Apple Cider Vinegar
Monday is for movies. And sometimes TV. Today, TV — the latest popular Netflix limited series; the satire on influencers and alternative-medicine/diet followers, Apple Cider Vinegar
Another week, another Netflix must-binge, water-cooler-convo limited-series. Back in the day they were called a Mini Series and they were the Television Event of the Day, and the build-up was enormous. And we received two of them a year, maybe three if we were lucky. And as kids, most of them flew over our heads largely, but we watched them anyway. Now there are several ‘dropping’ each week. And so many that you start, but never finish. Even though Tracey from the office reckons you really should stick with it, because her husband Dan liked it a lot, and his mate Rhys was tipped off in the first place by Gavin’s brother Marcus. The whole cricket team had liked it you see…
Anyway, I did watch — with some interest — Apple Cider Vinegar. And I actually bloody loved it.
Apple Cider Vinegar gets pretty impressionistic with the truth pretty quickly. But it has a larger point to make of course.
Skewering the alternative medicine and diet culture, and the influencers that, embarrassingly will trade for clicks with just about anything, Apple Cider Vinegar is first and foremost a deep satire, and scathing scythe through the idea of such industries, and such influencers — but it’s also centred around a real person, and uses their real name.
Playing out like a bit of creative non-fiction, Apple Cider Vinegar reminded me of the great book-length pieces by Janet Malcolm, and before her, Truman Capote. For there’s a deeper truth to nudge around when you are not concerned with getting every single fact just right, and instead arrange the details in a form of “truth-y”-ness that is truthful to the degree that it must be, but also unashamedly breaks some eggs to make that damn omelette.
Last year, the big one was Baby Reindeer — which I watched because everyone said I had to. And it even gave me the inspiration to write an essay which I called I watched Baby Reindeer Just Like Everyone Said I Had To!
I really did enjoy Baby Reindeer, and I totally felt uncomfortable about it too — and I liked that actually. If you feel too comfortable watching something you might as well be listening to Coldplay (although paradoxically too much Coldplay, by which I mean a second song, can have me shifting in my seat). What I’m trying to say is, I like the fact that I’m being asked to question the ethics, the logistics, and the decisions made by the show creators around the levels of truth included, and the little lies that help pull the story into important places.
Apple Cider Vinegar tells an Australian story, well, actually, it’s a small handful of Australian stories — there’s Belle Gibson, the shameless thief and liar, quite possibly a victim of past-life trauma that never got the care she needed and combined being a pathological liar with Munchausen’s by proxy. Her ‘escape’ towards a life of intended luxury was one of broad, dangerous delusion, and that’s at the very least.
Fictionalised versions of other real people have stories that intersect, and this is where it gets tricky. You’ll be able to Google and read, already, that some people don’t like the way the show lampooned them, or was disrespectful to their family member, or stripped them of agency. And this is the breaking eggs to make omelettes I referred to. A brutal way to put it. But also the reality if not quite the (actual) truth.
Apple Cider Vinegar doesn’t paint the wellness industry all that well; doesn’t see it as anything more than smoke and/or mirrors, and silly quackery. And, look, I’ll throw a caveat here, this show might be triggering to people that have had tough experiences around medicine, maybe ignored, or waitlisted for far too long, or misdiagnosed, but the science is science for a reason, and the basic tenet is your doctor knows more than you will ever know, unless you happen to be a doctor too. Not just mates with a doctor, or friends with a healer that sold their own recipe book and rubbed essential oils into creases the doctor’s pills were just not reaching.
We must remember that this type of TV is a satirical skewering, it is the cartoon in the newspaper that has a dark truth-bomb incorporated in its devastation, rather than being the meticulously fact-checked feature that was worked on for months. And as TV, as entertainment, Apple Cider Vinegar is quite close to exquisite, particularly within the format of the Netflix 6-episode Limited Series. At the helm, an amazing performance by Kaitlyn Dever, an American playing an Australian, something of a role-reversal from how it so often goes in the world of the Netflix limited series (looking at you again Nicole Kidman). Dever was little more than a kid when she had a recurring run on Justified, and was very good. She was great in an adult role on the brilliant (deeply crushing) Dopesick, and here, as Belle Gibson she is electric. Positively charged, and absolutely shocking. She is a new kind of character you hate, and the control the actor has over this is compelling. And a huge part of the magic of the show.
But it would only work if Apple Cider Vinegar had something to say. And the fact that the real Belle Gibson has thus far avoided paying fines means the truth that the TV show never quite fully gets to might just be because it is in fact stranger than fiction.
I loved Apple Cider Vinegar, was glued to it. You might be too.
And if you’d seen it already, I’d love to know what you reckon.
