all that shimmers is shame.

A dip into authenticity with directors Nikyatu Jusu, Jodie Foster and Lee Sung Jin. Please run the show.

[Fear of Rain, 2021.]

Hands up who cried into the mirror as a child. Great, that’s most of you. Didn’t all that emotional experience just sparkle? Hands up who has Googled “the least painful way to kill yourself” - bear with me - smashing show of hands. Yay, gang’s all here.

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Lee Sung Jin, creator of Beef [Netflix/A24] wrote what he knew. ‘I knew I’ve Googled “the least painful way to kill yourself,”’ he wrote in the L.A. Times, alongside a list of things that informed his rounded, rubik’s-cubey characters. ‘They have pasts and traumas. They have wants and desires.’

I’m back to Beef here because producer/director Jodie Foster spoke on The Screenwriting Life podcast last week, ‘On Building Truthful Characters’:

“I just saw this great show Beef and I am really enjoying watching that, to see characters who are intelligent people but who are reacting from old historical wounds that they don’t understand. And they can’t control themselves, and to watch them do that as a pattern, over and over again, I find that really fascinating.”

Spot on, Clarice. I had struggled to articulate my own love for the show beyond crows speaking in subtitles and grisly-wretched romance. But I noticed how no one bristled at a hallucinating yet high-functioning woman [Ali Wong’s Amy Lau] going off under pressure. How in their descent, both Amy and Danny [Steven Yeun] seem to have sympathy from the viewer. Psychotic episodes here were not car-crash TV, but stories embellished on the outside of things many of us feel on the inside.

Lee thanks his camaraderie of co-writers and creators.

‘Something incredible happens when we accept each other as we are. We breathe easier. We relax. We explore the corners of our minds we had pretended don’t exist. We can finally be ourselves, free of judgment or shame, as we were when we were kids.’

Foster fleshes out ‘shame’ when building truthful characters too. “It’s a good place to get to at some point, to figure out what it is the character is trying to hide from other people? What it is that they’re ashamed of that they haven’t been able to express in their lives for fear of being rejected, or for fear of feeling like a failure.”

Imagine it was Foster on my phone assessment during lockdown, and not the psychiatrist who gave me a new diagnosis “to look up,” then denied doing so. (Hands up if you never get to see the same psychiatrist more than a handful of times due to mental health system musical chairs. Ok, I see quite a few of you at the back there.)

“And then the even larger question that comes out of that is what it is that they are acting on that they don’t even understand that they’re acting on - what historical part of their life – what historical wounds are affecting the present moment that they’re having in the relationship with these other characters and the choices they are making.”

Tallulah would chase our troubles away.

Lee had a road-rage incident too and told the New York Times that:

‘I’ve definitely thought a lot about not just that incident but why I am the way I am. And why any of us are. It’s easy, in writing, to point to one thing and be like, Oh, it was this trauma in my past, like, A leads to B leads to C. But that’s just not how we work. The lines aren’t straight — it’s very wiggly, and there’s a lot of stuff. I think that’s what the show wants to explore: That it’s not one thing. It really is about how hard it is to be alive.’ (A curvy rubik’s cube then.)

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I haven’t seen Barbie but I did watch Nanny, a ‘supernatural horror’ by writer/producer/director Nikyatu Jusu. The film spotlights Anna Diop as Aisha, an undocumented Senegalese immigrant, meeting microaggressions while working as a nanny in New York. She’s waiting for her small son to join her in America and the story swells with suspense and mental instability. I awaited the inevitable scene of psychotic violence that never came. Instead, a tender film glimpsing the way in which those with mental health problems are often ‘first responded’ to. A focus on why a mind would fall apart in the first place.

“Mental illness runs in my family, whether it’s schizophrenia or clinical depression,” Jusu tells The Face. “Even if you can’t identify with the immigrant story or you can’t identify with being a Black woman in this world, you can identify with a sense of isolation and alienation in a society that doesn’t work to treat mental illness. We’re not navigating that – and when I say we, I mean all of us – as citizens of this world. We’re not navigating a system that prioritises our mental wellness. A lot could be solved by treating people’s mental health.”

How I hope these show-runners will be at the helm of de-Hollywoodifying the ‘mentally ill’ (monster.)

Judgement still brings me shame. The way you don’t message me or look me in the eye. My late father said nobody would want to read about my psychosis (when he was alive, not the ghost version who I recently caught admiring the coast off a Spanish balcony.) He didn’t mean it, meanly, and I suspect my self-deprecating subconscious set him up. He said something like “Oh god no,” when I said that I was thinking about writing about it, but nobody would be interested. Naturally I am ashamed of this Substack, of all the things I’ve said and the things I have not.

But my father also smuggled books from West to East Germany in a small camper van. I guess a little mission to bring new information to people that didn’t know they needed it. We are all truthful characters. My building-process just happens to be done, dusted and combusted. Shame and joy swoops down on me everyday. How does yours do?

Thank you for reading this far. If you like it, there’s a little heart somewhere nearby, and if you click it, I feel it. A reminder of why I’m writing is here & I update on Instagram here.

Mental health emergencies are serious. If you or anyone you know is suffering with your mental health, you can contact the mental health charity MIND.