In Which We Utilize A Metric Of Vulnerability

Swatting It Away

by ARIANNA STERN

Bridesmaids
dir. Paul Feig
125 minutes

Annie (Kristen Wiig) is having casual sex with a rough-yet-clumsy partner (a totes ridic Jon Hamm). Even before he says the handful of mean-spirited things that define him, the audience is asked to dislike Hamm's character because he's inconsiderate in bed. He ignores Annie’s repeated pleas to slow down and her anguished facial expressions. Vilifying a man who wouldn't even try to please a woman: It's not that other filmmakers do the opposite, it's just that it's a point they might not think to make.

Bridesmaids follows Annie, a 30-something single woman with a dull job. Her childhood best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), gets engaged and asks Annie to be the maid of honor. A rivalry develops between Annie and Helen (Rose Byrne), a new friend of Lillian’s, as the two compete for maid-of-honor status. Meanwhile, the other aspects of Annie's life fall apart, from her shitty retail job to her callous friend-with-benefits to her budding romance with a friendly cop.

Bridesmaids offers the audience well-rounded reasons to like some of its women characters: They’re funny, perceptive, good friends. But with two of its major characters, the film uses a metric of vulnerability to endear or distance the characters from the audience. I never found Annie to be especially likeable. She fucked up her best friend’s bridal plans, time and again, in ways that could have been avoided. In that way, she’s a little like Anne Hathaway’s character in Rachel Getting Married, except she gives everyone food poisoning.

“You're like the maid of dishonor,” says Annie's unassuming cop manfriend when they meet for drinks. He says that because Annie had such a huge, drug-induced panic attack that the bridesmaids' plane had to land early. In a somewhat cliché scene about airplane anxiety, Annie takes a pill with alcohol to calm her nerves. Instead, she starts hallucinating and accosts the airline personnel, spotting "a colonial woman" on the wing. A lot of people don't love flying – myself included – but for your best friend, wouldn’t you keep your shit together a little more?

Still, it's a very funny movie, and one that doesn’t underestimate the talents of its mostly-female cast. In contrast to the manic trailers, Bridesmaids has a mix of comedic styles that blends slapsticky physicality, potty humor, and clever dialogue. "Just swat it away," says Lillian on the topic of unwanted blow job propositions. In that early scene, Lillian and Annie talk about sex and relationships in a candid, caring way. Their friendship seems loving, mature, and real – satisfyingly devoid of competition. I wish every film had a friendship like this. I wish every woman did.

Over the course of the film, Annie has temper tantrum after temper tantrum, including once instance where she snaps at her cop crush, "This was a mistake." To make us like the character, Bridesmaids shows us that Annie's going through a lot – she loses her baking business, then her retail job. Her closest friendship is in danger, she has little money, and sustains few romantic prospects.

Annie has some redeeming qualities – namely, her sense of humor and her sincerity – but the film focuses more on her misfortunes than her personality. The development of Annie's character reminded me of Rachel Simmons' suggestion that relatability for female characters is based on pity. Is it a coincidence that the script underwent heavy editing by Apatow and other seasoned Hollywood dudes?

apatow & feig

Annie and Helen (the antagonist) first meet at Lillian’s engagement party, an elegant and expensive-looking affair that betrays the wealth of Lillian's fiancé. Helen is married to his brother, who also makes a considerable sum of money. These details are relevant because of the girl-on-girl jealousy that Bridesmaids tries to inspire. The first shot of Helen has a stylized, slow-motion effect that highlights her neat curls and expensive dress. Some version of this villain appears in every movie targeted at women. She looks immaculate, and is therefore suspect. She’s mannered, invulnerable, and intimidating – "too perfect," in other words.

When the time to raise toasts arises, Annie and Helen compete for closeness with Lillian, culminating in a sing-off. The scene exhibits a hallmark Apatovian quality where situations seem to be as awkward as possible, and then the characters somehow make them more uncomfortable by doing exactly the wrong thing.

I had trouble hating Helen based on her invulnerability. (In the scene where the bridesmaids get food poisoning, she is the only one who doesn't.) While Helen says rude things (on an airplane: "there's more of a sense of community in coach") and assumes that everyone can afford what she can, she never does anything truly cruel. Lillian seems to have a good head on her shoulders, and likely wouldn't remain friends with a mean-spirited sadist.

At the end of the film, when Helen breaks down in tears about her loneliness, the audience is finally supposed to pity-like her. As in all the ways that Bridesmaids tries to manipulate you into liking or disliking someone, Helen’s transformation feels contrived. In an otherwise bold film, this pity-based likability seems stodgy and conventional, making the two major character arcs feel oddly unresolved.

Arianna Stern is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about The Smashing Pumpkins. She tumbls here.

"Mira You're Free With Me" - Carol Bui (mp3)

"Baladi" - Carol Bui (mp3)

"Before We're Vaporized" - Carol Bui (mp3)

Carol's new album, Red Ship, is available now.

In Which We Choose A Brutally Self-Negating Credo

Cool Kids Never Have The Time

by ARIANNA STERN

It is fortunate, if not a little miraculous, that the time in my life in when I was the most alienated was also the time when it was cool to style yourself as an outsider.

For someone who has seen even his grandest rock dreams come true, Billy Corgan sure has chosen a brutally self-negating credo for his 1996 campaign.

– Craig Marks, Spin June '96

My parents first separated in 1993 and legally divorced in 1994, which meant that from the age of five, I had two homes – one in homogenous, affluent Highland Park and the other in Chicago's working-class Uptown neighborhood. My dad's apartment had a severe ant infestation that kept anyone from leaving food exposed for more than 30 minutes, and at night I heard fights break out between our neighbors, some of whom were members of The Latin Kings.

Aside from my brother Josh, no one else saw the stuff of my childhood firsthand. My classmates' parents didn't want their kids spending the night in Uptown, and during the week, my mom's 80-hour workweek kept her from carting kids around. Not that my classmates were exactly crazy about me, anyway. Weirdness was not celebrated in elementary and middle school the way it was in pop culture, especially not when it was coupled with the bitterness I felt because I was struggling.

So the hour-long, traffic-addled rides into the city, the biweekly trips to a run-down Butera on the corner of Greenview and Wilson, the kid-prepared meals, idle hours in front of the television, and most importantly, my brother's and my inability to leave either home independently – all of that was ours alone, and very isolating.

He's an attorney now.

In that strange and singular pocket of loneliness and boredom, pop culture wormed its way in, assuring us that it was okay to be an outsider, as long as you were funny, smart, and creative. Outcast status was a testament to your differentness, your specialness, and maybe even your greatness.

The Smashing Pumpkins were Josh's and my weirdo-heroes, with songs that combined the meandering beauty of shoegaze, pop hooks, and the aggression and catharsis of metal. It was an incredible comfort to see such strong, strange personalities win the adoration of millions. And strange they were: All four band members wore matching eyeliner in this memorable press photo, in which Billy Corgan and D'arcy Wretzky both don tight, silver pants. "Today" is a sexual pop jam about wanting to kill yourself; in the music video, Billy Corgan drives an ice cream truck through the desert, crooning about the scars on his wrists and how he wants to turn you on, he wants to turn you on.

I was an eight-year-old MisShape

I remember Kim Gordon once said some horrible thing about having to play for the jock in Iowa. That jock needs someone like Kim Gordon.

– Billy Corgan, Spin June '96

My mom's work schedule and my dad's sleep schedule meant that Josh and I had to look after one another. Keeping each other distracted and happy consumed all our energies, including those we should have devoted to schoolwork. We built forts and "sledded" down the stairs on a futon. I poured soda over Oreo cereal and ate it. We hurdled over the back of a green, velvety couch and watched music videos on TV, memorably "Tonight, Tonight" after my father had fallen asleep. In a decade supposedly obsessed with irony, Billy Corgan entreated, "believe that life can change, that you're not stuck in vain," as violins swelled melodramatically in the background. I loved its exaggerated optimism and imagination.

The real burn of childhood is its seeming endlessness. Kids have lesser capacity to imagine a bad thing changing for the better, because they haven't seen many things change. They haven't outgrown anything. During times when I literally couldn't imagine what lay ahead of me, and feared I would find more of the same, I saw famous adults and teenagers rewarded for their individualism. The Smashing Pumpkins were one example; so were Janeane Garofalo, Nirvana, Beck, Clarissa Darling, and The Kids in the Hall, among others. It was heartening for me to see, as a kid, so many people opening their eyes, ears, and hearts to a bunch of self-styled misfits. It imbued me with confidence and made me feel included. It made me feel like my differentness – which bullies spotted before I ever thought of it – made me more valuable, not less.

Though I often felt stuck during childhood, I felt in my bones the kind of momentum that every kid feels. I knew I would grow up, and as advertised, time cured nearly all ailments. By high school, my peers and I had enough independence that I lost the horrible inertia that gripped me as a kid. Once, I brought a group of my friends to an ice cream shop near my dad's building, and it felt like a victory for the younger me, a chance at visibility and inclusion.

Toward the end of the 90s, the United States fell out of love with the misfit. Banal pop culture had always coexisted with the idiosyncratic heroes, but the late 90s and early aughts brought a new language that mocked and belittled the persecuted. "Politically incorrect" humor gave powerful people a glimpse of underdog righteousness, asserting that women and minorities oppressed them by demanding too much. Billy Corgan revealed himself to be a defensive misogynist with little self-awareness. Anyway, pop culture's definition of a "misfit" was always aesthetic, not political. The Smashing Pumpkins and their ilk might have self-identified as misfits, but they were still a mostly white, mostly heterosexual, cisgendered, minus-sized coterie. Everyone is a misfit in some way or another.

As a teenager, I revisited the Pumpkins' catalogue, trying to understand the trajectory that extended from my childhood to then. It firmly refused to be understood. Mixed with the painful memories came a powerful nostalgia for the good aspects of my life, particularly that early friendship with my brother. I trusted him completely, a supportive and certain feeling of love. At first, I believed that if I revisited the songs enough, I could desensitize myself from the accompanying feelings, but it didn't work. I remember sobbing on my couch after listening to "Tonight, Tonight," thinking, this can't possibly be healthy. I had the same thought – and the same shuddering, tearful exhalations – while writing this.

I am a writer, in the business of explaining things, and I feel enormous pressure to be as talented and successful as I was different and strange. While I have outgrown almost everything else, I still feel the urge to counterbalance that hardship with brilliant writing that may be beyond my capacity to produce. The gifted-outsider concept was a beacon of hope, but also a commitment I struggle to fulfill. I left behind nearly all of my childhood except for the urgent need to explain myself, letting others into settings in which I was alone.

Arianna Stern is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about her trip to San Francisco. She tumbls here.

"Cherub Rock" - The Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

"Zero" - The Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

"1979" - The Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

In Which We Was Girls Together

The Opposite of Lonely

by ARIANNA STERN

When I came back from my San Francisco spring break trip, I tried to imagine what it was that made me feel so elated the whole time I was there. The exact feeling that I had — one of exuberance, powerfulness, and confidence, almost a feeling of invincibility — I hadn’t felt since I was 18.

Zoey, my host on the trip, was my brother’s onetime girlfriend of eight years. From early on, I intuited that we were the same in some way. Both of us grew up in the same wealthy suburb, grateful for our education but alienated by the homogeneity, segregation, and isolation of our hometown. In high school, she and I ate noodles together, and I learned to say “sex worker,” and Zoey would say sage things like “It’s just like, part of growing up in the suburbs, being bored and assuming that everyone else is having more fun than you’re having.” We put a great deal of thought into D.I.Y. haircuts and the trajectory of Claire Danes’ acting career.

We considered writing “Vote for Nixon” in the sand, but thought better of it.Explaining a friendship like ours to someone outside of it poses a challenge, because pop culture mostly tells stories about women and men. In Toni Morrison’s Sula Nel laments the end of her life’s most important friendship when she says “We was girls together,” and despite my dissimilarity to Morrison’s characters, I knew just what Nel meant. I mourned for her.

There’s something about a friendship in which the other person knows the intimate details of your life and the content of your dreams and still believes that you belong in the life that you imagine for yourself, in spite of everything. The two of us did a lot of imagining. Zoey saw the interior of my childhood home before my parents made much money. She knew that it was dirty, dark, and old. Other kids rarely came to visit, and so I spent a lot of time alone, hoping to leave but not being able. Instead of physically leaving, the two of us dreamed a lot: about the day when I would be a published writer and she would be a chemist living in sunny California. Those are the best kind of friendships, where each friend dreams on behalf of the other.

little silver bugs crawl around the wet sand. They look like beads of mercury.My brother and Zoey broke up when I had just turned 20 and it was wordlessly understood that I couldn’t talk to her for a while, out of loyalty, or out of sensitivity, or out of cowardice. She once promised my brother that she would call me, but she never did. “I was pretty sure your whole family hated me,” she told him. In October I sent Zoey a terrifying email asking her if she wanted to talk again, and we did. And then it just kept happening, each time less frightening than the last.

This city sometimes looks like an easy level of SuperMario.

At first I attributed my joyfulness on the trip to the series of happy accidents that occurred while I was there. To be fair, there were many. Zoey and I ate free falafel pieces and creamy gelato, and drank coffee that got a little thick at the bottom, like caffeinated caramel (please create this, universe). I unexpectedly saw the Gerhard Richter painting from the cover of Daydream Nation at the MoMA and choked up at the first Kahlo piece I’ve ever seen in person. The night of their show, I met most of Neon Indian on a bench outside of a museum. I said hello and wished them good luck, and thought to myself, What are the odds that I would meet this specific group of tourists, as a tourist myself, in a city with over one million people? But San Francisco just seemed to work that way, producing a series of fortunate coincidences that cumulatively seemed a little magical. Strangers introduced themselves, the races were integrated, and even the panhandlers seemed more convincing when they said you were pretty.

It took me a while to realize that I was happy because I was living on borrowed optimism — Zoey’s — because she was still doing what she always did. She imagined that things would be good for me, she planned for it, and they were. Our adolescent sadness seemed like an ugly, abandoned thing, like an empty junk food wrapper left roadside. I thought of it only when I remembered why the two of us live this way, what my life was like when being an independently mobile 21-year-old writer — or what her life was like when being a PhD candidate in Berkeley — seemed like a distant, romantic fantasy. We dreamed a lot, for each other.

Arianna Stern is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"No Aloha" - The Breeders  (mp3)

"Impossible Love" -  Gigi (mp3)

"Local Joke" - Neon Indian (mp3)

"Wellington's Wednesdays" - The Weakerthans (mp3)