Vague Visages’ Through the Writer’s Mirror essay contains spoilers. Alexandre Westphal’s 2022 documentary features Percival Everett. Check out VV movie reviews, along with cast/character articles, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

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The 21^st century has seen several documentaries about notable American authors, including Bukowski: Born Into This (2003), Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008), William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010) and Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019). Some documentaries about American novelists, short story writers or poets approach their subject experimentally, such as I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which uses the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel to tell a bigger story about Blackness in contemporary America. Other documentaries focus on American writers in different fields to literature, such as Public Speaking (about essayist Fran Lebowitz — 2010) and Life Itself (about film critic Roger Ebert — 2014). 

Success levels for these films have varied, but they have each reached a certain number of spectators by virtue of having an American icon as the centerpiece. L’écrivain et son double, released outside of France under the title Through the Writer’s Mirror, deserves a similarly large audience. Directed by Alexandre Westphal, the documentary is about the American novelist, short story writer, poet and painter Percival Everett: a polymath whose primary artistic output, literature, has seen over 30 published books in 40 years. The documentary subject was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, and his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction (2023), which won the BAFTA and Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2024.

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Spanning genres as diverse as crime, western, campus novel and bildungsroman — and balancing absurdist comedy, self-deprecation, social issues and graphic violence — Everett’s novels, which he is most known for, refuse to be one thing. This is also the case for Through the Writer’s Mirror. Westphal’s documentary prefers to keep several plates spinning. It shifts between readings of extracts from Everett novels (from an actor played by Avant Strangel) and interviews with the subject in his study (conducted by Westphal over several years), alongside footage of Everett driving, fishing and teaching creative writing workshops at the University of Southern California (where he has held the title of Distinguished Professor of English for 17 years). Through the Writer’s Mirror also incorporates archival footage of topics important to the novelist’s work, such as Native American conservation and lynchings by the KKK.

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Through the Writer’s Mirror begins with Strangel’s unnamed character reading the opening of Erasure. He is a towering silhouette against artificially constructed, all-white walls and ceiling. As the actor reads, his silhouette changes position and is later duplicated. At one point, the words from the extract being read appear on one of the white walls (which later becomes red), establishing the plays with position and projection pursued throughout Westphal’s film. Here, the complication of source and destination — or speaker and listener — are results of the trifocal perspective. As Westphal’s “Avec Percival Everett” subtitle tells the spectator, Everett is the focus of (and is expected to be in) the documentary, but the subject’s lens is first framed by the protagonist of Erasure, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison — which is then framed by the actor reading Monk’s first-person narration. This Russian doll approach to narratorial perspective and position is at the heart of Erasure, so it is fitting that Westphal’s documentary begins in this way.

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Later scenes of Strangel’s actor take place in new settings. A reading from Everett’s novel The Water Cure (2007), for instance, is set in an empty classroom, complete with a blackboard. Away from these moments, when Everett is in the frame instead of the actor, words that do not come from his novels are projected on the walls of his studio: the names of real lynching victims, as listed in his novel The Trees (2021) when a character called Damon Thruff is tasked with writing them out by hand (something Everett reveals to Westphal that he also did himself). In an additional, masterful complication of this visual trick later in the film, Westphal has Everett stand in front of the studio wall so the names are projected through him, appearing on his body and face. Towards the end of Through the Writer’s Mirror, a further layer or mirror is provided when footage of Everett fishing cuts to the actor watching the subject fish, courtesy of another wall projection. This is the only time in Westphal’s film that the actor and Everett are effectively in the same room, as they are otherwise left to occupy separate spaces.

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At another stage of Through the Writer’s Mirror, Westphal projects scenes from Sidney Poitier films on the walls of Everett’s studio. This takes place as the writer talks to Westphal about his bizarre, fascinating novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) — a book Everett confesses is motivated by “gameplaying,” but is about “the real-world consequences of identity.” The novel is about the life of a protagonist named Not Sidney Poitier, which is defined by people mistaking him for the real Poitier (who he also looks like) and mishearing or misunderstanding his name. To make things trickier, Not Sidney’s life becomes a series of uncanny episodes that are increasingly similar to situations in Poitier films. This novel was the product of a preparatory research process in which Everett watched “all” of Poitier’s films “40 times,” as he says in the documentary. Westphal projects Poitier scenes on the walls, but he also presents them more traditionally, without anything beyond or extra to the original frame. This fluctuation underlines the director’s reluctance to stay in one lane or restrict himself to one stylistic tool. 

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This would be the only way to authentically capture the dynamic, restless, elusive work of Everett on screen — which, incidentally, is where, in my opinion, the critically acclaimed American Fiction falls somewhat short, because it prioritizes linearity over chaos, sincerity over fireworks. Conversely, Through the Writer’s Mirror sets it in its sights to do what Everett attributes to the reading process in one of his interviews with Westphal: “to question artistic authority.” In this conversation, the documentary subject suggests that reading is “the most subversive thing one can do,” despite the distinction he makes for interpreting that reading: “interpretations are not private… the experience of reading is.” For its ability to both question forms of authority — including, paradoxically, its own — and play with the information artistic authorities are responsible for providing, to Westphal the documentary form is as “subversive.” 

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Through the Writer’s Mirror moves freely and purposefully between fact and fiction, giving a pivotal responsibility to an actor playing the character of an actor, but the film always remains most easily categorizable as a documentary. Westphal’s approach befits the work of Everett: an author who has been uncomfortable with traditions, conventions, labels and expected ways of being and doing for his entire career. This worldview is evident in many things the novelist tells Westphal, but is particularly striking in an honest moment when, after the spectators sit in on one of Everett’s writing workshops, he turns to the documentary filmmaker and says: “I’m somewhat ambivalent about teaching the workshops.” Despite the clear expertise and generosity the subject teaches with, the cultural institution of the workshop, as he says, moves towards the idea of “making art for a committee,” which he views as cause for concern.

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After all, Everett is a person who admits that “if I had a [writing] schedule, I’d shoot myself.” Imposed structures for creative output are limiting; to Westphal’s subject, “it’s the thinking that matters.” The greying man in his sixties with glasses on his head, stroking his dog — who Through the Writer’s Mirror first shows only after the introduction of Strangel’s character — is deceptively ordinary. Though Everett is calmly distracted rather than insisting his audience jumps through unpredictable hoops of ironic perspective and structure, which is often the case in his works, he still makes his spectator wait before talking about the books he is most known for. First, Everett wants to discuss his record collection and say some words about his current favorites. Then, he recounts a long, amusing story about his guitar, which he bought mistakenly thinking it was one thing before realizing many years later that it was something completely different. 

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Everett novels are driven by productive distraction. They are constantly many different things at once, whether it’s Erasure or The Trees, other works that Westphal’s documentary includes readings from, such as Assumption (2011), or the many titles that did not make the cut, including James (2024), the latest important Everett book, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) from the perspective of Jim, the slave who is Huck’s companion. Being multiple things at once is what makes Everett’s novels, but also his other art, so intriguing. Through the Writer’s Mirror is its own process of plate spinning. It is its own juggling act. Westphal takes different approaches and keeps competing interests in the air. He refuses to drop anything.

George Kowalik (@kowalik_george) has a PhD in contemporary transatlantic literature from King’s College London, where he also taught American literature for three years. He is both a short fiction and culture writer, and was shortlisted for Ouen Press’ 2019 Short Story Competition. His work can be found at georgeoliverkowalik.wordpress.com.

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