’s a head-scratcher: Since when does anyone—especially advertisers—prefer to ogle the dudes? But also, fine! Meanwhile, VF has announced another slew of new hires, including the recently Spread-featured author-journalist extraordinaire
(mazel!) As Hunter Harris and Lauren Sherman spend inches and minutes conjecturing on which cover boys will be chosen for the issue—code name: Magic Mike Monthly—with the kind of this-shit-really-matters excitement we haven’t seen since the Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue 2007, we couldn’t help but wonder: Are they, too, on the mag’s newly stacked payroll?
If “it takes a village,” most of us are screwed.
Wonder if Spread regulars Olga Khazan and Kathryn Jezer-Morton high-fived when they each posted stories about the same parenting proverb this week? Hoo, boy, “it takes a village.” At the end of Halloween-fall-birthday-flu-shot-Veterans-Day-school-conferences season, Khazan’s take is, in a nutshell, STFU. She enumerates the many reasons that exhorting a woman (always the woman!) to somehow amass this so-called village is, shall we say, unhelpful. For starters, there are fewer stay-at-home parents than ever before to help out in a pinch; we live further from our parents; and because we had kids later, those parents may be too old to help out anyway. (They may also be in the South of France living their best lives.) Much as it pains us to say, reading about people who are so busy working that they have no time or bandwidth to build a community they can depend on almost began to sound like an argument for tradwifery? Jezer-Morton’s take is more upbeat, in that she did, eventually, find a village—though the word, she points out, is a misnomer: “All you need is a couple of people in your corner.” One thing that stands in the way—and you’ve heard it here before—she writes, is “weaponized competence,” i.e., “the passive-aggressive insistence that no one else knows how to do things properly, so you’ll just do it yourself.” She continues: “If you’ve ever angrily cleaned a countertop while seething about how it must be nice being a complete fucking imbecile, you may be someone who uses your competence as a weapon.” We have no idea what she’s talking about.
Read Khazan’s “The Most Useless Piece of Parenting Advice” here.
Read Jezer-Morton’s “Is There a Secret to Having a Village?” here.
A Few Slightly Better But Definitely Not Exactly Good Men
Aside of the week: “One imagines a podcast studio attached to a well-appointed gym where a bunch of white guys are discussing Abundance over beta-alanine smoothies and doing pistol squats to the theme song from Pod Save America.” Pistol squats? Abundance? Fist pump! Shortly after the New York Times annoyed all people everywhere with the eminently mockable headline “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”1—a ridonculous line of thinking ably countered by Spreadfave Sophie Gilbert last week in the Atlantic—Jessica Winter has bravely entered the mancave of the supposedly kinder and gentler “centrist manosphere” (think: podcaster supreme Scott Galloway, Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emanuel). And, well, at least she had some fun in there! Winter applies her big brain to turning over this well-groomed, educated, seemingly progressive beast and exposing its misogynist underbelly: an amorphous belief that “men’s biggest problem is…a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all.”
Read “What Did Men Do To Deserve This?” here.
Leanne Morgan Breaks All Our Rules
We were both thrilled and worried to see the laser-sharp Kathryn VanArendonk take on the subject of Leanne Morgan, a comic we’ve come to think of as an honorary auntie (and, for the uninitiated, the subject of Amy Poehler’s most satisfying Good Hang to date). As you know by now, both of your Spreaditors are blond-highlighted, sturdily built, mouthy women who originated in the South, so obviously we pledge allegiance to Morgan—a fabulously billowy Tennessean who somehow made it big on the edge of 60. Morgan has a Bargatzi-like knack for PG-rated jokes that never make anyone else feel bad and that play well in red states, yet are somehow funny enough to have made Maggie LOL loudly while watching Morgan’s first Netflix special alone in her living room at 4:30 a.m. while prepping for a colonoscopy. Somehow, when she uses Southernisms that would usually make us cringe, like mamaw and wallering and taking to the bed; calling everyone darlin’ and referring to her adult daughter as my baby-child, they bypass our usual skepticism and warm the cockles of our cold, dead hearts. And yes, Ms. VanArendonk, Leanne is clearly figuring out her new identity in the face of late-breaking fame but—judging from the set one Spreaditor attended just two weeks ago in Boston—we think she’s killing it.
Read “Leanne Morgan vs. Leanne Morgan” here.
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