Mormon wives, portrayal betrayal, the last Book Fight

I have a confession to make. Technically, my summer started in June, but because of other obligations, I didn’t have any sustained time off until the last few weeks. At which point, for reasons that are not especially interesting, I had two weeks of being confined to my house on crutches with nothing much to do.

I’d planned to read books, watch documentaries, and generally act like a serious adult academic who should be spending my free time on scholarly pursuits. I did some of that. I’ve been reading a lot, and I’ve seen a handful of good movies this month—some of the best were Nickel Boys, Morvern Callar, Promising Young Woman, and Daisies—although only one, which I’ll get to in a minute, was a documentary.

But I’m chagrined to report that I spent most of my convalescence binge-watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

If, by some miracle, you don’t know what I’m talking about, stop reading. Maybe your luck will continue and you’ll never be exposed to the show. I blundered into it thanks to a Hulu suggestion—they’re promoting it relentlessly—and thought I’d watch a few minutes out of morbid curiosity. I might as well have taken a hit from a crack pipe.

I’m so ashamed. I’ve long been an insufferable snob about reality TV, making fun of friends for their fixations on The Bachelor or Drag Race or what have you. Other than an occasional season of Top Chef or Project Greenlight, or sports franchises like Last Chance U or Hard Knocks—both of which I think of more as documentary series—I don’t think I’ve ever really watched a reality show. Then again, there’s never been a reality show about Mormon swinger moms.1

Secret Lives is terrible in so many ways. (I’m not the only one who thinks so.) It’s staged and manipulative and exploitative, to a degree that seems remarkable even for the genre.2 The production value is abysmal. Most of the content is boring. I hate almost everyone in it,3 and myself for watching it; doing so fills me with a profound, ineffable dread. So why did I watch all eighteen episodes and the interminable reunion special in the span of two weeks?

The only reason I can come up with is the LDS angle. I grew up in Arizona, right down the road from a dry town founded by the Mormon Battalion, so the culture isn’t new to me. But that was in the nineties—it seems like a lot has changed in the church since then4—and those were rural Mormons. Which is to say that none of the LDS folks I grew up around were getting plastic surgery, doing ketamine “therapy” with their spouses, huffing laughing gas at the botox clinic, giving each other coffee enemas, or smoking joints removed from the orifices of exotic dancers. These Mormons are messy as hell.

I also feel like, as a somewhat old person who’s culturally even older—technically a millennial, temperamentally an Xer—this show has helped me finally understand TikTok, particularly how much money people are making on TikTok. It’s inspiring, in a sense. Also dismaying. If only the graduate degree, decades of specialized study, and publishing successes that allowed me to become a minor authority in certain academic fields had resulted in a small fraction of the money MomTok does. This whole time I should’ve been having kids and learning how to dance.

Although I haven’t been watching many documentaries, I did recently give a talk at the Rainier Writing Workshop summer residency on documentary film and what it can teach us about portraying real people in writing. I discussed a handful of examples, showing short clips from each film that related to different aspects of portrayal, a concept I think of as the core artistic and ethical concern in documentary forms.

I showed a couple of the first documentaries; the infamous barber scene from Shoah, which doesn’t seem to be available online; Herzog listening to the audio of his subject’s death in Grizzly Man; a clip from Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a film that somehow gets better every time I watch it. I also showed a clip of Cameraperson, a film I hadn’t seen until a few days before I gave the talk, which was so arresting and relevant that I felt like I had to include it.

The director, Kirsten Johnson, compiled the film from footage she shot for other projects, but calls it her memoir in the opening credits. The film ranges through a few rough and unrelated timelines, which unfold in short juxtaposed scenes from films she worked on as a DP or cameraperson. (Cameraperson was Johnson’s first film as director.) The scenes focus on different subjects and are shot on different continents across a span of twenty-five years. That might sound like an unpromising description, and I admit it’s a slow watch, but I thought the film was fantastic. 

One of the most compelling parts to me, and the one I discussed in the talk, was how Johnson repeatedly films her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and died before Cameraperson was finished. You can see a brief clip of what I mean at this moment of the trailer. I talked about how that clip was complicated in terms of consent, and the thorny and impossible-to-answer ethical question of whether and to what degree we own the stories of our loved ones, dead or alive. And a little bit about what Barthes called the referential illusion—the portrayal is not the person—and how that works in the preservational mode of documentary, where it makes it seem like something or someone is actually being preserved, rather than merely being portrayed, etc. etc.

I included a quote from an interview with Johnson in which she discusses that portrayal:

This was a profound act of betrayal. I can say for sure (my mother) would not have wanted it… I don’t know if I would have been capable of it had she been around… It’s as if two conflicting things can be carried in those images of my mother: our love for each other and my betrayal. That gets to the heart of what the film is attempting to lay bare: what it is to be me and what it is to do the job that I do – and love doing – even with all the contradictions and betrayals it entails.

Documentary artists tend to evade these types of ethical questions by recasting them as practical dilemmas or dismissing notions of responsibility entirely, so I was fascinated to see Johnson address it head-on, and take ownership of those decisions with an unapologetic candor I admire. I’ve heard good things about her second film, Dick Johnson is Dead, which is now on my list.

I was sad to hear recently that Book Fight, the literary podcast hosted by Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister, was ending its thirteen-year run. It was both the first podcast I ever listened to regularly and the first one I was on. Many years ago, after my first book came out, they were kind enough to invite me to discuss Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper and sit in on a Writer’s Ask episode.

In their last episode, Mike jokingly said they were the Velvet Underground of podcasts—they might not have had a ton of listeners, but all of them started podcasts. I don’t know how many others did, but having listened to and been on Book Fight was one of the main reasons I decided, years later, to suggest to my colleague Elena that we start an essay-focused one of our own. 

A few years ago, we joined Mike and Tom for what they said in the finale was their most-downloaded episode. As much as I’d like to take credit, I’m guessing that was because both podcasts had loyal followings, and Elena is a radio pro. (Check out Open Book, her new-ish podcast limited series of writer interviews.) 

I’m lucky in the sense that my school year doesn’t start for another month, whereas most academics are gearing up for Fall right now. That has occasioned more discourse around AI in academia. One of the more interesting things I read on the subject this month was this debate in The Point between a philosophy professor who’s wary of AI and a humanities dean who is … not. 

I’m not referring to anywhere I’ve ever worked, but in the general sense of what’s happening across academia, the dynamic of the debate feels familiar: actual faculty, the ones who have to deal with AI and its effects on the classroom, tend to be overwhelmingly against it, while administrators tend to run around trumpeting how it’s going to transform higher education by replacing faculty altogether.

Enjoy is probably not the word for my experience of reading that debate, but I did appreciate Berg’s tenacity and aplomb in wiping the floor with Robbins, as well as the familiar irony of finding out that the former is a first-year assistant professor, while the latter is a former prof turned dean turned “special advisor,” whatever that means.

Based on my experience with LLMs, it seems like they’d be at least equally well suited for replacing administrators as they would be for replacing faculty. It would save a lot more money.5 Strangely, I’ve never heard that possibility suggested.

Some other stuff:

• After the RWW residency, I usually dedicate a few weeks to reading books by my colleagues there. So far I’ve read two of my favorite kind of novels, books that are literary but not annoying about it, still tell a compelling story, and are not about people living in New York. One was Aram Mrjoian’s debut Watermark, about an Armenian family in Michigan navigating a tragic death; the other was Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, about a virus that drastically reshapes life on Earth over a multi-century timeline. It would be hard to find two more different books in terms of content, but both navigate multiple perspectives and timelines really beautifully, are fast and engrossing reads, and are full of well-crafted characters and sentences.

• If I were more ambulatory, I might’ve flown to Arizona just to see my hometown celebrate the life of Val Kilmer last weekend.

• I also recently watched The End of the F***ing World, which was great—why are British shows so much better than American ones?—and included cameos by some of my favorite Peep Show alums.