The new series is a spider’s web of our times: lures of unscientific cures, metastasis of the influencing industry and why we love loathing liars

If you haven’t already juiced up on Netflix’s recent offering Apple Cider Vinegar, an emperor in the genre of scammer docudramas, start now. Pause your yogic exhalations, ajwain water and magical thinking compulsions to watch Kaitlyn Dever as the amoral scammer of over-promised healing who plays real life liar Belle Gibson. Created by Samantha Strauss (three cheers please), it is a damn good watch. Journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano wrote the book The Woman Who Fooled the World (2017) and Strauss wrote the series based on it with Anya Beyersdorf and Angela Betzien. “It is a true story based on a lie,” as the series reminds you again and again.

It cures nothing. Quite like many alternative, wellness therapies promoted for curing diseases like cancer or the affliction of couching in front of the TV. Yet, it bristles with the maladies of our times. How we are swept away by some social media influencer or the other without fact checking their claims. Not just in the wellness economy but in fashion, beauty, fitness, yoga, politics, or well, Maha Kumbh-onomics. The series pulsates with stress in its compelling narration and performances.

Mark Coles Smith and Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Justin and Lucy.

If Dever incites resentment in her ’Who Will Belle the Cat’ role, Alycia Debnam-Carey plays Milla Blake based on Jessica Ainscough another real-life wellness author and influencer. Ainscough did suffer from cancer and died. Milla has the glowing skin of a militant juicer pitted against conventional medicine and poses as a coffee enema pundit with irritating righteousness. There are other good performances. Aisha Dee as Milla’s best friend Chanelle and Mark Coles Smith, a journalist and the husband of a breast cancer patient are a delight to watch.

Each role is written in the ink of human imperfections. It is an exciting device. It reminds us that we are, but a complex assimilation of imperfections. That reducing human beings to pathologies (control freak, hypochondriac, compulsive liar etc) may be a dangerous compulsion of our times.

Kaitlyn Dever plays the real life liar, Belle Gibson.

Symptoms of our Age

Apple Cider Vinegar is a hurting tale. It is about anger, anxiety, cancer, chemotherapy, avoidance, arrogance, fake altruism, the unpredictability of alternative cures and a trunk full of lies. It has the insidious lure of a crime drama, currently the roaringly successful genre in cinema and TV. It has visceral moments of real suffering that cancer vitiates in the human body among its victims and their caregivers, lovers and parents. There is death and there is the undying battle with grief and trauma.

If you are watching intently, it brings back memories of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer prize-winning socio-cultural history of cancer in the Emperor of Maladies (2010). As well as Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) where the writer-critic deconstructs cancer as a disease of passion, exploring its mythology that repressed feelings break down into malignancy.

The series finds inspiration in the book, ‘The Woman Who Fooled the World.’

Belle Gibson’s lying sickness, the hope and envy it briefly generates in dietary cures to an agonising descent into a cocktail of mental health issues, children pathologically worried about sick parents and parents paranoid about sick children speaks to the anxieties we share today. Strauss unravels the story in jumbled timelines, but the timeline is yours and mine. We inhabit it now.

Cures and Lures

Where do these collective anxieties spring from? Cancer’s extending signature across the human race, its short and long cures, its debilitating impact on our race is one trigger. This series is also a red alert on the landfills of information thrown at us. Fake news, claimed cures, lures of instant celebrity hood stirred with scamming data. Last year, politician and former cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu claimed his wife, Navjot Kaur was “cured” of stage IV cancer with dietary and lifestyle changes. It incited fury and questioning, rightly so, from oncologists and other experts. What didn’t get top billing status in the derision was why no editor stopped Sidhu’s claims from being published.

“It is a true story based on a lie,” as the series reminds you again and again.

For us, in the business of storytelling, Apple Cider Vinegar is a cautionary tale of pausing to ask if First Person Sick and Relatable is under threat as a storytelling device? Belle Gibson didn’t have brain cancer yet it was that very claim that got her fame, fortune, a caring partner (who possibly loves her neediness). Diets are great for wellness, slimness, newness, but might they need a joint consultation between a qualified medical practitioner and a wellness guru? When does that moment arrive when unwell “followers” of practitioners like yoga and Ayurveda evangelist Baba Ramdev, for instance, who promised cures for several illnesses—diabetes even cancer—(his theories were questioned), return to traditional medicine? What’s the prognosis of their diseases by then? How should family members cope with Munchausen Syndrome where people fake illnesses for attention?

It’s sick. This fear and loathing in the age of unmonitored social “influencers”. Gulping down apple cider vinegar won’t cure it. We must. That’s why this series has both vim and vinegar.