Why Is Hollywood So Bad at Kink?
Babygirl, Secretary, and the challenge of moral spaciousness
Small Rain has won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award. I feel overwhelmed; even after a few days sitting with the news I don’t really know what to say. Except that I’m immensely grateful to the judges: Deesha Philyaw, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Bruce Holsinger. You can read their comments about the book here. I’ll be doing a virtual event with Deesha Philyaw (also a previous winner) on Monday, 4/28 at 7pm ET. I’d love to see some of you there. You need a ticket, which are pay-what-you-can; you can register here.
There’s still time to register for the May 4 online seminar on the practicalities of The Writer’s Life—but not too much time. Scholarship applications will close on Monday, April 14. The priority deadline for submitting your questions for the seminar is Sunday, April 27. You can ask about anything you’d like: publishing, time management, finances; my hope is to use your questions to build a class covering all aspects of a sustainable writing life. I’d love to have you join us. You can find full information and registration here.
A reminder that if you would like a signed/personalized copy of Small Rain, or any of my books, you can order through my local bookstore, Prairie Lights, with this link. Just use the notes box when you check out to request a signature and/or a personal note. You can also order by phone by calling 1-800-295-BOOK (2665).
Finally, the second meeting of the To a Green Thought Book Club is just around the corner, on April 20. I’d love for you to join us as we discuss Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost. The bi-monthly meetings are open to all supporters of this newsletter at the Founding Member level. If you’d like to join, just click on the Subscribe button below to sign up or upgrade.
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Luis and I finally watched Babygirl, the Nicole Kidman vehicle about a tense, tragically repressed CEO who gets involved with a baby-dom intern played by Harris Dickinson. I missed seeing this in theaters, but I didn’t miss the discourse—I can’t remember the last film that sent so many DMs flying to my phone. I guess this makes sense: my second book, Cleanness, has two chapters that dramatize BDSM encounters, and I did co-edit an anthology called KINK with R.O. Kwon. So it’s reasonable to expect me to have some prejudices about how these things might best be explored in art. My friends’ opinions were all over the map—it was brilliant, it was trash—but they all agreed I had to watch it. Which might have contributed to my holding off, actually: there’s no more delicious pleasure than not having an opinion about the thing everybody’s arguing about in the group chat.1
Well, I have an opinion now: the movie is disastrously bad. It’s barely a movie: it’s so thinly written and imagined, it’s little more than that scenario I sketched above. By which I mean it’s little more than a cliché: powerful executive seeks powerlessness in bed. (Halina Reijn both wrote and directed.) Kink as a dynamic phenomenon, interesting, psychologically rich—any possibility of that is drained away. The characters—Romy is the CEO, Samuel the baby-dom; I’ll use the characters’ names, even though the actors remained, resolutely, the actors—don’t really have pasts; there’s no attempt to give their current selves the depth of history. Well, I guess there’s the barest gesture toward a past for Romy, just enough to be gross—she mentions, it’s not clear how seriously, having been brought up in a cult, and in a later, tragically underwritten scene, as she attempts to explain her affair to her enraged husband, she will sob, “my childhood,” as though the two words conveyed something meaningful. I say this is gross because it isn’t characterization, it’s lazy etiology; the film isn’t actually interested in Romy’s past, it just wants to vaguely gesture toward it as a way of 1) dodging meaningful narrative, and 2) signing on to Romy’s sense that her desires are outside the range of normal human feeling, that they’re a kind of deformation, the result of trauma. (There’s no attempt to reconcile this with the final scene’s equally lazy suggestion that kink is a benign variant of bourgeois life, a domestic amuse-bouche.)
Sketchy as it is, that’s more reality than Samuel gets; his character consists more or less entirely of a goofily tattooed torso and a talent with dogs. He has no past, no family, he never speaks about his life; the film utterly subsumes his existence in Romy’s, as though when he steps out of scene with her he winks out of being.