Before Barbie (2012)

***Contains spoilers for Frances Ha and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel***

Sometimes, I think that everything in my life would be easier if I were capable of being a little more honest.

I’ve had a piece sitting in my drafts for the past two months about the series finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The first draft was too unhinged and the most recent one was so sterile that I abandoned it completely.

Anyway, my partner and I have this ritual where every month, one of us picks a movie that we love that the other hasn’t seen and we watch it together. August was my month, and I picked Frances Ha.

I first heard of the movie a few months after I moved to New York City. I was nineteen and had no concept of anything even remotely highbrow. Like, I didn’t even know that “brows” existed. I had a writing class and the other students would come in and talk about all this artsy stuff that I’d never heard of with the professor, and that’s when I became an expert at pretending to know what people “smarter” and “more sophisticated” than me were talking about whenever I ended up in a room with them. (Literally, you just smile and nod.) On one of these mornings, my classmates and professor gushed over Frances Ha, which sounded like a ridiculous movie. I wrote the title down in my (lined, spiral-bound) notebook anyway. It was on Netflix. 

I watched it in my dorm’s basement (which doubled as a study lounge) on my iPad that night, and even though it was about someone whose life didn’t look much like mine, I connected with Frances. I don’t remember exactly how I felt watching it back then, but I know I felt sorry for her while also kind of wanting to be her. I was a teen who’d just moved to New York, and she was a twenty-seven-year-old with a whole life. If I’m honest, I missed a lot in that first viewing. I felt proud just to have watched it. It was in black and white, and people who carried Moleskines liked it, so I at least knew I was on the right track to becoming who I was meant to be—someone who read The New Yorker and knew proper macchiatos basically came in shot glasses.

I went years without thinking about Frances Ha, but at some point, it kind of became my movie. To be clear, my life has never looked much like those of the film’s characters. They all seem to either have a parent-funded safety net or most of it figured out, and I’ve never really had either of those luxuries. Frances isn’t rich rich, but she has impulsivity and guts, and most of the time, I don’t have those, either. There’s never any real danger in the film. So why can’t I stop watching this movie?

The whole big focus of writing about the Maisel finale was her big comedy set on the Gordon Ford Show. Midge talks about how her kids will grow up to hate her because she wasn’t around enough and how she wants this big life and is willing to do whatever it takes to get there. It’s a great set—funny and inspiring, and of course I ugly cried watching it all go down. The point that I kept trying to get to in all of the drafts talking about it was that sometimes you just have to be selfish to make your dream happen, no matter what other people think about it. The point was that sometimes standing beneath a spotlight and being vulnerable to a crowd full of hurting people can be a bigger kindness than tucking in some snot-covered kids at night. 

Midge always seems somewhat in control. She has a beautiful Upper West Side apartment to live in no matter what she does, and she gets a manager instantly after performing her first set. I still love her audacity, and I know the only reason I’m making the connection between Maisel and Frances is probably because Michael Zegen (Joel/Benji) and Justine Lupe (Astrid/Nessa) play roles in both, but watching someone try to figure out life as a youngish person in 2010s NYC just hits different. (I’ve watched too much TikTok lately to figure out a smarter way to end that sentence.)

There are so many things that I didn’t pick up on the first few times I watched it. How truly awful Adam Driver’s character is—back in 2014 I had no idea just how many Levs would be brought into my orbit—or—embarrassingly—how the final scene doesn’t just echo the title but also a moment early on where Frances doesn’t know who she is. And her moment of  “making it” doesn’t happen on national television but on a small stage where she’s put her art forward after taking a day job. And I guess the biggest difference is we don’t know what the future will hold for her. Maybe she’ll be the second coming of Balanchine or marry Benji or move back to Fresno or become a mildly successful choreographer who still has to do paperwork. We don’t know! We know that in that moment, she did things that were risky and hard and she’s been cocky and humble and unlucky and absurdly fortunate. We know that she’s in the middle of making progress and working really fucking hard to figure out who she is and how to get what she wants, and I don’t know how I’ll feel about this movie in ten years, but I know that tonight, watching her write her name on a slip of paper was enough to make me cry.

The credits rolled and I wondered, if in 2012 you had told Greta Gerwig, Frances herself, that she’d become the first woman director to gross over $1 billion at the box office, could she even have believed it?

Until next time,

Kayla