Girls, Visions & Everything and High Art
Oh hello
After dinner, at Valerie’s, who I have not mentioned, a new friend, who can only speak in exclamations like: “No!” “Please!” “Stop!” and, my personal favourite: “Unreal!” Valerie makes everyone feel good because she is universally supportive. Everything is amazing all the time. We are all doing amazing things. It’s actually inspiring? She is having friends for dinner, using the most incredible produce from her friend who has a farm in Yorkshire. Each bite she pauses to say: “Unreal! This asparagus is unreal!” All we are really eating is grilled vegetables and bread. Amazing! All you need! The dinner is over and soon I will play violin to this room, which means now all I can think about is the last time I played violin to Iris, building inside me a depth of melancholy for being with Iris, the spectacular tension and, for a moment at least, the heart racing meeting of desire with desire, of a question - communicated in gestures or in words - responded to with “Yes, now.”
But life circles on and on away from Iris and towards new, towards difference. Fruit arrives for dessert, of course, a large plate of citrus. Incredible! We are peeling mandarins when Sam turns to me, slightly lost in my thoughts because of the upcoming performance, and Sam who is too often simply someone who I receive advice from, Sam shows me pointedly his large goldfish eyes and says: “I’m still waiting, Anne, for someone who wants to celebrate me, who expresses admiration for me and asks me to continue, to go on.” He looks around the table. “I worry I shut people off from that possibility by lauding them first, by beating them to it and saying: Amazing! But they just need to push back, push back firmer. Have they considered responding with the same? It’s so boring,” he continues, struggling with the Spanish citrus’ peel, “that we force relationships into binaries where one person plays one role and the other person plays another. Like it could be both! Or neither! You know? Isn’t that much more exciting? Much more sexy?” Sam looks at me again and leans back pushing his chair further away from the table. He waits for an answer.
This week I’m writing about Sarah Schulman’s Girls, Visions and Everything (1986) and High Art (1998) by Lisa Cholodenko.
Girls, Visions & Everything (1986) by Sarah Schulman
Lila Futuransky cruises the East Village, reading On The Road, writing short stories that she mails to crushes, going to the Kitsch Inn, a bar and performance venue, with the perfect name. Lila, along with friends like Helen and Isabel, are preparing for the Worst Performance Festival, a celebration of terrible performances. Girls, Visions & Everything follows a community of down and out lesbians, in a city that is changing, becoming more expensive, more tidy, more cute to a fault. Inflected with Schulman’s thinking on gentrification, which she explores in more detail in The Gentrification of the Mind, Schulman’s characters are frustrated at being priced out of their homes, and losing the community that is theirs. Isabel complains about the trendy new cafes (“up-scale quiche spas with their endives”) not wanting to hire her. “You have to be in style to be in servitude and let’s face it, I’m out.” “Today’s kitsch is tomorrow’s collectible,” Helen Hayes says.
Lila falls in love with Emily, who works for low pay in a factory. Love, like it does, takes Lila, beatnik Lila, by surprise. She details, in a section that could be pulled from a new Netflix romcom, how long she waits to message Emily. What Lila describes as “how to properly exercise restraint”. Emily is less stuck up on the rules of dating, more entranced by those rules and the fantasy of them. After a faux argument, Emily says:
“I know Lila, it’s just that I’ve had this fantasy for such a long time that one day I would have a girlfriend who loved me very deeply and one day we would have a petty disagreement and I would say Don’t be angry with me baby, I love you so much. And now it’s come true. I’m so happy.”
Can you tell I like the book? Ultimately, Girls, Visions & Everything teases with the possibility of having it all. It’s about the desire to be a “loved and understood person in this world” while still being yourself and living your own life, not suffocated by the attachment that can come with being a loved and understood person in this world. It’s about desire running into desire. It’s about seeking something and getting it, and the vertigiousness that that results in. One of my favourite sections is close to the end. Emily and Lila are in bed together. They are fucking and Lila is both into Emily and into being into Emily. Lila loves that Emily makes her scream. Lila concludes:
“It was knowing that she had sought his woman out, night after night, because she wanted Emily’s hands between her legs … because Lila loved Emily’s wrinkles … her grey hairs, the thrilling shape of her thighs, because Lila wanted Emily’s hands tracing her stretch marks. It was knowing she had sought her out and now Emily was in her.”
High Art (1998) by Lisa Cholodenko
I thought, in light of the lesbianism in Girls, Visions, bla bla bla, I’d revisit High Art one of my favourite movies, which is also, distinctly, lesbian.
Syd, a junior editor at a photography magazine, Frame, goes upstairs to ask her neighbour about a leak, which is dripping into her and her boyfriend’s apartment. (The boyfriend is an incredibly well executed sad, uninterest -ed and -ing boy.) There, in the apartment is Lucy Berliner, a photographer who disappeared, and her girlfriend, Greta, with a drug addiction, who used to be Fassbinder’s muse. Syd sees in Lucy incredible talent. Talent she wants everyone to see. Lucy is both scared and excited by the attention. Syd pitches to her magazine a series on Lucy (“I thought she was in Berlin”, a senior editor says drily.) Lucy begins to work on the series, ultimately, going away with Syd upstate to clear her head and take photos. They fall in love.
I don’t want to give the ending away and that makes it really hard to talk about what the film is about but I will say this. High Art is a drama about seeing someone and looking again and then, eventually, seeing that person as someone who sees you too. Lucy and Syd fall for each other uncomplicatedly. Uncomplicatedly, they fall in love. Despite the entanglement, the knotting of arms and legs and hearts and leases, High Art revolves around two people who want to see each other again. Which is to say, there is an inevitability to their love, to their eye contact, that ignores the messiness of their lives. This is a gorgeous film.
Love
Anne