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I Found It at the Movies (Holiday Swoons)

December 24, 2017 in City Matters, Film Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

Every year I spend the holiday season watching old films on the biggest screens possible, and every year this delights me as few activities in cities ever do. Alone in the dark shoulder to shoulder with rapt strangers, I feel connected to the human condition in a way that is more pleasurably than painfully melancholy. Yesterday, in a green, absinthe-infused hangover I watched 1936’s My Man Godfrey–the Carole Lombard and William Powell vehicle that’s as much smoke as it is fire–long-lashed and heavy-lidded and soaked in a satiny, Depression-era fuck-you politique. I loved it. The day before, I poured vermouth and sherry and watched 2008’s A Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin’s neurotic, erotic paean to love lost and barely found. Its deep skepticism of blood bonds enthralls me almost as much as Deneuve’s red-lipped what-the-fuckery. This is to say: quite a lot.

Today at Metrograph, I ogled The Apartment, one of my favorite Billy Wilder films of all time, which means it’s one of my favorite films, period. Featuring midcentury, midtown New York at is its most woebegone and most sharp-toothed (most rumpled and stylish, too), this 1960 love story lampoons corporate America’s immorality while not-so-secretly upholding underdogs of every walk of life. Not only is it the most Jewish Christmas movie Hollywood ever made, it’s the baseline for all NYC-based romcoms since–all romcoms worth their salt, really. As clever as it is melancholy, New York’s grabby, glamorous melting pot presides as a central character, and its lonelyhearts discover each other via a Manhattan scavenger hunt of great flourishes and rueful afterthoughts. Neither Jack Lemmon nor Shirley MacLaine were ever so sweethearted again, and that’s saying a mouthful. Movie love to you all tonight. Any light in the dark deserves to be honored in this holy terror of a year.

The Hazards of Building a Bildungsrosman

October 27, 2017 in Book Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

One of the weirdest things about writing a book about my early life, which is why I call this memoir a bildungsrosman, is that there are days when I’m channeling my elementary school self or my mother at 16 or my dad at 26. Somedays this is interesting, other days it’s plain devastating. Today falls under the devastating category and it’s like I just watched the goodbye scenes in Terms of Endearment: Ain’t no way I can hold back the tears pouring down my cheeks though I don’t notice them until I feel wet on my cheeks and even then assume the ceiling has sprung a leak. Metaphorically at least, this is not so far from the truth. It’s all coming down.

The #MeToo of My Tween Acting Career

October 18, 2017 in Age Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Food Matters, Past Matters, TV Matters

This morning, as the sun rose wanly here in Truro (yes, I’m back for the rest of the month), I caught up on the Harvey Weinstein revelations. Nothing unpredictable, I’m afraid, which made them all the more appalling. Woman after woman coming forward with the same clutch of details: the bathrobe, the massage requests, the obsession with showers, the need—nay, the demand—for sexual attention. What angered me most: Harvey claimed he was offering career ascension to hundreds of young women, but all he really was saying was: If you submit to my sexual demands, I will not harmfully, aggressively cockblock your career.

He is a larcenous pig not unlike, say, our alleged president.

As the estimable Gloria Steinem has written—as the Academy of Motion Pictures itself has acknowledged—such predatory behavior is hardly unique to Weinstein. Instead, this “isolate and destroy” brand of toxic masculinity has meant that we women have felt damned if we do and damned if we don’t in terms of sexual resistance.

Again, not news to anyone walking as female in this life.

But Sarah Polley did raise an issue I hadn’t considered in 15 years. In this week’s New York Times, the director addressed her reason for walking away from acting: She felt like prey. Scratch that. She was prey. And it made me think about my own career as a tween actor.

I never talk about why I quit acting. The truth is that it’s probably no loss to the world. As as an adult, I’m good enough on stage or in front of a camera as a commentator but not especially adept at pretending I’m anything but myself. As a young person, though, I really, really wanted to be an actor and experienced a surprising degree of success. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy