You can't go home again....

This weekend I felt rotten. Yet again my crappy immune system has failed me and I have caught some sort of virus. I am at work and pottering about through London simply because I do not have the time to take to my bed and sleep for a week (which is probably what would ultimately repair my broken health). I am not seriously ill but I am walking about feeling under the weather. (sad face)

So instead of enjoying the amazing sunshine that shone over this weekend, I lay in bed and moaned to my husband, who very good-naturedly put up with it and cooked soup and cottage pie from scratch. I am one lucky woman. I also watched a shed-load of old movies that I have not seen since I was a teenager. And some episodes of The X Files (god I LOVE that show). But more on that later. For today's post I am going to concentrate on the movies. Those movies that I adored as teenager, that I thought would stand the test of time and..well...have...not. I am not sure whether it is that I have developed 'taste' over the years or if they were always bad and I just did not have enough experience of watching films in order to recognise their badness. The first film I watched was Kissing Jessica Stein, which if I am honest is not actually such a bad film, But it is a not a great one either. I loved this film when it first came out in 2001 (I was 18, so young! Sigh) and it was the first film I had ever seen, that portrayed homosexuals in a positive and well-adjusted light rather than closeted and emotionally damaged (which seemed to be the norm for most TV shows or films that contained gay characters in the late 90s, early 2000s). I had not seen the Channel 4 TV series Queer As Folk at that point and I did not, to my knowledge, actually know any gay people. I had little understanding of same sex attraction and seeing Kissing Jessica Stein opened my eyes to the idea of lesbianism. I saw the film in the cinema and I loved it. I thought it was witty, romantic, intelligent and moving. To recap briefly, the film is about Jessica Stein, an uptight and neurotic New Yorker, who tired of all the failed dates she has been on, answers a personal ad in the newspaper under the 'Women Seeking Women' column and has an affair with a woman (called Helen). Despite believing that she could never be attracted to someone of her own gender, she falls in love with Helen and moves in with her. And then it all goes pear-shaped.

Helen and Jessica have fun packing a handbag

Years later things have changed. I now have gay friends, have worked with gay people and gay marriage has been made legal in my country. I have more of an understanding of sexuality and the many ways people can feel attraction for each other. Sexuality seems to me to be a sliding scale and not always easily defined, which is sort of the message that could have been portrayed in Kissing Jessica Stein if it had been a smarter movie. Jessica is attracted to Helen the individual, rather than her gender, but by the end of the film simply can't ignore that Helen is not the right gender for her. Which is why I think the ending is a bit of a cop out. Because of a lack of a sustained sexual attraction between the two women, Helen breaks up with Jessica, stating that although they may love each other, they are more like room-mates than actual lovers. Jessica is heartbroken and the film ends with the two remaining as friends.

When I was 18, the film seemed witty and profound to me. But now it seems very unrealistic and confusing. Are we supposed to believe that two women would move in together and become lovers because one has exhausted her search for a male partner by eliminating all the men in Manhattan through her incredibly high standards and the other woman is bored with heterosexual sex? This is not a love story between two people attracted to each other's personalities rather than their genders (or even about two lesbians), it is about two people experimenting with relationships. At one point during the film a gay friend calls Helen out as just trying on homosexuality like a coat because she feels like trying something new. Of course, people should be able to be who they want to be, but it does seem to me that this character has a valid point. The film feels like a story about two heterosexual people trying to be gay for a few months and then deciding that they are really still heterosexual (except Helen, who does go on to start a relationship with another woman at the end of the film and I think she is a more authentic character than Jessica anyway). As if sexual orientation is simply just a choice or that sexual attraction is not as complex a factor as it really can be. When the film was first released it received some criticism from the gay community for not dealing in depth with the difficulties of being openly gay, but it was also praised for portraying a same-sex relationship in a positive light. I suppose that it is positive in ways, both women are happy for a while and their friends and family treat them both with love and respect and they receive very little resistance to their relationship, which was nice to see. But I feel the film chickens out because it is not actually about homosexuality. A better film would have had the two women remain together and just be gay together and it not be a big deal. To portray something as normal, you have to introduce it as just normal within the narrative world of the film. Jessica never treats her attraction or feelings for Helen as normal. She panics when a friend bumps into her and Helen on the street and lies about dating a woman. This is Jessica's story and so we see most of it through her eyes and she is not comfortable with being gay. What I thought, when I was 18, was a positive story about same-sex relationships is actually a film about an anxious woman experimenting. Added to the fact that as a 32 year old, I find Jessica's unrealistic expectations of the men she dates, very annoying and not remotely funny, I found the film irritating and I felt like telling the main character to just 'grow up' and 'calm down.' Perhaps I have a lower tolerance for neurotic characters than I once did. It might be all the Woody Allen films I have seen over the years or I may have reached a stage in my life when I am less neurotic myself. I don't think that Kissing Jessica Stein is a really bad film, but I don't think it has stood the test of time either.

Which brings me on to the film I watched on Saturday night on Netflix. Empire Records. I loved Empire Records as a teenager. I was 12 years old when it was first released and I must have seen it when I was around 15. The film did poorly at the box office and was given pretty bad reviews but garnered a cult status later on VHS (remember those days? The days of VHS and cassettes!). If you fancy reading about the history of the film and more about its cult status, it is completely summed up in the below Buzzfeed article:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/how-empire-records-became-the-unlikely-film-of-a-generation#.crQmkvbvqe

A very young Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger in Empire Records.

I was not aware of the bad reviews when I first watched the film and I instantly loved it. The film is a story of one single day at an independent music store and its mismatched, quirky and dysfunctional teenage store clerks. Over the course of the film the staff fight to keep the store from being sold to a large music chain, dance around to different alternative and indie songs and generally air out all their angst and teenage pain. I loved the soundtrack and I actually thought Renée Zellweger, who sings in the film, had a pretty good voice. I wanted to be cool, alternative and quirky and sell music and wear grungy clothes. I felt inspired by the rebellious characters and touched by their emotional plights and dilemmas. Watching this years later as I lay in bed with a fever and my husband sitting beside me (doing a crossword from the newspaper), I wondered what the hell I was initially thinking when I thought Empire Records was a great movie. The plot is a mess (a bunch of random and rather unconnected scenes plunged together), the characters are stereotypes, the dance sequences disjointed, pointless and too contrived and the dialogue is ridiculous and too self-aware (or pretensions in a youthful way), And it is all kind of boring. Watching teens emote does not do it for me anymore. And I HATED the soundtrack this time around and turned the volume down. And Renée Zellweger seemed to be shouting, not singing.

'You like some weird films.' by husband murmurs beside me, looking up from his crossword as one of the characters delivers another bizarre line of dialogue and flails about like a blubbering fish.

'I was 15! I had no taste! I was full of angst!' I cry trying to justify my earlier comments to him (which were; 'This is a great film. I loved it. It is really quirky, you'll like it.')

There was also another aspect to the film that I did not enjoy this time around. The three main female characters are all damaged. One is self harming and shaves her head in an act of rebellion, another is pressured by her father to be a straight A student and throws herself at her music idol in an extremely embarrassing scene and the character played by Renée Zellweger is basically billed as a slut. In fact I think someone actually calls her a slut at one point. God! Are there no other ways of portraying teenage girls on screen! I was none of these three characters when I was 15. As an adult woman and a feminist who has grown up over the years and gained confidence and independence, I find portrayals of girls like this boring, oversimplified and unrealistic.

But is it really a bad film? Or have I just grown up? Actually I think it is a really bad film. But I have also grown up and I can't go back. You can't return to that naive part of your life once you have left it. You can't return to that teenage angst, that childish self importance and that joy in finding something really stupid profound, instead of recognising it as really stupid. That teenage innocence. And to be honest, I am not sure I want to return to that era of my life. I like being more discerning. I like intelligent films. I like being an adult. My cultural taste-buds have evolved. Which is why I might stick to the entertainment of my adult years and avoid my adolescent obsessions.

Except for The X Files of course. Which I don't think I ever really understood when I was 15 anyway.