Interesting, but not Compelling: The Lady from the Black Lagoon

It's been a long time since I've picked up nonfiction for the sake of my own edification. Call it the hours and hours and hours and hours put into studying for orals exams that put me off this as a leisure activity. It's been almost a decade, so I am now easing myself back into reading nonfiction for its own sake. One of my first selections was The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick. 

This was a good and important book. It's just a shame that the author has no actual credentials to do this kind of research and to present it in a convincing, compelling fashion. Because it shows. The book is padded out with the author's personal journey to find Milicent Patrick and the undeniable proof that she is responsible for the creature design of The Creature from said lagoon, and that she became a victim (like so many other women) of industrially-sanctioned misogyny. In that way, the author's own experiences deserve to be a part of the tale, to a degree, as should the contemporary references to issues that spurred the MeToo Movement in Hollywood, but these are executed in such a lackadaiscal, off-hand fashion that they do not come off as aggressively compelling as such facts could be. The prose is too laid back, too informal, and does nothing to bolster the credibility of the author or make me believe that she's the right person to bring this story to the foreground. Getting a tattoo of a woman on your arm (while a great idea), is not a credential for writing an important biography, which this book clearly intends to be and should be.

The biggest misstep this book makes is that it doesn't "show the work," to take a math homework analogy. When you get to the meat of the story, there are passages that refer to interviews Patrick gave while promoting The Creature from the Black Lagoon, original planning for the press tour that was later changed that significantly altered Patrick's role and relationship to the film's production, the actual press articles that resulted from the tour, and inter-office memos detailing the changing tenor toward Patrick and her eventual dismissal from Universal studios on the whims of male ego. None of that makes its actual way into the book by way of quoting, excerpting, photoscans, or anything. NONE OF IT!!! That's what I (and I assume most readers) came to this book for - to see the proof of Milicent's contribution and the injustice she suffered, to read the language of these sources for ourselves. What we're left with instead are bland paraphrasing from someone who's already proven that she's not a great communicator or conveyor of facts and ideas. And that is the absolute tragedy of this book- is that it could have been soooo much better, if only it had used its own evidence more effectively - the way a professional would have.

K Rating: 3/5