In Which We Contemplate Our Daemons

The Spirit Animal

by KARA VANDERBIJL

At the shelter, they recommend that you sit on the floor and wait for the right animal to approach you. Ideally, you will connect with an animal that best fits your needs, based on any number of inexplicable factors that draw a cautious prowler to the hollow of your lap.

If you have a 9-5, it will be fine home alone during the day. If you like to have loud company, it won’t have to hide under the bed. If you don’t have money, it will never require medical attention. If you are insecure, it won’t look at other humans. This highly anticipated encounter, like going unescorted on a Friday night to any local watering hole, is a game of pheromones that eludes the human subject and thus makes it ridiculous.

neil gaiman by kelli bickman in 1996

Any understanding between man and animal (as with man and man) is nothing but a profound misunderstanding. When claws or fangs draw blood, we expect a beast’s empathy, if not its complete understanding that it deserves death and punishment. Why then, in the subtle lairs of our living rooms, do we endow upon the creature our wildest animal instincts? How can we laugh at the proclivity to chase sunbeams across a wood floor?

elizabeth taylor

The natural state of any living thing, except a Happy Meal, is birth and death. What happens in between those two is the great debate. Before the spirit animal, men and women were driven to hide their essences elsewhere: gaudy containers, pieces of jewelry, bottles rolled away to the safety of the sea. Like what people did before blogging, it is something we may never know for sure. There was nowhere to hide in plain sight.

Of the first cat I remember, auspiciously named Plato, we saw only snatches of dark fur, a paw flung carelessly over the edge of an armchair. When unprovoked, he remained indifferent, although ornery for such a handsome and well-fed specimen. Provoked (easily), he appeared twice his usual size, producing unearthly growls that eventually got him banished to a curtained back bedroom. On one occasion he stalked angrily around the coffee table while my brother and I trembled on all fours behind the sofa. He suddenly appeared in front of us only to leap, claws extended, and we screamed. Only his mistress, my aunt, and sometimes my uncle, could coax him into their arms – a privilege no doubt acquired by the blood sacrifice of many small and unfortunate creatures. Left to his own devices, we felt sure that he would murder us in cold blood.

Did philosophy or religion exist without this animal? At the incline of its head nations tumbled, empires fell to dust. Nepalese peaks rose in imitation of its clever ears. At the very least, corners proved darker for its playful ambush of passing feet, windows larger to frame its wise face. The arts owe more to the feline than to any other creature, save perhaps the horse. Somewhere in the desert, an ancient Sphinx rests on time and mankind’s imperfect worship.

Unlike its feral counterparts, the housecat is a follower of Epicurus, its basest passions restrained by a constant striving after pleasure. Survival is less important than aesthetics, a subject explored by the animal in great detail as it reclines fluidly on the rug. Its ennui humanizes it, as it progressively forgets (intentionally, unintentionally) why it was placed on earth.

grace kelly

We inherited our first family cat in California, when my parents managed an apartment building. An elderly tenant moved or passed away, and according to standard apartment procedure the managers ended up with whatever was left beneath sinks or in the back of the closet.

Mikey was an ancient orange and white tabby and I think we saw him a grand total of five times while we were in his possession. He spent most of his time wedged underneath my parents’ bed, although we made sure he was still alive by shaking his box of dry food and calling his name, a clever ruse that got him to frolic like a kitten down the hallway. In the mornings he mewled outside shut bedroom doors, awake only when nobody else was. Shortly thereafter we moved, and another tenant took him. In all likelihood he still lives in the San Fernando Valley surrounded by Koreans.

The survival of a species depends entirely on the ability of its hunters, on the secrecy of its cache. Infamous tiger-slaughterer Jim Corbett shared pleasantries with many a man-eating feline at dusk over bait. If they lunged, he fired his gun. An otherwise grandfatherly-looking man, he mostly hunted alone with his small dog Robin. In tales about the Chowgarh tigress it is unclear whether he was hunting or wooing her. Concrete slabs mark the spots in India and Nepal where he finished them; we can imagine him tenderly composing pet epitaphs at night to the howl of nearby monkeys. He devoted his later years to the preservation of endangered species, no doubt fearful of karma.

Dad kept a freshwater aquarium for a few years, and Mom indulged in parakeets and a couple of yellow canaries. My parents provided us with a cat every few years, despite their general reserve towards the animal kingdom. It showed a remarkable ability on their part to see our potential for compassion. Still they were the first to pick up the slack when it proved once again (as it always did) that we were still very young, and that we could not yet grasp how another living thing might need us. They allowed disquiet at the foot of their bed and shoveled through litter boxes and patiently satisfied another hungry stomach.

aldous huxley

To identify with or as is the siren song of this generation, an ongoing game of association in which the subject pinpoints behaviors, fashions, morals, or ideologies and appropriates them to himself. (e.g. I must be Liz Lemon because I think and act and speak like Liz Lemon. Ryan Gosling must be my boyfriend because Ryan Gosling speaks and looks and thinks and acts like I want my boyfriend to act.) The spirit, it would seem, has become as much of a consumer as the body. This is vanity.

For a long time the most desirable relationship was such a one as existed between Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, or between Lucy and Aslan, a bond in which similitude transcends any differences of kind or quality. In any case, this relationship seemed highly preferable to any story in which animals only talk amongst themselves, which is believable only inasmuch as reality television is believable.

In the early 00s, my parents somehow became acquainted with farmers in the Haute Savoie, a portion of France irreversibly wrinkled by that majestic mountain range known as the Alps. From them we received goat’s cheese, lessons in vocabulary, and a chaton – a tiny ball of brown and white fur we unorginally named Simba. We brought him home in a cardboard box. He peed on a towel. From the very beginning, we strove to teach him the difference between right and wrong using a squirt gun. He chased our ankles and climbed papered walls. When he took to running in wild circles around the apartment day and night and howling at the moon, we released him in a meadow near a friendly-looking barn and stacks of warm, plush hay. He did not look back.

Otherwise, it was our constant hopping from one location to another that prohibited a long-term relationship with a pet. It was also our own inability to remain constant, our chameleonesque capability to blend into language and space, adopting the same awkward ease with which an academic handles reality: drawing on a vast well of knowledge, but with very little practice.

Domesticating an animal, like educating a child, rationalizes its wilderness of instincts, robs it of the power quivering on its whiskers.  An oblong box filled with sand might just as well be a place to shit as a place to rest in peace. If eternity is man’s natural habitat, he cannot be blamed for chasing it by dividing his soul into parts.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Jeffrey Eugenides‘ The Marriage Plot.

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In Which She Gave Herself To Sin And Providence

This Blessed Arrangement

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
406 pages

Madeleine Hanna's time at Brown University has been confusing: she chose to study literature out of (she feels) a superficial love for the works of Austen, James, and the Bronte sisters, but all the cool kids on campus are smoking pot and spouting unintelligible streams of Derrida. She debates the pros and cons of a primarily black wardrobe, and wonders whether or not she should wear her glasses. Now, on a sunny graduation day in 1982, she wakes up with a massive hangover and the sneaking suspicion that her life is not going quite as planned.

It should come as no surprise to readers that Jeffrey Eugenides, who has turned out a novel every decade since his own graduation from Brown in 1983, should return to youth in his latest, The Marriage Plot. He is perhaps our last Greek tragedian; his pet device, the coming-of-age novel. Yet Eugenides does not simply have us sit back on our heels as he unravels the average young American’s psyche — he has flavored the absurdly normal with the equally strange. The Virgin Suicides adopted a grubby, husky, continually horny collection of boys to witness the demise of five young suburban sisters, in the style of a Greek chorus. In Middlesex, his second, Pulitzer-prize winning bildungsroman, Eugenides transforms what would have otherwise been a boring immigrant tale into a fantasy involving incest and the intersexed.

Fewer fireworks fizzle off the pages of this year’s book, however — the solemn opening, "To start with, look at all the books" rings neither of suicidal gore nor of Middlesex’s daring, "I was born twice, first as a baby girl on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." The exhortation is tamer, perhaps a bit more nostalgic, with something inherently self-congratulating built in. Look at all the books. Eugenides, himself an instructor at Princeton, winks at his audience with a tale that is as in tune with our super-critical generation as it is pleasing to our innermost souls. To say that a coming-of-age novel is pleasing to the populace, especially in age when art has become purely self-reflective, is an understatement.The Marriage Plot, like all novels of its kind, tickles that sensitive place you were in while you were growing into yourself; the pleasure found in identifying with a young, struggling protagonist is practically masturbatory.

Of course, when Eugenides instructs us to look at the books, he is really instructing us to observe his Madeleine: bright, beautiful, Waspish despite herself, and altogether unremarkable except for the fact that her senior thesis deals with the 19th-century "marriage plot" — that literary trope exploiting women’s societal need to marry in order to create riveting romances, a trope which ultimately disappeared with the sexual revolution. But “sexual equality,” argues Eugenides through his heroine, "good for women, had been bad for the novel." Novels had lost their primary conflict — resolution, once complete in matrimony, had to find other ways to express itself. Ironically, while Madeleine argues her little heart out on paper, she finds herself caught in an impossibly Victorian love triangle. Daydreaming, spiritual — and Hanna parent-approved — Mitchell Grammaticus has long held a torch for her, but Madeleine has fallen in love with a brooding, handsome biology major named Leonard Bankhead whom she met, of all places, in a literary criticism class.

Leonard has a big secret, though: he is manic-depressive, a reality that lurks underneath his charisma and wide-ranging intelligence. Even though he’s bedded half of Brown, he is magnetically attracted to Madeleine, a girl who has the audacity to believe in romance even when “the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love”. After a whirlwind affair that begins with an innocent slice of apple pie and ends between Leonard’s ratty student-apartment sheets, Madeleine finally musters up the courage to say the three fateful words. Her cerebral lover, however, reminds her immediately of Barthes’ statement that after the first admission of love, the avowal has no meaning whatsoever.

Madeleine dumps him almost as quickly as she throws the Barthes volume at his head (good for her), and leaves heartbroken. Leonard, however, ends up far more worse for the wear than she, realizing his mistake shortly before succumbing to psychotic depression.

As in his previous works, Eugenides weaves a tale that moves backwards and forwards in time, prophesying the outcome that his characters will fight for or against. When Madeleine wakes up on graduation day, she is merely hours away from finding out that Leonard has been hospitalized — and from choosing to forgo the ceremony in order to be with him. If the constant interplay between pre-narrative and current events makes The Marriage Plot difficult to follow chronologically, it does allow us to pay particular attention to the three young people whose ideas and emotions are in imminent danger of being exposed to… well, the real world.

After his discharge from the psych ward, Leonard and Madeleine travel to the Cape, where he plans to participate in a fellowship studying the genetics of yeast — an obscure study, the details of which Eugenides shares in almost excruciating detail. Here Madeleine finds herself isolated among mostly males, uncomfortably bridging the gap between her increasingly despondent boyfriend and his colleagues, who must never find out about Leonard’s illness. If anything, his condition has worsened — increasingly reclusive, overweight, and indifferent to her, Leonard proves to be a burden. When Madeleine’s mother and sister come to visit, they find lithium in the bathroom. This discovery throws Madeleine, whose interaction with her parents up to this point pegged her as the favorite, into a position that makes her older sister’s failing marriage as trivial as… yeast. Mrs. Hanna sends Madeleine ominous news clippings in the mail about relationships between manic-depressives and their spouses; meanwhile, Leonard secretly experiments with his dosage, lowering his intake little by little in an attempt to outsmart both his therapists and the disease. Mania slinks in, sullying the edges of his consciousness and, by consequence, Madeleine’s. “It was as if,” she begins to understand, “in order to love Leonard fully, [she] had to wander into the same dark forest where he was lost.”

In a novel where nothing spreads faster than mental disturbances, religious enlightenment creeps at a glacier pace. Mitchell, rebuffed by the woman he believes to be his future mate, departs for Europe in the company of a friend, Larry, with India as his final destination. While in Paris, the two meet up with Larry’s girlfriend Claire, who has been studying feminist theory at the Sorbonne and, comically, hates men. Over dinner, Mitchell finds himself consumed by lust for her and haunted by her accusations that he objectifies every woman he sees.

Since Mitchell weirdly conglomerates the Virgin Mary and Eve in almost every female he sees, this is not far from the truth; however, Claire’s utter inability to recognize her own sexism turns the stay in Paris into a sort of intellectual farce. Mitchell and Claire butt heads on almost every issue, from eating couscous in the Latin Quarter to the way he looks at women when they pass, but it is where their disciplines intersect that Claire becomes hilariously vocal.

"The religion of the Goddess was organic and environmental - it was about the cycle of nature - as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, which are just about imposing the law and raping the land." 

Mitchell glanced at Larry to see that he was nodding in agreement. Mitchell might have nodded, too, if he were going out with Claire, but Larry looked sincerely interested in the Goddess of the Babylonians. 

"If you dislike a conception of God as masculine," Mitchell said to Claire, "why replace it with one that's feminine? Why not get rid of the whole idea of a gendered divinity?" 

"Because it is gendered. It is. Already. Do you know what a mikva is?" She turned to Larry. "Does he know what a mikva is?" 

"I know what a mikva is," Mitchell said. 

"O.K., so my mom goes to a mikva every month after her period, right? To cleanse herself. To cleanse herself from what? From the power to give birth? To create life? They turn the greatest power a woman has into something they should be ashamed about."

"I agree with you, that's absurd." 

"But it's not about the mikva. The whole institutionalized form of Western religion is all about telling women they're inferior, unclean, and subordinate to men. And if you actually believe in any of that stuff, I don't know what to say." 

"You're not having your period right now, are you?" Mitchell said. 

We laugh, but sense uncomfortably that Eugenides makes a valid point. Mitchell worries constantly about money, becomes distracted during Mass at the Sacre-Coeur, shares a skinny European hotel bed with a stranger. When Claire decides she’s a lesbian, Mitchell and Larry escape from France to Greece, the land of Mitchell’s (and Eugenides’) ancestors. Eugenides insensitively compares Athens to a "giant bathtub filled with dirty suds." Mitchell squeezes his eyes shut and waits to be struck by a lightning bolt of faith at the foot of the Acropolis. We sense that the endless queue of stereotypical personalities that Mitchell meets — a Greek homosexual wearing his shirt wide open to reveal gold necklaces, Evangelical fanatics, traveling lunatics — are not proof that Eugenides is a poor writer, but rather that Mitchell is incredibly judgmental.

Mitchell recalls his time at Brown:

He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were 'political' and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism.

Unsurprisingly, Mitchell is blind to his monumental self-righteousness.

What saves The Marriage Plot from falling into an endless pool of clichés — ah yes, the European jaunt in search of self-discovery, the overly intellectual youngsters jumping headfirst into existential crisis after existential crisis — is the nostalgia Eugenides fosters for a time that is not yet so far away that we cannot remember it, yet completely out of digital touch. We realize, with an indulgent ache in our hearts, that none of this story (in fact, none of Eugenides’ works) could have taken place in the digital age, which is perhaps why he placed them so carefully in the 1970s and ‘80s. Can we understand the almost-mythical traveler’s checks, Mother Teresa sightings, Cold War crazes, and Reagan administrations that he describes? Yes. But we cannot understand the obsession of a generation looking to see or touch information that the average toddler can access today.

The Virgin Suicides was succint and shocking in both execution and subject; Middlesex proved over-indulgent and rambling, faults that we can only forgive in light of its bold investigation into hermaphroditism. Undoubtedly both will age better than his new work, which fades into obscurity next to other brilliant campus novels like Tartt's The Secret History or Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, to which The Marriage Plot has already been favorably compared. If nothing else, we will turn to Eugenides as an archivist of the '70s and '80s in America, viewed through his kaleidoscope of Greek and Detroit heritage.

Considerably sharpened by the lack of lithium in his system, Leonard makes a move on Madeleine if she but extricates herself from the bed. They have sex almost constantly, a surge of lust that has Madeleine — quite starved of any kind of stimulation — quite manic. She obsesses over his member: "Leonard’s was highly particular to her, almost a third presence in the bed. She found herself sometimes judiciously weighing it in her hand. Did it all come down to the physical, in the end? Is that what love was? Life was so unfair. Madeleine felt sorry for all the men who weren’t Leonard."

Of course, Leonard’s penis merely replaces his manic-depression as the focal point of their relationship; Eugenides allows his characters a hot, sweaty passion that later leads into the most complex and frightening psychotic breakdown Leonard experiences while they are together. Across a dozen oceans, Mitchell volunteers at Mother Teresa's organization, where he wipes fevered brows. Madeleine writes that she and Leonard are going to be married, a letter which — oh, the foreignness! — he picks up at an American Express office and crumples, envelope and all, into the bottom of his backpack.

Is it a coincidence that Leonard, Madeleine, and Mitchell represent three disciplines that claim to explain the universe? I don’t think so. One might even argue that the ease (or lack thereof) with which each of them adapts to life outside the university determines the truth of their intellectual pursuits. Leonard, with biology, occupies what we might see as the colder, more precise side of the spectrum; his mental illness, however, numbs the bold claims of his discipline by laying waste to his mind, body, and consequently his life. Mitchell, whose spiritual search begins at Brown under a particularly astute professor, dreams of God, a dream perhaps conflated with his idealistic love for Madeleine.

Despite his good intentions and his willingness to place himself in locations where enlightenment might be found, Mitchell fails to be compassionate. He enjoys the idea of himself as a volunteer in India, but when he must change bandages and clean up excrement, he balks and runs away. Even Madeleine, whose simply personality may fail to hook the reader, proves herself more moral than Mitchell; she cares for Leonard selflessly until the end. Ever the illusionist, she continually questions truth and morality. While her artistic temperament balances Leonard, it ruins Mitchell, who regards her, as he regards all women, both as feminine perfection and a destructive temptation. Leonard, however, she almost saves.

India's stark poverty, and all the shit and trash that go along with it, stands in complete opposition with the opulence of Leonard and Madeleine’s European honeymoon. The trip is a disaster. In Monaco, Leonard dresses himself in a cape, gambles unrestrainedly with questionable people, basically rapes his wife, and disappears during the night. Madeleine questions their ability to remain together, especially as Leonard's guilt over the occurrence sinks him irretrievably into despair. The Victorian romance for which she yearns had disappeared when marriage was no longer connected to material gain and immaterial gain, as Madeleine and Leonard know only too well, lacks meaning — it lacks a signified. Unquestionably, Leonard benefits the most from their union. But while the idea that the wife brings the true bounty to a marriage seems like a general pat on the back to women, it sucks so much to be a woman in Eugenides' novels that we can’t feel anything but pity for Madeleine. Leonard’s eventual disappearance brings Mitchell running to the rescue, a poor mockery of the Messiah. It isn’t until he can’t satisfy her in bed that Mitchell realizes his mistake, and is consequently enlightened. And after four hundred pages of merely reacting to the mundane cataclysm of her life, Madeleine finally decides to live for herself. Her thesis gets published. The romance ends. She becomes an interesting character.

Of the three, Leonard’s is the most fascinating story, and the one to which the author does the least justice. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times conjectured that Eugenides modeled his troubled polymath after David Foster Wallace, a radical assumption mostly spurred by the bandana Leonard habitually wears on his head. This absurd claim (which Eugenides denies, by the way) is as exaggerated as Wallace's talent, which exploded into the stratosphere after his death. To compare The Marriage Plot to Jonathan Franzen’s literary attempts is not quite as ridiculous as it is dangerous. Who doesn't wish they could take back the hours they devoted to The Corrections? Eugenides himself is a precarious talent, relying as he does on the siren’s call of our collective youth. In ten years we may not find him as alluring.

Kara Vanderbijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Breakfast at Tiffany's.

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In Which We Furnish Our Life With The Usual

On the fiftieth anniversary of Breakfast at Tiffany's...

The Proud Look of It 

by KARA VANDERBIJL
 
None of my memories from childhood involve creaky swings in an overgrown backyard or lemonade on the porch. In fact, our homes rarely had backyards and our porches have never been the kind you drink lemonade on. We've always been apartment-dwelling city folk, and growing up the idea of playing outdoors was so alien to my brother and I that when we finally moved into a house with a honest-to-goodness backyard, we rarely spent any time in it.  

(Before you notify anybody about this, you should know that we both turned out fine.) 

Without a venue for our antics, we had to find unconventional ways to amuse ourselves. So it was always a treat when Mom would disappear shortly after lunch and reappear with lipstick on, a sure sign that adventure was around the corner. We'd buckle into our ancient Honda (named Henri, not to be confused with Henry) and sit in excited discomfort until the air-conditioning kicked in. Then it was wherever the 405 freeway could take us & the sky was the limit. 

Sometimes it involved strolling down Olvera Street. Sometimes we'd drive to a tiny library and check out half of their children’s books. Sometimes we'd visit a really fancy grocery store far away from our house, the only establishment at the time that sold Orangina in individual pear-shaped glass bottles. 

On really good days, we'd visit IKEA. 

When you don't live in one place for very long and you can't afford fancy furniture that might break when you haul it halfway across the world, IKEA becomes a sort of haven. After all, it’s exactly the same everywhere on the planet. You know that if you're in Europe somewhere and you have a sudden hankering for four-dollar Swedish meatballs you can walk in and get a plate of them for four euros. You know that if you’re stranded you can just walk in and collapse onto any sofa and no one will tell you to leave. You know that if you forgot a pen there will always be golf pencils available in a plastic box on the wall. And so on. 

I’m not quite sure how they do it. Somehow, with a few dashes of blue and yellow paint and bizarre Swedish names, something as normal and unexciting as a furniture store can become everything from an exotic wonderland to a comfortable evening at home in front of the fire. As a child I had fantasies of moving in—pitching a tent in the shortcut between the light bulb section and the kids interior décor section and calling it home. Other times I would choose endless combinations of sofas and coffee tables and kitchens, just so that I’d be set when I grew up and got my own place. I still have a crazy habit of classifying furniture in “best look for best price” every time I walk through the showroom. 

Later on, when my family did end up moving halfway across the world, it was comforting to know that most of our furniture would still be from IKEA. Our bookshelves would come in flat boxes and our sofas would come covered in bubble wrap. Our tea lights would still come by the hundred in plastic bags. There would always be exactly the right amount of screws to construct each piece of furniture. IKEA, by far the most empathetic of anybody we came into contact with, understood that we still couldn’t speak French and provided assembly instructions in ten different languages for our convenience. The ice cream was still only fifty cents. 

When I grew up and moved away for college, some of the first things I bought to spruce up a stark dorm room came from IKEA. When we had papers to write and needed an excuse to run away for a while, IKEA offered the cheapest vittles in town. I’ve had dates at IKEA and I’ve had some of the best family dinners over Christmas break at IKEA. There’s no better place to go after a movie, to digest sushi, or to find random odds and ends nobody else sells. It’s there if you need a restroom or if you’re homesick or if you’re PMSing. 

It’s a lot like Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Even those who have never seen Blake Edwards’ 1961 film are familiar with the timeless image of Audrey Hepburn smiling enigmatically in a little black dress and pearls, a cigarette just inches from her mouth. Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a New York socialite who takes interest in her new neighbor Paul Varjak (played by George Peppard) and drags him into a glamorous world of parties and scandalous escapades. While she maintains a poised and elegant front for the men who want her company, she moonlights as a vulnerable and neurotic young woman who just wants to find her place and someone to share it with. 

In an iconic opening sequence, a lone yellow taxicab glides up Fifth Avenue and stops for a young woman to emerge. It’s early in the morning and “Moon River” is playing in the background and before we know anything about Hepburn’s character Holly Golightly, we already feel the displacement and loneliness she feels looking into the windows of Tiffany’s jewelry store. With her pastry and cheap cup of coffee she just doesn’t belong, no matter how she’s dressed or who she entertains. As the movie progresses, the boutique becomes a symbol of everything Holly wants, just out of her reach behind pristine display windows.

“You know those days when you get the mean reds? No, [not the blues], the blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of…well, when I get it the only thing that does me any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there,” says Holly to Paul Varjak the first time they meet. "If I could find a real-life place that’d make me feel like Tiffany’s, then — then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name!"

There are many things I enjoy about the film. No matter what the snobs say, it has a lot to offer as far as critical analysis goes. But on a purely superficial level, that line of Holly's grabs me every time and won’t let go. Maybe it's because there is no word in French for home and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm not sure if I’m in the aisle seat or in somebody’s spare room. Maybe it’s because I’ve fallen prey to the common female problem of wanting to identify with Audrey Hepburn. In any case, when I discovered Breakfast at Tiffany’s at age sixteen it quickly became my favorite film.   

In college, a lot of other English majors were unsurprisingly surprised to discover this about me. It’s a well-known fact that if you're an English major you’re supposed to have favorite films like Memento and shun anything resembling a romantic comedy (unless it’s (500) Days of Summer). Second, when you look past the glitz and glamour of Hepburn’s performance, there really isn’t much to be said of Breakfast at Tiffany's. You could complain about the blatant racism, express concern at the excessive drinking, or write it off as a waste of time. Truth is, it just doesn’t have much of a plot. From the moment Holly Golightly emerges from the taxicab to eat her pastry in front of Tiffany’s to the moment she and Cat fall into Paul Varjak’s arms, the film is just a series of seemingly unrelated events that happen to bring two people together in the end.

In reality, Breakfast at Tiffany's is a fantasy. It is a story of two unlikely people falling in love in a New York that only exists in dreams. It’s a world where the streets of Manhattan are empty and mafia members are just kind old men in Sing-Sing. It’s a world where Brazilian politicians fall in love with escort girls, where people in New York actually know their neighbors, where Tiffany’s engraves romantic messages on Cracker Jack prizes, and where happiness is drinking champagne for breakfast. Holly Golightly is a "real phony", a character so unbelievably believable that we want to have faith in her fantasy. In a world full of divorce and dead younger brothers and financial hardship, we want to believe that going to Tiffany’s can make everything better.   

After all, maybe that’s the reason we do anything — maybe that’s why we go to movies, and make love, and throw pennies into the Fontana di Trevi in Rome. Maybe that’s why we find comfort in Swedish furniture. We’re just looking for a real-life place like home. But then again, maybe you’re not like me and you’ve already found those people and places that are as comfortable to you as golf pencils and cheap meatballs are to me. I hope you have.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Downton Abbey. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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