This is a second attempt at a long-awaited article. It’s been nearly a month since I last wrote to you, and I’m getting a little antsy that the Debt Collector is coming to collect the 1,000 words or so that I’m currently composing in my nest. The year has left me tapped. The only thing that comes to mind when I think of needing rest is Hebrews 4, but we’re not at seminary. You came here to be entertained by film talk. The film I have chosen for this month’s Flopcorn I watched when I was aimless, restless, and mad mad mad at the world. A movie that checks the boxes of feeling tapped, while everyone around you seems to be living life at an exponential pace, is Frances Ha.
I was introduced to this movie while I was at home during my gap year. To call it a “gap year” is a public relations twist on what it really was. In reality, I was living at home for a year, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life after I had dropped out of [INSERT COLLEGE THAT WILL MAKE YOU THINK I’M SMART]. My days were simple: sleep until 10 a.m., run, go to work, and if I didn’t have work, watch a movie either at the theater or at home. This cycle led me to films like Saltburn, Battleship Potemkin, and Loqueesha.
(PLEASE WATCH THE TRAILER FOR Loqueesha! IT IS NOT SATIRE. IT IS A REAL MOVIE THAT WAS MADE! IT IS TRULY A MOVIE THAT I WISH I COULD ERASE FROM MY MEMORY.)
During this time at home, I was seeing a girl who went to a college close enough to home that I thought it could work out. You know the rationale: “She lives in my hometown and goes to school an hour away. What could go wrong? We totally won’t become resentful and mad at each other all the time!” Naturally, I wanted to look as bohemian as possible. That meant consuming movies that bring out the most insufferable sides of you, going to bookstores, and bloviating about books I hadn’t read. The opinions I have are from reviews on Reddit, likely by someone who has since died and is currently being eaten by their cats.
That’s not to say Frances Ha is a bad movie. Frances Ha is about a girl chasing her dreams of becoming a professional dancer in New York City. Is it going well? Not really. Is it shot in black and white? YES SO IT HAS TO BE WORTH WATCHING! What I’m trying to say is the people who love these types of films, the Noah Baumbach/Wes Anderson/kitschy ironic bobos (bohemian bourgeois, look it up) who insist on their miserable view of life, are in retrospect both hilarious and insufferable. Their ethos, to steal a line from David Brooks, is egalitarian and pretentious at the same time.
(Quick Tip: For those trying to woo a woman who’s into artsy stuff but also very smart, grind Greta Gerwig movies. Watching her entire filmography will pay dividends when you’re at a party and need to make conversation with a girl you’d never talk to under normal circumstances. You just happen to be on the same couch while everyone else is talking about vacations and lip fillers, so you might as well strike up a conversation. This reminds me of the Annie Hall scenes with the subtitles.)
Frances Ha really speaks to the permanent graduate school mindset that I think a lot of us are in right now. We don’t know what the future looks like, and everyone around us seems like they’re about to do big things, while you and I are just sitting there, feeling like we’ve wasted however many years chasing dreams or slogging through college. Frances Ha is the encapsulation of the malaise that creeps in on a Tuesday when you’re visiting your more successful friends. It makes you realize that contentment is better than achieving your dreams, because otherwise you’d have to reckon with the failure to measure up.
Last year, I visited a Stupidly Successful friend (SS) with a New High Society friend (NHS) of mine. While SS and NHS were basking in their own lives and absolutely killing it, all I wanted to do was sit down and watch Frances Ha, because she is the vapid, flickering hope of rest in a restless world. At that point in my life, the only way I could feel rest was through the faux rest of others.
She does something daring in that movie. She chases all the things that supposedly bring happiness in modern life: going to gay ol’ Paris, and pursuing her dreams. But the cruel twist, the thing that kills both the pursuit of dreams and happiness on arrival, is this: Frances is most happy when she rests in who she is, but even that is fading in the wind. In retrospect, the underlying theme is aimless hope. There is hope, and it has found me. The hope is not in art, for that will be forgotten and I wish that I could grab Frances and tell her that this road is to the door of death. It is resting in someone who is above you and lifts the burden of work, the need to prove yourself, from those who could never lift it themselves…..Hallelujah (Read Hebrews 4).