I decided to watch Plush because I dig some of Catherine Hardwicke’s work: Lords of Dogtown and The Nativity Story. If I had known that Plush was described as an erotic thriller, I would have rolled my eyes and kept it moving. When I think erotic in media, I think of a dash of a good story with a lot of excuses to feature soft-core porn in tv series such as Red Shoe Diaries and The Hunger. It doesnot help that Plush has some really bad acting and a mish mash of cheesy premises: rock stars in Fatal Attraction.
So why did I love Plush?!? I thought Plush worked.

SPOILERS

This adult teenage girl (19 years old) gets success with her brother in rock n’ roll. Like an idiot, she gets married to a grown ass man who should have known better than to marry someone that young and a rockstar to boot. They have two kids so her brother parties alone and dies of a drug overdose. She is devastated and is no longer able to play house so she tries to move on by returning to the road, but her new sound is a flop.
Can she be successful without her brother? Cue bad decisions. She is a rock star so it is fairly predictable: she drinks too much and ends up having an affair with her brother’s lookalike replacement (ew, incestuous), whom she initially thought was gay. When she returns home, you find out why: her husband is all sizzle, but no steak. Duh, you married him when you were an infant! You have no discernment skills! And she still doesn’t because the new guy is a complete psycho, but really inspirational artistically and sexually. If he wasn’t such a psycho and didn’t explicitly mess with her family dynamic, he probably could have been a kept man for years. I’m not condoning, just observing. I won’t give away the twist and turns-some were predictable, but suffice it to say that it was just the right dose of messiness and cheesiness.
What made Plush interesting was the gender subversion of the rock icon: how does it look when you have an entourage willing to cover for you as you do dirt to cultivate your artistic vision, but also have to seem perfect to your family if you’re a mother and a wife. If you’re not Pat Benatar, the tension created by the different iconic expectations of wife and mother (smiling, supportive, faithful, doesn’t need an orgasm just happy to be home with you) and rock star (drinking, dangerous, drugging, highly sexual, selfish) is obvious. There are some really interesting things tucked away in the drama.
Plush may be a hot mess that only should be shown after midnight on cable, but I loved it.