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| Shapeless |
Living with an eating disorder is like living with a monster, with a part of oneself which is constantly on the attack. Shapeless is a film which takes this to heart, using the tropes of the horror genre to explore one woman’s struggle with her remorseless condition. She’s Ivy, a talented singer whose life gradually falls apart as she loses her mental focus and then her voice, and she’s played by Kelly Murtagh, who also co-wrote. As a survivor of bulimia herself – and someone who will always be at risk of relapse – Kelly was taking a risk by pursuing this project, but she felt that it was a risk she had to take in order to try and reach out to others.
“I always have looked to art, looked to books, looked to stories, looked to films as a way to process my world around me and to understand things that are complicated or to see different characters in all scopes of life,” she explains when we meet. “When I was in treatment for bulimia, about 12 years ago, I was really seeking something, and I was trying to really find some type of art form that could help me process what I was going through. When I looked to film, I felt like I came up dry. I felt like the things that were out there were either sort of, like maybe an after school special, where it was like a treatment film, and then they all got better, and that it was all nice and tidy. Or maybe it was the butt of a joke. A lot of times eating disorders have been used as the butt of jokes. And so there really wasn't anything I could find at the time that felt like it spoke to the true authentic experience of what this felt like.
“So I had the idea for a film like this, back when I was in treatment. It took a long time to get get it going. But I think what film can really do is it can immerse you in this character, it can immerse you in this story, maybe something that you've never seen or experienced before. so you can really feel like what it feels like to live with something like this. And I think film is really capable at doing that for a lot of reasons, because of the visuals, because of sound, because of all the different things we love about film that can really transport you and put you in a certain experience.”
Did she always intend to star in it herself?
“Yes, that was always the first intention, I always felt like I wanted to star in it and write it. And I think that those two sort of went hand in hand with this story because of just how personal it is. At the time, when I was in treatment, I was I was a professional actor – you know, I still am – and that's always been my first love. I do love writing as well, you know, I love that process of finding a character and getting to live in that experience and really get to know them from the inside out. And so that was always something that I wanted to do, was to be the person that not only wrote this story, but to be the one that could embody it and bring it to life. That felt important to me.”
It was, nevertheless, difficult to go back into the mental space which such illnesses create at their most intense.
“It wasn't always easy,” she acknowledges. “I will say, I had to feel really safe on set. And I think Samantha Aldana, the director, was so key in that, because we spent almost two years developing and writing before we even were in production. And what that allowed me was this safe space to have some very vulnerable conversations, you know, to really say like, ‘What did that feel like for you? What was that like? What was this detail like? What was this experience like?’ She had not struggled with anything like that. She had loved ones near her that had. But she came at this project with such a non-judgmental, curious, respectful point of view, and I think that what that did for me was it allowed me to also be curious and respectful and vulnerable and kind to myself, and that I could feel safe enough to to advocate and to really speak for myself.
“Some days were really hard, especially the the bingeing and the purging days, and those were days when I really had to be conscious of what I needed for my mental mental health. And I will say, living in that world, that was 18 days jam packed days of filmmaking, I had a hard time coming out of it. I relapsed twice, that following year, and it was something that I really had to process Because I think what Shapeless is, when I look at it, it's like perfectionism and control gone to this extreme. This is where it manifested for me and became bulimia, this constant trying to perfect and control. And I think it can manifest in so many different ways for people. I think as a filmmaker I was really trying to do that still, you know, I was still trying to make it perfect.
“I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that I could tell this story as respectfully as I could and do it the best way possible. And that's its own little deathtrap, right? You're constantly in that not enoughness. And when I relapsed, it was different, after Shapeless, in a good way, because what Shapeless taught me is, it was safe for me to be vulnerable. And it was safe for me to be honest, because I realised the more I had these uncomfortable, vulnerable, honest conversations with the filmmakers I was working with in order to tell this story authentically, I felt my shame lesson. It was like the human connection, you know that conversation you can have with someone where they just look at you and say ‘I understand you,’ even if they haven't gone through exactly what you've gone through, can really help create an empathy for yourself. I think that that process really helped me when I did relapse.”
What was it like for her to see herself from the outside, watching herself in that footage?
“It's so interesting, Jennie, because I've seen it so many times and every time I watch it, something hits me differently,” she says. “Like something that maybe didn't affect me the time I watched it before, I'm crying the next time. And each time I watch the film where I'm crying, where I'm just releasing something where I'm saying, ‘Gosh, I love you, I love that version of you’ – I didn't feel like I let myself, then, but I can somehow go back in time and give myself a hug and say ‘Gosh, that was really hard.’ You know? And there is also hope on the other side. And it feels so visceral because it's this very visceral film.
“So it's vulnerable, it's really vulnerable to watch. It's really sometimes hard. Sometimes I have to look away or sometimes I'm having an out of body experience and I'm like, ‘Is that really me? What's going on?’ And I'm also really proud of the work that I did and the work that everybody did to create this art form. It brings up all the spectrum of emotions for me.”
It was always Samantha she wanted to direct, she says.
“We had known each other in New Orleans in the film community prior to Shapeless and she is someone I very much admired. I'd seen her her work in the New Orleans Film Festival and different events in New Orleans and I just loved it. I thought she had such a sense of care and heart and tangibility to her worlds that was magical. It was almost like this fantastical elements, and I have always loved fantasy and magic and I think surrealism is something that I've always been drawn to – and genre film – for that sandbox of possibility. And Sam was someone that I sort of saw that in her work. So when it came down to it. when I had this first draft that I was sort of like ‘Okay, I think now it's time to start getting a director attached,’ she was immediately the first person I thought of. I very much felt drawn to this idea of someone who could bring that sense of fantastical.
“Thankfully when I sent her the first draft – that was very different than what the film is today – she saw something in it that really intrigued her, and she was very curious about it. So that began this process of what we've colloquially called creative therapy. And we would just have these long conversations about what it felt like. She just took it and ran with it in the best way possible. She read the books she could read, she watched the movies she could watch, and she really delved into this world of what it could feel like. And I think what was so unique about our relationship that really worked for Shapeless was I was the one that had lived this experience and then she had this outsider perspective, so it's almost like we had both perspectives coming together in this way that I think is very effective. Because that's what we hope that it does give us, we hope the ones that do struggle, that do live with this serious mental illness day in and day out, can see that is what it feels like and feel less alone because they see it. And then also those who maybe haven't had a lot of experience can say, ‘Wow, that's what it's really like, I didn't know.’ And for that to create this dialogue, hopefully.”
It’s very much an interior thing, and it's obviously difficult as a writer to think about how that's going to come to the screen, so how much of that was worked out between the two of them and with Kelly in her role as an actor as well, when they were making the film?
“We were stumped at quite a few points on how to portray this, how to write this, how to show this,” she admits. “Before we would write or really do anything, it was like, ‘Is this honest? And is this respectful?’ We wanted to treat this with the utmost respect. We didn't want to glamorise it, we didn't want to glorify it, we didn't want to skim the surface, you know, we really wanted to find a way to delve in while also finding a creative way to allow people in. And it got to a point where we both felt like we just needed another head in the game. And I was not a professional screenwriter. I had taken one screenwriting course at a local university in New Orleans and I was trying my best, but I think what I realised was that this would behove us to work with someone who's a professional writer. And that's when Bryce Parsons-Twesten came on board and he was just absolutely incredible. And also a safe, non-judgmental human being who came at it with like, ‘Okay, let's just talk about this.’
“We were always trying to figure out what to show and what not to show, and asking ‘What are we really trying to say here?’ To get our point across in the most concise and respectful way. And I think that's really where the magic started, where we started to dig more into the genre of filmmaking and where that idea of body horror really came into the picture of ‘How can we articulate this reality in a way so people can understand it on some symbolic level?’ And where it naturally led is in the discussion we had about what it felt like for me when I was really, really struggling. It felt like you’re invaded, you know? It felt like there is this other voice, there is this other entity inside of you that almost takes over. And so we really wanted to somehow embody that feeling of having a monster within and how can we best do that. So that's really where that idea of the body transformations came into the picture.”
I tell her that I like the way the film explores the disorientation which eating disorders can cause, when blood sugar levels are too low, and ask how she and Samantha approached representing that visually.
“I struggle still, to this day, with anxiety,” she says, “and that sensory overload, that sense of ‘Where am I? What is safe? What is real? Is this in my head or is this not in my head?’ That kind of inner war was something that was really important and so real. So that experience, that sense of being watched, where you think everyone's watching you, you think there's all these things that are around you that you constantly have to manage, which could very much be in our own minds, or maybe some of it’s real too – but that that sense of feeling paranoid or feeling watched was something that we really wanted to create. And I think with the visuals, and with the sound, it was so effectively done, in my opinion. And that was something that I think that people can really resonate with too, that sense of anxiety.”
As a final question, I ask her about her work with Project Heal, and organisation which aims to break down systemic, healthcare and financial barriers to eating disorder treatment.
“Yes, that was something that was important to me from the beginning,” she says. “I wanted to make sure that in the credits, there were some sort of directions for someone if maybe they just watched this film. And before I worked on Shapeless, I had been following Project Heal on Instagram, and was really supportive and excited about the work that they were doing. And what they do is they are out there trying to break down these barriers for people to get help, because there's a lot of things that make it hard to get help. And it's hard enough to live with something like this, hard enough to recover, so getting the help shouldn't be as hard as it is.
“Unfortunately, it is hard. Sometimes it could be a financial barrier, a healthcare barrier, or a systemic barrier. I've spoken with a lot of people who struggle with eating disorders and say, ‘I'm having trouble getting help because my doctor doesn't believe me because I identify as a male,’ or however someone identifies. And I think that these misconceptions that people have about eating disorders, or the stigmas that people hold about eating disorders also really inhibit people from getting the help that they need.
“This is such a pervasive thing that's actually in our society that we haven't really spoken about a lot. I think we are, little by little, talking about mental health more. But something that's always really stuck with me with eating disorders, and just some statistics about, is it affects everyone, you know? It affects people of all gender identities, races, cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, age, weight. It can truly affect anyone. And it's also the second highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, behind opioid addiction. And so if you think of it that way, it's really prevalent.
“I know I suffered in silence because of the shame, and I would imagine that there's a lot of other people out there in the same boat that I was, so if there is any organisation out there that is saying, ‘Let me help, I understand,’ good, great. And that's something that Project Heal is really doing. It was founded by people who had struggled with eating disorders and really saw the pitfalls of how people can get lost. And so I just really resonated with what they were doing.”
