[COLUMN] There Is No Truth in Verity | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the movie Verity, which is currently in theatres. Full spoilers, including several major plot twists. If you’re looking for a capsule review, I did not think it was very good. In fact, I thought it was ver(it)y bad.

Verity is, quite literally, about the death of the author.

The adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel opens with young author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) hired to finish the popular book series from best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway). Verity has been in a catatonic state since a car accident following the death of her young daughter Harper (Sienna Kulovitz) in a canoeing accident on the lake outside the family’s lavish property in rural Vermont. Lowen agrees to ghostwrite the books, moving into Verity’s house with her family.

There is an interesting hook here, something close to a late capitalist Vertigo, the story of one woman who is forced by the demands of the market – the need for a new Verity Crawford novel – to transform herself into another. The publishers are working on an aggressive schedule. The novels need to be finished. The audience demands content. If Lowen must surrender herself to do that – moving into Verity’s mansion, wearing Verity’s clothes, sleeping in Verity’s old bed – so be it.

While searching through Verity’s study, Lowen stumbles upon a thumb drive. On that thumb drive, Lowen finds a manuscript titled “So Be It.” Framed as Verity’s autobiography, “So Be It” offers a cynical and twisted account of Verity’s life story, from her first encounter with her future husband Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) through to her resentment of the two twins that she had with him. Verity’s prose is bitter, twisted and occasionally even sociopathic.

Rather than read the manuscript in a single sitting or over a concentrated period, Lowen drifts in and out of it over 1_-the subsequent weeks. In that time, Lowen comes to suspect that Verity is faking her catatonia, even though she can find no real evidence to support that theory. Eventually, reaching the end of the manuscript, Lowen stumbles upon the realization that what appeared to be an autobiography was in fact a confession. Verity tipped the canoe intentionally. She murdered Harper.

Jeremy arrives home, finds the manuscript, and lashes out at Verity. Only when he threatens to take the manuscript to the police does Verity drop the façade, revealing that her helplessness was all an act. “I can explain!” Verity protests, but it is too late. Jeremy starts to strangle his wife in a fit of rage over the death of their daughter. Lowen urges him to stop. She then suggests how Jeremy can stage the death to look like a suicide instead. Lowen and Jeremy kill Verity and dump the body.

It is worth acknowledging that Verity is a work of pure nonsense. It might be too much to call it camp, but is operating at a heightened level of melodrama where none of the characters act or behave like human beings. In order for the plot to function as the movie needs it to, the characters often need to make the stupidest possible decision at the worst possible moment, the film holding back just enough information from the audience to maintain some suspension of disbelief. 

Still, there is something potentially interesting in this hook, in particular concerning the relationship between an author and their work. There is a lingering question of how much of a creator must bleed over into the art that they produce, how much of themselves is reflected in the world or the character. “In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or as Faust,” Oscar Wilde wryly observed, and Verity is a film obsessed with the blurred boundaries between identity and creation.

This is a work that feels in conversation with the current moment. The idea of Verity Crawford as the beloved author of a series of popular and seemingly fantasy novels that she has left unfinished much to the frustration of fans and publishers recalls the debate around George R.R. Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire. The idea of bringing in another author with a similar style to finish Verity’s novel mirrors similar debates about whether Brandon Sanderson would take over A Song of Ice and Fire.

However, there is also something broader simmering beneath the surface of Verity. Lowen reads the pages of “So Be It” and sits in stern moralizing judgment of Verity, who is expressing her maternal anxiety and her postpartum depression, perspectives that women are often stigmatized for daring to say out loud. Society hates few things as much as a woman who dares renounce or rejects motherhood as some sacred calling.

Rather than reacting with empathy or compassion to Verity’s efforts to express the darkest parts of herself on page, Lowen responds with disgust and horror. She bins the manuscript. She pushes it away. Lowen comes to think of Verity less as a complex and multifaceted human being who might happen to hold a complex inner life that is unpalatable and more as something akin to a movie monster.

Throughout Verity, there is a strong recurring emphasis on the idea that Verity has always written particularly compelling and engaging villains – that the evil characters in her novels are the most compelling. In various clips and interviews, Verity dodges questions about where they came from. There is an anxiety that these monsters are perhaps a dark aspect of herself given form. Jeremy never read any books past her first because he “couldn’t stand to be inside her head.”

Verity was originally self-published by Hoover in 2018, and it feels very much like a product of that late 2010s literary scene. In particular, that era was dominated by successful book franchises written by and aimed at women, like Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight or E.L. James’ 50 Shades series. These books attracted a dedicated audience among older women and became publishing sensations that launched cinematic adaptations.

These novels, which were overtly sexual and fantastical, including fantasies of domination and abuse relationships, quickly became caught up in a larger moral panic that often seemed to be policing what women wrote and what women read, infantilizing both author and audience with opinion pieces decrying these works as “female masochism” that had “set back another generation of women.”

There was, perhaps, something of a double standard here. Nobody seemed particularly worried about what it said that men were writing and consuming superhero power fantasies during this time. This sort of discourse afforded male authors and audiences the freedom to be complex or contradictory, without necessarily feeling the need to label those works “problematic.” There is a sense that Verity is in some ways about that.

If nothing else, Verity is a story about the death of the author in a literary as much as a literal sense. In his influential essay The Death of the Author, French critic Roland Barthes famously proposed that a work of art must be considered and discussed in complete separation from its author’s life and intent. It is a valid approach to criticism. It has a lower bar to entry, requiring less research and knowledge. It is more accessible, as it requires less context. And it has a cleanliness to it.

In discussing literary theory, as in discussing any philosophy, there is a tendency towards absolutism, a tendency to believe that there is one correct process which can be applied consistently and universally. That theory is correct, all others are false. In reality, things are more nuanced than all that. Sometimes it is worth considering the work in the context of the author’s biography, sometimes it is not. Sometimes a work demands to be seen in a wider context, sometimes it stands alone.

What is really interesting about Verity is how aggressively insistent it is upon the death of the author, in a way that feels incredibly defensive on the part of Colleen Hoover. It’s less death of the author than suicide of the author. It cannot help but feel informed by the literary discourse of the 2010s, when authors were subject to intense moralistic scrutiny which seemed to suggest that only bad people could write about bad things and that depiction implied endorsement.

Verity makes a point to situate its author within that media ecosphere. When Lowen begins doing research on Verity, she watches podcast appearances on Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper and Hot Ones with Sean Evens. Even beyond the fact that it was self-published, Verity is not a product of the old-fashioned literary establishment. Verity is not promoting her books on NPR or even on late night chat shows. It is all filtered through a pointedly modern – and seemingly more “authentic” – lens.

Verity makes this point with a forehead-slappingly stupid reveal that the manuscript that Lowen has been reading as an autobiography and which includes a foreword introducing itself as an autobiography is not an autobiography. Verity was dealing with the death of her daughter by engaging in a practice known as “dark journalling.” She was writing a shadow account of her own life, all of the darkest possible things that she might have been thinking at any given moment.

However, Jeremy stumbled across an open copy of the file on Verity’s desktop, assumed that the manuscript was a confession, and reacted so poorly to the false confession that his wife had murdered their daughter that he drugged her and crashed her car into a tree. Verity has been faking her catatonia in the hopes of eventually sneaking away from Jeremy. However, at no point does she attempt to communicate this to Lowen or anybody else.

So Jeremy and Lowen assume that the version of Verity in the manuscript is the real Verity, murder her and run off to live happily ever after. Until Lowen stumbles across a handwritten note that reveals it was all a lie, and Harper did die in an accident, and “So Be It” was an attempt by Verity to assert some control over her own loss by writing a fictional history. The film then tries to pull a fuzzy “… or is it?” ending, but it is very clear that the handwritten note is to be accepted at face value.

It is all very dumb, from a narrative point of view. However, thematically, it is fairly consistent with the central idea of the movie. Authors exist completely independent of their work, and an attempt to read authors into their work is unreasonable. Unpleasant and uncomfortable ideas in fiction exist within a hermetically sealed vacuum, and there is no need for any larger context. It is a very defensive position for an author to take, and it feels more than a little hypocritical.

It is an approach that feeds into the larger contentification of media. If there is nothing of an author in a work, then the author becomes inessential. Verity essentially argues for her own replacement. If her characters – in particular her well-written villains – are not intrinsically tied to anything in herself, then it makes perfect sense that the publisher can just slot Lowen in to replace her on the later books.

However, there is also something a little more sinister stirring beneath the surface. By insisting that these constructs exist entirely in the abstract, as dark imaginings with no tether to the real world, Verity disconnects herself from the very idea of empathy as a writer’s tool. In the film’s opening moments, Lowen witnesses a cyclist being hit by a car, but she seems more affected by Verity’s admission that she resents her children. Lowen cannot fathom such an unpleasant idea.

There is something in this framing that is as puritanical as the culture that Verity seems to be reacting against. Verity exists in the wake of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a novel that dared to feature a profoundly unlikeable and selfish female character, Amy (Rosamund Pike). However, Gone Girl was willing to actually let Amy be unlikeable and selfish, to indulge her sociopathy. Amy is a monster, but she’s also recognizably human. Her “cool girl” monologue remains a vital piece of writing.

Even more recently, the same weekend that Verity released, Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden dared to center Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh), a deeply selfish and sociopathic female character who is largely defined by her refusal to conform to the role of mother that has been cast upon her. East of Eden does not condone Cathy’s actions or decisions, but it does at least attempt to understand them. It contextualizes Cathy as a person, no matter how uncomfortable that person might be.

So there is something extremely cowardly in the way that Verity dares to present a version of the title character who is genuinely provocative and unsettling and confrontational – who challenges the audience’s idea of what a woman should or could be – only to immediately retreat from that idea by insisting such a woman could only ever be a fictional construct, and the real horror is that Lowen and Jeremy would ever think that she could exist.

In some ways, it feels like the flip side of the coin to Zendaya promoting Challengers on social media by explicitly asking her fans and followers to “try not to judge the characters too much.” Verity wants the audience to judge its characters, but to feel safe doing so. It is critiquing a sort of moral puritanism in how this sort of art is parsed, particularly as it relates to female characters, but it lacks the courage of its convictions and so indulges in the exact same sort of puritanical thought process.

This is, in a broader sense, one of the bigger issues with Verity. This is a film that longs to be a trashy and pulpy thriller, but is constantly anxious that the audience will judge it for fully embracing that trashiness and pulpiness. The film will start towards sex scenes, before prudishly cutting away, as if embarrassed that this sort of gaudy thriller might actually be gaudy. It is also possible that the film is reacting to its perceived audience, as Will Gluck did when he cut the sex out of One Night Only.

Verity insists that there is no truth to be found within its narrative. That is perhaps true. It would explain why it feels so empty.