Minutes into Netflix’s new doco Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly, all I could think of was Christopher Guest’s Best in Show meets Chazz Michael Michaels from Blades of Glory.
Mostly because of Rachael Gunn’s husband Samuel Free, breakdancing name Sammy Sex, who speaks to camera with an American twang and what looks to be an elite home perm. By turns, Sammy looks cooked and thrilled, but maintains one thing throughout: that his wife is a world-class B-Girl.
And therein lies the rub. This isn’t a mockumentary of the Raygun kerfuffle that swept the Paris Olympics. It’s actually a love story. And the question it throws up extends to all of us: how much should the people who love you most tell you the truth?
Even Raygun’s terrific parents seem bemused by her Olympic selection. Not Sammy. He’s in her corner, from practice sessions to that final unforgettable Olympic routine – yep, zero points, the sprinkler, the move where she lay on the floor opening and closing like a set of tongs, the kangaroo hops.
“I was, like, struck by the beauty of the performance,” he says of her final battle. “It was the essence of creativity.”
Well. Risking coming late to the pile-on, but I grew up on Dance Fever, the TV disco dance-off that spun out of Saturday Night Fever, and I know quality dance. Watching Raygun, I had that feeling you get in front of a Jackson Pollock: I could do that. The “essence of creativity” is a bit rich.
Sammy’s more interesting than his wife (who at one point says, and I can hardly bear to type it, “We’re not in Kansas any more”) in her own show.
He’s doing what a good husband is supposed to do: backing his person. And he seems sincere, which is the worry. A flatterer knows they’re lying. A delusional spouse doesn’t.
Love has a dangerous side effect. It makes the person you adore look like the person you think they could be. Iris Murdoch called love “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”. Not just a fella with a blind spot, Sammy’s managed something else: the refusal to see what’s real.
When does backing a spouse tip into actively failing them? Perhaps Ryan Reynolds should have had a word with Blake Lively before the Baldoni legal bloodbath. Maybe Harry could have said, Meg, the homemade bath salts are making you ridiculous.
Certainly, Melania should have seen the gilt work in the Oval Office and confiscated the glue gun.
A good spouse will say you’re smart enough to go on Sale of the Century, that you killed it at karaoke, that you’re legit hilarious, that you smell incredible, that your deadlifting has really come on, that you organise great holidays. A delusional one will say … you could be Miss Universe and be boss cocky of Mensa and your tailgating doesn’t matter and sure, you could win breakdancing at the Olympics.
Because the love that never says the hard thing doesn’t make the hard part go away. It outsources it. The world eventually delivers the verdict that love withheld, and it has no stake in being gentle.
Old story, but fits here: when our middle son hit a junior footy milestone, we made a banner: “48 great games and two poor ones.” Yep, it got a few laughs from one resilient boy and a small crowd. Raygun: not so lucky. Her feedback arrived via a braying audience of millions.
Maybe Sammy couldn’t say, “darl, you’re not much chop” because he was too close. Maybe Rachael couldn’t hear it, although she did tell a psychologist pre-Olympics she feared being a laughingstock, which suggests self-awareness.
Either way, it would have been kinder for someone at her kitchen table to tell her the truth before we all did.
The upside? Richard Branson is a fan of her individuality, and nobody remembers who won the Paris breaking medals, only the woman in the green and gold tracksuit who bombed.
Gotta say, fronting a documentary with the word “badly” in the title two years after the planet laughed at you takes something no judge could score: jaw-dropping chutzpah.
Kate Halfpenny is an author and the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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