BINGE is a new independently released indie-comedy pilot created by Angela Gulner based on her decade long battle with bulimia.
Different from many beauty trends (large breasts, flat chests, round butts, long blonde hair, pixie cuts) one holy grail remains: being thin. It is our elusive goal and ever-lasting trap; for even when achieved, we must struggle to maintain. Unlike many achievements, one can never be satisfied with it, for the slimmer one becomes, the more avid their desire to reach perfection. It serves as both the carrot and the stick. Similar to drug and alcohol addiction (and in many cases intertwined), it makes life unmanageable. And it is precisely this unmanageability that Gulner highlights in her pilot for the series.
BINGE opens with the protagonist, Angela, passed out in her car wearing a cocktail dress and crumbs of food and vomit lining her lips as a middle-aged, paunched, man suitable to play a high school principle, knocks on the window. We learn that after a night of alcohol abuse at a bar she had agreed to “let him inside her.” Clearly, life has become unmanageable.
We follow her into her bakery, which she owns with her best friend who reveals she dropped out of law school to go in on this with Angela. She is disappointed by Angela’s constant tardiness and general unreliability and is worried that her engagement cake will not be ready for her dinner with the in-laws that night. While piling white frosting into her mouth obsessively, Angela reassures her it will all work out. Minutes later, she in kneeling in a bathroom stall, expertly, effortlessly shoving fingers down her throat when her phone rings. The person on the other line is a handsome man she had disclosed her disorder to the night before, someone she had “let in” in emotionally, by drunkenly exclaiming, “You know why you’re hitting on me right now? Because I just threw up in the bathroom — women tricks!” She then belligerently confesses, “Sometimes I just want to die!”
And that is the exactly the underlying hum of disorders and mental illness, the unrelenting feeling that you just want to die, and this is a refreshing reflection of that to a number of women and men who are suffering in silence.
At the end of the credits, Gulner writes, “We made this pilot to prove to The People Who Have Money that there’s a place in the world for stories that are messy, painful, honest and human.” Yes, if there is a place for men imitating duck sounds, surely there is a place for this truthful and hilarious show. As of yet no networks have picked up this show up, so if you like, please share.
Top photo: BINGE
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