Josephine Decker’s world is full of secrets. There is something powerful about her ability to craft characters – mostly women – who have complex personalities and disorderly relationships with the truth. We can think of the recently-released and much vaunted Madeline’s Madeline (2018) as the culmination of a ‘triptych’ of features, beginning with 2013’s Butter on the Latch and continuing with Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2014). (Decker is keen to stress that all her films are made in close collaboration with her cast and crew.)¹ In these films, Decker’s heroines navigate difficult, though often exhilarating, relationships with themselves and others in large part by sharing and withholding secrets. All three films address comings of age, but the titular Madeline, a teenager in her last year of highschool, is younger than Decker’s previous protagonists, and Madeline’s Madeline is Decker’s closest approach yet to a traditional Bildungsroman.
Decker’s films skilfully portray relationships between secrecy, coming of age, and the cultivation of multiple selves. Butter on the Latch, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, and Madeline’s Madeline reconfigure the trope of female-character-as-cipher: the women protagonists are not femmes fatales or manic pixie dream girls, but ciphers qua ciphers, human beings engaged in the business of parsing themselves. Decker puts emphasis on her characters’ instincts for self-preservation and pleasure – which is no coincidence, since self-preservation and pleasure-seeking are perhaps most thoroughly questioned and pursued during adolescence, the time of life when a person is said to come of age. (The expression ‘to come of age’ implying, of course, that there is a unified self one can, with careful determination, come to be.) Madeline’s Madeline’s protagonist has quintessential teenage concerns: family, emergent sexuality, mental health, and personal identity. Madeline’s recent mental health crisis, which we understand to have occurred slightly prior to the film’s timeline, looms large in the background of her family life. Her mother, Regina – played with perceptive nuance by Miranda July – attempts to prioritise Madeline’s wellness, but her efforts often seem only to exacerbate Madeline’s irritation. Whereas we perceive Regina’s actions as motivated by maternal responsibility and care, Regina’s presence frustrates her daughter, threatening Madeline’s capacity to carve out space between the different facets of her life: family, school, romance, and an experimental theatre company. Attempting to keep these worlds separate – most notably trying to keep her mother at arm’s length from her romantic interests and her theatre work – compels Madeline to keep and manipulate secrets. Scenes of heightened conflict between mother and daughter are catalysed by Madeline’s perception that Regina has intruded into non-family parts of her life, such as when Regina walks in on Madeline and two teenage boys watching porn in the basement of their family home, or when Regina attends one of Madeline’s theatre rehearsals. In these scenes, we are reminded of the linked capacities for fear and delight inherent in secrets. Madeline’s enjoyment of her burgeoning sexuality and of her creative autonomy within the theatre company seems contingent, at least to Madeline, on their distance from her family life. Yet Madeline’s delight in her private experiences is connected to a fear that Regina may expose Madeline’s vulnerability and mental-health struggles. In attempting to maintain privacy through wielding secrets, then, Madeline is not so much dishonest as unimpeachably human. It feels universal, the teenage tendency to reframe details about oneself so as to present differently in different contexts. Dividing the self is not something adults stop doing, but rather something adults have learnt – in large part through awkward adolescent experimentation – to do effectively. Examining the fluttering intensity of secrets and Madeline’s passionate attempts to wield them, Decker paints coming of age as a process, not the journey towards an end-point.
Decker’s approach to coming of age recalls the words of the modernist short story author Katherine Mansfield: “‘To thine own self be true.’ … True to oneself? Which self?”² The more we learn about Decker’s characters, the less we seem to know them. In Butter on the Latch, the two protagonists, Sarah (Sarah Small) and Isolde (Isolde Chae-Lawrence), initially appear as possible survivors of gendered violence. Within the first ten minutes of Butter on the Latch, Sarah receives a panicked call from someone named ‘Pony’ who has just awoken to a scene of dubious sexual consent or safety. The details of Pony’s experience are relayed obscurely, as we never see her and only catch glimpses of their circumstances from Sarah’s side of a clipped phone call. In a subsequent scene, Sarah herself wakes up, panicked, next to a man whom she appears not to know, or at least not to want to be around any longer. Sarah’s relatively decontextualised circumstances echo the opacity of Pony’s call and latent danger permeates the filmic atmosphere. The majority of Butter on the Latch unfolds at a Balkan folk-music camp in northern California, where Sarah and Isolde haltingly describe some of their fraught romantic and sexual encounters. Though the women each volunteer partially-sketched anecdotes, neither character appears fully comfortable sharing details. Secrets are clearly being kept, but the rationale – and realities – behind such secrecy remains unexplained. The women’s rapport is thus dogged with mysterious tensions; at times, Sarah and Isolde’s friendship seems more like a site of animosity than of empathy. Indeed, as Butter on the Latch progresses, we learn more about the two friends’ capacities for aggression. As film critic and programmer Jemma Desai observes:
Working with an almost exclusively female crew, and making a film that boldly eschews any ‘commercial’ considerations, Decker seems free to explore the progressive, the problematic, and the ambivalence of being in relation. Butter on the Latch is a film that is disorienting in its oblique editing style, in its depiction of the complicated psychology of female friendship … These are two friends that seem to have a deep connection, but also may not. Their dynamics constantly shift and confuse.³
Sarah and Isolde’s dynamic is unsteady – at times openly hostile – and the film culminates in a murder, which, whether real or vividly imagined, exposes the tenuous sanctity of the characters’ inner worlds and reminds us of the many secrets – of the secret selves – that the characters never disclosed.
The first half of Thou Wast Mild and Lovely depicts violence in a more surreal light than Butter on the Latch. It begins with Sarah (Sophie Traub plays a Sarah seemingly different from the character in Butter on the Latch) tossing around a headless chicken. Traub’s Sarah playfully tussles outdoors with a man we learn is her father, but whose teasing repartee with Sarah and the chicken reads as more flirtatious than familiar. The strangeness of this father-daughter dynamic partially distracts the audience from the perverse way in which the characters handle the small bird’s lifeless body, the blood from its severed neck staining their hands and clothes. As Thou Wast Mild and Lovely progresses, more humans and animals are drawn into the father and daughter’s dark bucolic reveries. The film contains frequent flashbacks and dream sequences that heighten a mood of commingling horror and eroticism. In one memorable scene, Sarah lies alone in the muck of a field, seemingly bringing herself to orgasm while her hands float above her head. Sarah imagines scissors and cutting implements that we see in shot, hovering in the sky above her. The camera cuts between Sarah’s perspective, looking upwards at the blade-speckled clouds, and that of the farmhand furtively watching Sarah from afar. Shots of unruly farm landscapes and creatures suggest a kind of innate, atmospheric wildness, which underscores the intensity of scenes featuring human sexuality. From the first moments of the film, whose opening montage includes a nervously snarling dog that looks straight into the camera, Decker shows how, in Sarah’s world, the boundaries between aggression, attraction, and fear are blurred. For most of the film Sarah seems blithely unafraid, though we may retrospectively see some of her confidence as false or performative. The layer of languid eroticism between the characters, as well as in connection to the landscape, makes their motivations particularly hard to gauge. The audience comes to realise that the Sarah of Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, like her namesake in Butter on the Latch, is more complex than a mere rebellious adolescent. Sarah is her father’s co-conspirator, as well as a co-conspirator of her many selves, a multiplicity on display in in her oscillating impulses to, variously, coddle or kill the creatures that cross her path.
In Madeline’s Madeline, the simmering violence is contained to humans. Whereas Sarah and Isolde (Butter on the Latch) and Sarah (Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) inhabit rural spaces and seem to draw a frisson of excitement from their landscapes – a wooded campground in Mendocino, California, and the green pastures of a Kentucky farm, respectively – Madeline lives in a small house in New York City and the film unfolds in various domestic and rehearsal spaces. The limited role of pathetic fallacy in Madeline’s Madeline lets interpersonal drama come to the fore. The film, which stars a mesmerising Helena Howard in her first on-screen role, is Decker’s most sustained exploration of the power of secrets and multiple, conflicting selves. Zeroing in on these selves, Ashley Connor – cinematographer on all three of Decker’s features – trains the camera on Howard’s face, the site of Madeline’s undisguised anguish, trepidation, anger, curiosity, and mirth. Madeline’s enormous physical and emotional expressiveness is also her artistic gift. Her involvement with the theatre company – and, in particular, her close relationship with the director, Evangeline (Molly Parker) – is initially a source of empowerment. Evangeline pays attention to Madeline, especially when the teenager is sharing secrets, an act of vulnerability that Evangeline does not reciprocate. Instead she encourages Madeline to share details of her relationship with her mother to use as dramatic source material. The ethics of this exchange are dubious. Sometimes Evangeline doesn’t even seem to know what to do with the raw material she presses Madeline to provide. At one point, after Madeline has performed a heartbreaking, extemporaneous monologue recounting low points in her conflict with Regina, an awed Evangeline limply asks the other actors to “improvise a dance” in response to Madeline’s trauma.4
The tensions between Madeline and Evangeline, and Madeline and Regina, go back to the way these women perform their discrete and various selves, enlisting secrecy in doing so. Evangeline, struggling to keep the theatre company afloat and to devise a successful play, takes advantage of Madeline’s desire to impress her. “I dreamt you were my daughter,” the pregnant Evangeline says to Madeline early in the film, away from the other performers. “Do you feel safe around your mom?”5 Madeline blushes with pride at the director’s suggestion of intimacy. The dubious politics of a white director (Evangeline) trying to re-tell a mixed-race young woman’s (Madeline’s) story without explicitly asking for her consent raises further problems. In a later stage of the company’s workshopping process, KK, an actor, asks Evangeline: “So you’re going to tell the story of the inside of [Madeline’s] brain? … Think about the optics …”.6 Somewhat shaken, Evangeline responds, “Yes, it’s her story, it’s also my story, it’s everyone in this room’s story.”7 The performers’ cringing, uncertain, and disappointed reactions are shown in jagged pans around the rehearsal room. Madeline’s response to her peers’ advocacy is also wrenching. The enormity of sharing such delicate moments of such a fraught family relationship is clearly beginning to dawn on Madeline. Moments before KK’s intervention, Regina, whom Evangeline had invited to that day’s rehearsal, has fled the room in tears. Sitting on a rug in the centre of the room, her arms and legs crossed and her face trembling, Madeline barely reacts then when a blue-haired actor asks: “And [Madeline]’s comfortable with that? You’re comfortable with that? With us telling your story?”8 Madeline has previously yielded her secrets so freely to Evangeline that the question of permission was totally sidestepped. Her many selves have become the company’s creative inspiration and we witness Madeline’s realisation that this sharing may, in part, be at her own expense.
Although Madeline’s Madeline is broadly closer to visual and narrative realism than Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, all three films conveys a similar suspense, a feeling of taut energy. The audience senses a potential for unravelling linked to the protagonists’ shared experiences of fractured identity. As a result, the psycho-thriller undertones of Madeline’s Madeline, such as when Madeline lashes out verbally and physically at her mother and when the theatre company ultimately rebukes Evangeline via a performance art intervention featuring chimerical costumes and an outdoor dance sequence, reflect a more domesticated form of the violence seen in Decker’s earlier films. The characters in Madeline’s Madeline are no less complex than those in Decker’s other pictures, but the narrative’s more readily familiar subjects – family drama, teenage strife, cultural and racial appropriation – make it more haunting. Thinking of the film as the centrepiece of a triptych of Decker’s works helps us to see that secrets and conflicting truths are central to the emerging autonomy of all Decker’s characters. Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely feature protagonists who are, like Madeline, immersed in private worlds of memory and fantasy – until they are suddenly jolted back into reality. In Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, these jolts usually occur as a result of interpersonal conflict; in Madeline’s Madeline, it is just as likely to be the dynamics of art and performance that provide the jolt. Madeline’s Madeline thereby gestures at the challenges of making films, of collaboratively telling stories at all. (To wit, the parallels between Evangeline’s collaboration with Madeline and Decker’s casting of Howard are unlikely to be lost on Decker’s audiences.)
In the end, Decker’s deft telling of Madeline’s coming-of-age tale encourages us to read into the other comings of age in her oeuvre. Once again, Mansfield comes to mind. In a passage from her journal, dated April 1920, Mansfield continues to evaluate the multitudinous self:
Which of my many – well really, that’s what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves? For what with complexes and repressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections, there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.9
Mansfield might well be describing Madeline, or Sarah and Isolde, or Sarah. The “hundreds of selves” Mansfield describes come alive in Decker’s films. There is something rare and thrilling about seeing such multiplicity evoked onscreen. The many selves and their attendant comings-of-age tear down staid notions of maturity and definitive culmination, ushering forward a revised, open category of Bildungsroman that feels conducive to feral femininities. Significantly, the range of secrets in Decker’s films are captured without judgment, allowing the audience to contemplate the characters’ inner lives more closely. Decker’s capacity to offer extreme emotional detail without overstating narrative sentiment or resolution is supported by Connor’s visceral cinematography. In all three films, Connor fades her shots rapidly in and out of focus, painting the protagonists’ rich physical and mental worlds into neo-fauvist vistas that thrum with emotion. Decker’s wild beasts (so to speak) resist being corralled by Connor’s lush, kinetic camerawork. Their evasiveness is both alluring and, at times, infuriating. It is resolutely human. Like the “small clerk of a hotel” watching guests enter and exit carrying their own secrets, the protagonists are hosts unto themselves.
Esmé Hogeveen is a writer and editor based between Toronto and Montréal. Esmé tweets here.
1 As Decker put it in a recent interview with the principal cast of Madeline’s Madeline: “I always feel like it’s very misleading at the end of a film – I hate people who write ‘a film by’ and they put the director’s name. […] It just pisses me off to no degree, because I’m like, that film is by 217 people and you are one of them, and it was very important to me throughout the process to keep that in mind.” Los Angeles Times, “2018 Sundance: The cast of ‘Madeline’s Madeline’ on working on a unique set | Los Angeles Times,” (YouTube video) 22 January 2018 2 Sally Brown, ‘Hundreds of Selves’: The British Library’s Katherine Mansfield Letters (London: British Library, 1988), p. 154. 3 Jemma Desai, ‘“Something Happened”: Conversation and Connection in Butter on the Latch’, Cléo, Fall 2014 4 Madeline’s Madeline, dir. Josephine Decker, New York, NY: Oscilloscope (2018), 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid,. 7 Ibid, 1:17:19. 8 Ibid, 1:16:40. 9 Patrick D. Morrow, Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction (Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), p. 11.
