Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel, photographed by Rachel Chandler.
Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke GoebelWant to Make a Movie About Rats
About midway through the movie Eileen, a beautiful woman compliments a younger girl’s dreams. “I bet you dream of other worlds,” the woman new to town tells the girl who grew up dreaming of getting out. Eileen, which arrives in theaters today, is an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh‘s award-winning 2015 novel of the same name, a noirish psychological thrill ride that won Moshfegh the PEN Award for debut fiction. Eileen, like so many of Moshfegh’s characters, is a cynical wreck angling for an escape route, searching for salvation in dark bars and cars as close to breaking down as the girls driving them. Her stories star alcoholics, addicts, anorexics, bulimics, and other messy outsiders, people with disturbing habits and delusions of grandeur. All of Moshfegh’s women–the beautiful ones and the bland ones, the confident ones and those crushed by insecurity–harbor violent impulses, vast appetites, and fatalistic convictions: that the world is a callous place, and society a rigged game. But as pessimistic as they appear, these are no nihilists; her characters are devoted daydreamers who keep ragged scraps of hope close to their chests, spending much of their lives in quiet, blistered yearning.