A sweet temptation, but it’s not enough
The show: To the Bone The moment: The candy wrapper Ellen (Lily Collins) and Luke (Alex Sharp) are living in a treatment facility for people with eating disorders. But she’s losing weight instead of gaining, and he’s worried.
As Ellen and other roommates watch TV, Luke holds out her favourite candy: a Goo-Goo cluster, a bomb of chocolate, caramel, peanuts and marshmallow. “You know you want it,” he says insinuatingly.
“Don’t make it a sex thing,” she says.
“It is a sex thing. Don’t pretend it’s not,” he replies.
He unwraps it. He urges her to sniff it, touch it. The roommates are riveted. But when he pushes her to bite it, she tells him to back off. He leaves.
“Luke just made me touch chocolate,” Ellen says to the others.
“He’s totally weird,” one says. But she snatches the candy wrapper and gives it a long sniff. “Ooohh, get in on that,” she says. Everyone reaches for the wrapper.
This telefilm caught flack for showing the emaciated bodies of real people suffering from eating disorders. To me, the depictions are respectful, neither idealized nor demonized. But I never experienced an eating disorder myself.
However, the writer/director, Marti Noxon, did; so did Collins. So the scenes of food consumption, secretive behaviour and therapy have the brittle snap of authenticity. So does the dark humour.
The problem I have is with the ending, which resolves far too easily. But the first two-thirds opens a window into — and offer a deeper understanding of — a world its inhabitants are too skilled at hiding. To The Bone streams on Netflix. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.