assignment #17 - lily gardner: i am all but perhaps only half of a divorcee

The Gerwig-Bombach partnership is as iconic as it is confounding. A romance that began many years before another had officially ended. I wonder how she feels when she watches the film? Guilt? She is the metaphorical stage manager, after all.

When I watch films, I want to squirm. With delight. Inspiration. Because I am uncomfortable. Feeling something. If I don’t, rolling pictures can never achieve the highest level of validation in my mind, which is of course the most important ranking they will ever receive.

I was forced to visit a marriage counselor with my parents in the fifth grade. This was years in the making, I later learned, as they had been going for quite some time. It was to no avail, if they hadn’t brought me to the formerly drug-addicted Columbia University grad who I now text from my father’s phone as a joke, I would’ve never known. Such a fact is indicative of their progress.

I remember the bathroom clearly, as I locked myself in there rather than talking about feelings and all that bullshit. It was small. I had no phone. I sat with the toilet seat down, daydreaming about the compensation I could ask for when we returned to the farmhouse.

I am baffled by my choice to watch a film about divorcees who worked in a theater and made roast vegetables and had family both near and far away and were radically different human beings. My father could not put the car seat in the car. I resented him for many years, sleeping rather than partaking in any fun he had planned for me.

The film made me squirm. Perhaps it would’ve more had I not lived it. And yes, I have been known to appreciate anything Adam Driver is in, save for Girls. I would partake, but HBO is a financial commitment for which I must create a cost-benefit analysis. I have even watched his TED Talk, and Star Wars, which to me feels like a much more impressive feat.

If Marriage Story was about my familial life, then Frances Ha is about my own. I am wondering now if the experience of all Jewish adolescents is the same in some way or another, or if Noah Baumbach just understands.

My grandmother told me that the film reminded her what it was like to be young. I would concur.

At their core, youth and divorce are radically different subjects. But at the same time, are they one in the same? Someone just searching for their identity and wading into a world unknown.